David Appelman Recap
On Tuesday, October 17, the University of Maryland Sports Business Society welcomed David Appelman to campus. Appelman is the founder and owner of fangraphs.com. He spoke about about getting his start in statistics, developing his website and how one can work their way into the industry.
Appelman said he grew up a baseball fan, collecting player cards. In college, he started playing fantasy baseball, which sparked his interest in statistics. After graduating, Appelman worked for AOL, where he organized data for executives. During this time, he started to think about creating a fantasy baseball website. “I’m doing all these graphing packages for executives and working with databases and I thought, ‘Maybe some of this data is better visualized,’” Appelman said. In early 2005, Appelman struck a deal with Baseball Info Solutions, coding for the site. Later that year, FanGraphs was created.
Appelman initially launched the website for fantasy baseball, but it grew to be much more, including articles and tutorials. He experimented with the site, adding figures like win probability and pitch stats. In 2008, wins above replacement, a measure used to value all aspects of a player, was added to the site. “That was a very big moment for FanGraphs when that was launched and something that resonated quite well [with readers],” Appelman said. Being a relatively new site, Appelman said that updating stats daily and receiving contributions from leaders in sabermetrics helped prove the reliability of the stats. To improve the stats on the site, Appelman said that at the end of every season, his team comes together to consider additional measures that can be added.
For people interested in getting into statistics, Appelman said that getting your work out in the public and making a name for yourself is extremely helpful. “A lot of people get hired because they’ve done work in the public space,” Appelman said.
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