TINSTAAPP
TINSTAAPP is an acronym for There Is No Such Thing As A Pitching Prospect. It is sometimes referred to as TANSTAAPP, replacing "ain't" with "is", doubling up on grammatical unsoundness.
It is generally thought to have been adapted by Gary Huckabay (one of the founders of Baseball Prospectus, although Gary's coinage of TINSTAAPP on rec.sport.baseball predates Prospectus) from Robert A. Heinlein's "TANSTAAFL" ("There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch", from the novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress)[1][2]
At Baseball Prospectus, Joe Sheehan summed TINSTAAP nicely:
- [TINSTAAP] is actually a shorthand way of expressing the idea that minor-league pitchers are an unpredictable, unreliable subset of baseball players. [...]
- The principles behind [TINSTAAPP] are pretty simple. Pitchers are unpredictable. They're asked to perform an unnatural act--throw baseballs overhand--under great stress, thousands of times a year. They get hurt with stunning frequency, sometimes enough to cost them a career, more often just enough to hinder their effectiveness. (Modern medicine has dramatically changed what a pitcher can do to his arm and still have a career.) Even the better ones--Andy Pettitte, for instance--have wide year-to-year variations in their performance. It's only the very top 0.1% of pitchers who are consistently good year-in and year-out over substantial careers.[3]
