Clay Davenport

Clay Davenport is a baseball sabermetrician who co-founded Baseball Prospectus (BP) in 1996. He co-edited several of the Baseball Prospectus annual volumes and is a writer for BaseballProspectus.com. Much of his work for BP was behind the scenes, where he maintained and implemented advanced statistics for the website.

For most of the time during which he contributed to Baseball Prospectus, Davenport's main employment was as a meteorologist. In March 2010, it was announced that he had moved to full-time status at Baseball Propectus. In 2011, he departed Baseball Prospectus, but maintains his own website ClayDavenport.com on which he continues to publish baseball analysis and projections. As he commented there in May 2011:

As my title indicates, this is a place for me to keep some statistics I happen to care about. These are statistics that I've run at Baseball Prospectus for many years, but BP has decided to discontinue them – or at least transform into something I no longer recognize. Baseball Prospectus was founded on the premise that, since no one was publishing the baseball book we wanted to read, we would print one ourselves. In that same spirit, since BP is not publishing the stats I want to see, the way I want to see them, I'll put them up myself.

In a later post, he characterized the reason for his departure from BP:

I'm Clay Davenport, one of the founders of Baseball Prospectus. I still have a (looser than before) affiliation with BP, so don't expect to see me using this site to dish dirt or run anybody into the ground. I'm old enough and stubborn enough to have my own way of doing things, and some of those things are contrary to the way BP wants to do things, which is why I wound up out here.

Davenport is a native of Hampton, Virginia and now lives in Maryland.

Davenport is known for creating the Pythagenport Formula, (designed to find the best exponent for the Pythagoras winning percentage equation), for inventing the statistic Equivalent Average (EqA) (now called "True Average" or "TAv"), and for the "Davenport Translations" or DT's. The DT's are estimated Major League equivalent performance statistics based on player statistics from minor league and international baseball. DT's were first published by Davenport on the rec.sports.baseball Usenet site in 1995, before Baseball Prospectus was founded.

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