Tom Tango
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tom Tango and "TangoTiger" are aliases used online by a baseball sabermetrics and ice hockey statistics analyst. He runs the Tango on Baseball sabermetrics website and is also a contributor to ESPN's baseball blog TMI (The Max Info).[1] Tango is currently the Senior Database Architect of Stats for MLB Advanced Media.[2]
1968 (age 57–58)
Tom Tango | |
|---|---|
| Born | Unknown 1968 (age 57–58) |
| Other names | "TangoTiger" |
| Occupations | Sabermetrics analyst, statistician |
| Known for | Maintaining the "Marcel the Monkey Forecasting System", creating FIP |
| Notable work | "The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball", 2006 |
Born in Canada in 1968, he resides in New Jersey with his family and has insisted on keeping his true name secret.[citation needed]
In 2006, Tango's book The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, which was co-written with Mitchel Lichtman and Andrew Dolphin, was published featuring a foreword by Pete Palmer. In The Book he and his coauthors analyzed many advanced baseball questions, such as how to optimize a lineup or when to issue an intentional base on balls. They also introduced the wOBA metric to measure overall offensive contributions.[3]
Tango maintains the "Marcel the Monkey Forecasting System," a player projection system which uses three years of weighted player statistics with statistical regression and player age adjustment.[4]
He is best known for developing the FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) statistic, which attempts to more accurately assess the quality of a pitcher's performance than other statistics, such as ERA. 2009 American League Cy Young Award winner Zack Greinke specifically mentioned FIP as his favorite statistic. "That's pretty much how I pitch, to try to keep my FIP as low as possible".[5]
Tango works as a consultant for several National Hockey League teams, and has worked for Major League Baseball. Tango has worked for the Seattle Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays as a statistical analysis consultant.[better source needed][6][7] He worked exclusively for the Chicago Cubs in a similar role.[8]
In 2020, he was awarded the Henry Chadwick Award by the Society for American Baseball Research.[9] The award is given "to honor those researchers, historians, analysts, and statisticians whose work has most contributed to our understanding of the game and its history."[10]
Books
- Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman, and Andrew Dolphin. The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2007. ISBN 1-59797-129-4.
