History
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 has become well known for its baseball discussions. Sports Illustrated 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.
Read more about this topic: Jim Furtado
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