Tom Tango and "TangoTiger" are aliases used online by a

baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding tea ...

sabermetrics Sabermetrics, or originally SABRmetrics, is the empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. Sabermetricians collect and summarize the relevant data from this in-game activity to answer specific ques ...

and

ice hockey statistics Ice is water frozen into a solid state, typically forming at or below temperatures of 0 degrees Celsius or Depending on the presence of impurities such as particles of soil or bubbles of air, it can appear transparent or a more or less opa ...

analyst. He runs the ''Tango on Baseball'' sabermetrics website and is also a contributor to

ESPN ESPN (originally an initialism for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by ESPN Inc., owned jointly by The Walt Disney Company (80%) and Hearst Communications (20%). The ...

's baseball blog ''TMI (The Max Info)''. Tango is currently the Senior Database Architect of Stats for

MLB Advanced Media MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM) is a limited partnership of the club owners of Major League Baseball (MLB) based in New York City and is the Internet and interactive branch of the league. Robert Bowman, former president and CEO of MLBAM, indicated ...

. Born in

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

in 1968, he resides in

New Jersey New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...

with his family and has insisted on keeping his true name secret. 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 Pete Palmer (born January 30, 1938) is an American sports statistician and encyclopedia editor. He is a major contributor to the applied mathematical field referred to as sabermetrics. Along with the Bill James '' Baseball Abstracts'', 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 In baseball, an intentional base on balls, usually referred to as an intentional walk and denoted in baseball scorekeeping by ''IBB'', is a walk issued to a batter by a pitcher with the intent of removing the batter's opportunity to swing at the ...

. They also introduced the

wOBA In baseball, wOBA ( /'woʊbə/, or weighted on-base average) is a statistic, based on linear weights, designed to measure a player's overall offensive contributions per plate appearance. It is formed from taking the observed run values of various ...

metric to measure overall offensive contributions. Tango maintains the "Marcel the Monkey Forecasting System," a player projection system which uses three years of

weighted A weight function is a mathematical device used when performing a sum, integral, or average to give some elements more "weight" or influence on the result than other elements in the same set. The result of this application of a weight function is ...

player statistics with

statistical regression Statistics (from German: ''Statistik'', "description of a state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industri ...

and player age adjustment. 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 An era is a span of time defined for the purposes of chronology or historiography, as in the regnal eras in the history of a given monarchy, a calendar era used for a given calendar, or the geological eras defined for the history of Earth. Comp ...

. 2009

American League The American League of Professional Baseball Clubs, known simply as the American League (AL), is one of two leagues that make up Major League Baseball (MLB) in the United States and Canada. It developed from the Western League, a minor league ...

Cy Young Award The Cy Young Award is given annually to the best pitchers in Major League Baseball (MLB), one each for the American League (AL) and National League (NL). The award was first introduced in 1956 by Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick in honor of Hall ...

winner

Zack Greinke Donald Zackary Greinke ( ; born October 21, 1983) is an American professional baseball pitcher who is currently a free agent. He made his MLB debut with the Kansas City Royals in 2004 and has also played in MLB for the Milwaukee Brewers, Los An ...

specifically mentioned FIP as his favorite statistic. "That's pretty much how I pitch, to try to keep my FIP as low as possible". Tango works as a consultant for several

National Hockey League The National Hockey League (NHL; french: Ligue nationale de hockey—LNH, ) is a professional ice hockey league in North America comprising 32 teams—25 in the United States and 7 in Canada. It is considered to be the top ranked professional ...

teams, and has worked for

Major League Baseball Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball organization and the oldest major professional sports league in the world. MLB is composed of 30 total teams, divided equally between the National League (NL) and the American League (AL), ...

. Tango has worked for the

Seattle Mariners The Seattle Mariners are an American professional baseball team based in Seattle. They compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the American League (AL) American League West, West division. The team joined the American League ...

and

Toronto Blue Jays The Toronto Blue Jays are a Canadian professional baseball team based in Toronto. The Blue Jays compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the American League (AL) East division. Since 1989, the team has played its home games ...

as a statistical analysis consultant. He worked exclusively for the

Chicago Cubs The Chicago Cubs are an American professional baseball team based in Chicago. The Cubs compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as part of the National League (NL) Central division. The club plays its home games at Wrigley Field, which is located ...

in a similar role.Bleachernation.com
/ref> In 2020, he was awarded by the

Society for American Baseball Research The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) is a membership organization dedicated to fostering the research and dissemination of the history and record of baseball primarily through the use of statistics. Established in Cooperstown, New ...

the Henry Chadwick Award. 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."

Books

*Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman, and Andrew Dolphin. ''The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball''. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2007. .

References

;Citations * Justin Sopp
"Q&A with SaberWizard Tom Tango"
''Beyond the Box Score'', 24 August 2011

External links

''Tangotiger''
(official)
''The Book—Playing The Percentages In Baseball''
(official)
Interview at Baseball Digest Daily - Part I

Interview at Baseball Digest Daily - Part II
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Tango, Tom Living people Canadian statisticians Baseball statisticians Baseball people from Quebec People from Montreal Anglophone Quebec people 1968 births