Baseball Think Factory

Baseball Think Factory, abbreviated as BTF or BBTF, is a sabermetrically-oriented baseball web site that features daily news stories in baseball, with original content contributed by SABR members such as Dan Szymborski. The site was previously branded as Baseball Primer, and was created in 2001 by the founders of Baseball-Reference. Contributors who have gone on to work for Major League Baseball front offices include Voros McCracken, Carlos Gomez, and Tom Tango. Bill James' Baseball Abstract books published in the 1980s are widely considered to be the modern predecessor to websites using sabermetrics such as baseballthinkfactory and baseballprospectus.

The site was founded in 2001 by Jim Furtado and Sean Forman of Baseball-Reference under the name "Baseball Primer," with a matching URL of (http://www.baseballprimer.com/). The site's emphasis on sabermetric baseball analysis attracted members of the rec.sport.baseball Usenet groups, and later drew readers of Rob Neyer's ESPN columns. The early site cultivated spirited discussions as a result of the Usenet veterans' familiarity with each other and the fact that registration was not required to post comments. The site also featured a number of original research articles.

In 2004, the site was re-branded as "Baseball Think Factory" and was re-built on a different software platform in order to support the growing user population and accommodate user registration and content management features.

BTF mainly hosts baseball discussions. Sports Illustrated magazine listed the site as an "essential baseball destination," characterizing it as offering "links to significant baseball articles, accompanied by freewheeling, usually informed discussion threads."Michael Lewis also mentioned the site (as baseballprimer) in his book Moneyball.

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