Tom Tango

Who is Tom Tango?

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.

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, like 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.

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.

He is best known for developing the FIP 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".