I've decided that there's a dearth of thought. It's Occam's Razor at work, but in the world of baseball, original productive thought seems to be at an all-time low. Some will call it a cyclic correction brought about by an historic shift (the publication of Moneyball and the mainstreaming of 20 years of research by James, Neyer, and BP.)

Instead of developing interesting tools, the current crop pales in the shadow of Bill James, Eric Walker, and Keith Woolner. Go ahead - show me the best sabermetric thoughts over the past five years. You know my position on DIPS, but I give it value based on the questions it raised rather than its results. PAP is the best available tool for measuring pitching fatigue over a broad population despite critics best efforts to topple it. Zone rating and it's stepchildren? I'll give you that one, though I'm not sure how many different ways we need to say that Derek Jeter sucks. PECOTA is more a distillation and application of what we've learned before than a true advance.

I'm sure I'm missing some, but that's the fault of the community itself. There's no good research "library," leading to many to go back and reinvent the statistical wheel. If there's some out there, I'd love to hear about them. I'd love to publicize the best ideas and get them into the broader consciousness. I'm hardly a sabermetrician myself, despite throwing injury analysis into the sabermetric stew over the past few years. Perhaps my contribution can be my loud voice and persistent nature.

I see three types of things going on that must be corrected to go forward:

1) Complaining about a statistic without offering an alternative or even suggesting improvements. All too common. Bitching is not productive and is bitching, not peer review.

2) Making a minute adjustment to an existing statistic/metric that gives an incremental and usually fractional gain is scarcely worth the effort to create and often not worth the effort to read. We have plenty of most things, offensive and defensive.

3) Reinventing the wheel occurs so often that the wheel is getting pissed. It's a function of not knowing what comes before; it's part library and part lazy. I'll pick on an old friend here - Steve Lombardi of NetShrine did an interesting, well-thought out study on contact. Unfortunately, it's also preface to Linear Weights and while I'll never tell anyone not to follow their bliss, Steve pretty much wasted his time. Did he simply want the mental exercise? Maybe. Did he not know that he was running down a treaded path? Maybe.

I think when we look back at this period in sabermetric history - which Alan Schwarz shows us is nearly as old as baseball itself in his phenomenal book, The Numbers Game - I think we'll see this as a period of consolidation or perhaps an historic 'plexiglass principle.' Perhaps there's a kid in a bedroom somewhere, learning Excel and watching MLB.tv. With an interweb connection and the right questions, that kid could be Keith Woolner, Rob Neyer, or Michael Wolverton.

Let's help that kid; let's help our game.