[mellon002]

I dunno if Peter Hirdt already posts on bigsoccer.com but we should invite him to help us in this forum.

PHirdtMLS@esb.com

[mpruitt]

yeah again in the original thread that started this there was of course dicussion of Peter Hirdt, in fact one of the first small victoreis of this was an old timer by the name of Tom Eaton questioned Hirdt on the value of the catch/punch statistic. I'm not sure if he's aware of this forum, but I believe in Tom's contact he was made aware at least that people were talking about the specific topic. I don't remember if he has ever posted on here though, I'd lean towards yes but that's just a random assumption as it seems like everyone else does. Lets just say that historically Elias hasn't been cooperative with these sorts of thigns in the past in regards to baseball, and from Tom's original contact with him that seemed like a bit of a trend.

Certainly it'd be nice to make him aware of this, but in terms of helping out? I'd just like him to see dictate more stats be put into MLS box scores, stuff like #of touches, which you'll see pop up on broadcasts. Also more consistent regular season stats made available in terms of thigns like how and from where goals were scored. That at least isn't really asking much, they keep the numbers...just give'm to us.

Otherwise, the type of Opta stats that we'd all love to see taken in MLS would be the ultimate goal. As beineke pointed out the FMF keeps those kinds of stats for at least their national team games, it's a shame that MLS and USSF don't.

[TomEaton]

Specifically, my issue with Hirdt involved his claim that a goalkeeper's catch/punch statistics were highly correlated with winning. He didn't provide much context for the claim, so I asked for some, which he provided in his next column, although I still question the way the data were arranged.

Elias is a for-profit company, so it's perfectly understandable that they want monetary return for the effort they're putting in on the statistics. What I don't understand is that Elias won't even sell the data. Maybe there are contractual issues with MLS, or something. Other than that, it looks like the chief effect of keeping them secret is that Peter Hirdt can write an interesting MLSnet column now and then while the rest of us just have to guess whether he's making the numbers up.