[Data-modeling] the pitch... baseball managers

[Jeff Prucher]

I like the idea a lot, but I'm not sure that the one type will works for
both managers and coaches. A minor issue is just nomenclature -- it's a bit
odd for a pitching coach to be typed as a "baseball manager", and a bit
odder to detail his coaching career under a property named "baseball teams
managed". Renaming these to something more general would fix this, though.

A bigger concern is the "current team" property. Although it's meant to be
used only for managers, it's fairly likely that people will enter the
current teams for coaches as well.

See http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/en/dave_righetti

I see two-and-a-half possible solutions: 
1) Rename the type to something like "baseball manager or coach" (or ideally
something shorter that conveys the same idea), rename "teams managed" to
something more general (maybe just "teams" or "team history"), and rename
"current team" to something unambiguous like "currently manages".

1.5) Rename the type and "teams managed" property, as above, and add a CVT
to the current team property to allow listing current roles for coaches.

2) Have two types, one for managers and one for coaches.

I think I like 1.5 best.

Jeff Prucher

> -----Original Message-----
> From: data-modeling-bounces at freebase.com 
> [mailto:data-modeling-bounces at freebase.com] On Behalf Of Dan Milbrath
> Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 9:42 AM
> To: data-modeling at freebase.com
> Subject: [Data-modeling] the pitch... baseball managers
> 
> Interesting pattern I've run across for sports teams -- worth 
> a look at an example with baseball. If this works, I might go 
> ahead and extend it to other sports team types as well.
> 
> I want to make it very simple to get at who the current 
> manager is, so I added a simple property (current manager) 
> that links between team and manager. I also wanted to support 
> a richer model for the entire coaching staff, including 
> historical staff, so I added a compound value type 
> relationship with a property called 'coaching staff'. This 
> leads to a bit of redundancy, but it seems OK to me.
> 
> Have a look here:
> http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/en/joe_torre
> http://sandbox.freebase.com/tools/schema/baseball/baseball_manager
> http://sandbox.freebase.com/tools/schema/baseball/baseball_coa
> ch_tenure
> 
> Comments? Suggestions? 
> Note: this data will likely go away in the next day or so on 
> Sandbox, but if it looks alright to those who review it today 
> -- I'll post the same model on freebase.
> 
> 
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