Mooned for Rebuttal is a blog about principles.

Sort of.

Some background:

• The author of this blog has spent an inordinate amount of time on the Internet complaining about the state of baseball analysis, but never in a form longer than 140 characters at a time. The end result: a continual feeling of "God damn it, I already talked about this a year ago in a random discussion I had with user @bonerfarts420 that subtweeted Tom Tango."

• He's also attempted to start blogs on baseball multiple times over the last 6 years. It hasn't gotten past anything more than unserious joking. Heck, even this blog was pseudo-dormant for a year.

• In spite of this, he's currently in a position to actually make new baseball metrics happen. Still confused about that.

• He's also somehow convinced Important People in academia, industry, and government into believing he has invaluable expertise on electrical engineering/signal processing topics.

Why these principles?

Statistical sports analysis is mostly performed by weird hobbyists and bored college students, except for those employed by teams (who usually started out as weird hobbyists or bored college students with money.)

As a weird hobbyist and a bored student at various points, the author points out that this often leads to fucking garbage. For example, there's a multimillion dollar layered sensing system in every major league ballpark in America, and it's being used to tell us that it's hard for an outfielder to run backwards. This is after at least two years of testing. We need to demand more, and that's what this blog is all about.

Axioms of the blog:

• Analysis should be founded on actual mathematical principles.
• Application of these actual mathematical principles is informed by the imperfections of the system you want to analyze.
• Always verify the imperfections.
• Baseball (or, indeed, reality) is imperfect as hell.

We'll explore this imperfection here. If not us, who will?