Author Archive

Rejected FanGraphs Spin-Offs

A few months back, Rotographs editor and Fangraphs writer Eno Sarris created Beergraphs, a site dedicated to the analytics of beer. It’s a fantastic site, focusing on beer stories (“Barely Beer”) and the analysis of user beer ratings, trends, ingredients and more (“Beergraphs”).

The site uses some of the Fangraphs intelligence and means of evaluating baseball players to evaluate and rate beers. If you consider the connection that exists between beer and baseball – whether that be drinking at the park or drinking away your sorrows – it’s a logical spin-off.

What many people don’t know, though, is that this wasn’t the first spin-off idea that was tossed out there. For every “Fraser” there are some “Joey”s. Thanks to some internal emails the powers that be thought were destroyed, I was able to find out what these rejected spin-offs were.

Snackgraphs
Synopsis: Analyzing the sales volume of ballpark snacks.

Sample graph:

snackgraphs
Reason rejected: 100 percent of husbands and wives vetoed the idea for a “Super Size Me” style feature on eating nothing but Boomsticks for a month.

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Josh Reddick’s Beard Caught Up in WWE’s Top Feud

Back in March, WWE superstar Daniel Bryan laid down a challenge to Josh Reddick of the Oakland Athletics.

The beard-off was later accepted by Reddick, with the details as follows: grow your beard until the end of the calendar year and fans would vote on whose beard was better. The loser of the vote would then have to shave it off.

While Reddick trimmed his early in the year, the former “American Dragon” hasn’t tamed his at all.

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