This was the tail end of a longer piece from LarryB on the website. You can read it here.
A sampling:
You’d think with all the ups and downs of the game I’d have learned how to accept them as simply part of the life cycle of a team. I don’t. We don’t. The expectation of the San Francisco Giants every single year is to contend for the postseason. Falling short any year is a disappointment.I like to take a guy at his word until he proves I ought not to. Like I said before, it should be an interesting November!
--M.C.
10 comments:
Must-read relatively short piece from SI. Seems the Dodgers are one of the franchises that got the Feds interested in investigating the recruitment and signing of Caribbean players.
MLBTR has a summary of the above, an even shorter read.
It can't be good that Washington has turned its sights on MLB and their shady dealings with even shadier characters in foreign lands. We'll see, like much of the stuff coming from DC, it could all be hot air. (I've no doubt that the pipeline from Latin America is rife with corruption, but that doesn't mean the Feds can change that.)
From Henry Schulman in the Chronicle today:
"The Giants, belatedly, have begun to infuse more resources into a less-than-robust farm system and international scouting."
I suppose they let Schulman look at the Accounting Department's Book of Infusions? Do reporters know when private businesses spend more money in one place than another? Or is he just assuming that the lack of talent coming up the pipeline is a result of poor "resource" allocation? Did the Giants say "we haven't spent enough"?
I don't know why we have not seen a Cody Bellinger, Corey Seager, or Walker Buehler come through the farm system lately. Is it because our scouts suck? I wish I knew. This stuff is mostly a mystery, all we get to evaluate are the results. We don't really have any idea why one team gets a bunch of great talent and one team doesn't. Are their people smarter? Luckier?
But your point is that we HAVEN'T seen a Bellinger, Seager or Buehler....and that sucks.
I assume that they told Schulman, in response to a question of his, that they were putting more resources into the farm system and international scouting. Maybe Ron's remark prompted him to ask.
And speaking of international scouting, maybe the Giants should take a look at this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=56&v=XSvrIZKI8mk
Yes, that is my point. My other point is no one knows why that is the case. It is easy to write "they need to do a better job with blah-blah-blah" and yet no one knows if that's the reason or not. It's just sports-writer filler material. It reveals nothing new. As fans, we are not privy to the inner workings of the team and the resource allocation and the decision-making. Presumably the reporters get a little more, but certainly nothing close to the real thing. (I read an article where a guy was trying to get the Yankees to tell him how many analysts they have on the payroll and the Yankees man said "that's proprietary information.") The game is too competitive for team to reveal to the public how they work. If we want to know, we have to get a job there.
As fans, like I said, we are stuck evaluating the results. We all know that you can do everything right and still get poor results. We don't know why the Giants have not produced a young superstar in a while, we can only assume their processes (draft, international scouting, etc.) are not good enough. But we don't know that. And the team can tell us "we will do better in x-y-z departments" but that's just corporate jibber-jabber that reporters write down and then fob off on the news-starved hoi polloi.
Phillies are looking for a Quantitative Analyst and a Software Engineer.
Did you ever think, back in the day, that such people (computer geeks, statheads, quants, and other number-crunchers) would be getting recruited for MLB jobs? Guys who thought they'd be doing oil-field depletion analysis or missile targeting uncertainty calculations are heading straight for the sports industry. It's a brand new world out there, my friends!
I don't think that's particularly new, at this point. Maybe in about 2000 it might have been. What I often find impressive about "the new stats" is how simple they are (the vast majority are counting stats like so many x per y events). That, and they mostly confirm observation rather than upend it. I'm sure teams use more statistical analysis than they talk about, but I have to wonder how much value it really adds. Of course, in a game where 1/162 can mean the difference between postseason and also ran, maybe teams see it as valuable. But I'm betting DoD analysts are using a bit more sophisticated tools than baseball guys. Probably not having as much fun, though.
I'm not so sure, other than supercomputer applications. Quants are taking over every industry. As you point out a 1/162nd improvement can be damn significant.
What these guys want obviously is predictive ability. What measured skill or outcome is most correlated to big-league success, for example. What should we be measuring/observing to get the most bang for our buck? There's so much uncertainty due to randomness, not to mention uncertainties inherent in any measuring/calculating scheme, that even the smallest improvement could pay huge dividends.
And I can't believe you'd call the new stats simple. WAR, FIP, xFIP, wOBA, etc. are not simple things. They involve relatively simple statistical ideas and techniques like standard deviation, regression analysis, probability distributions, that sort of thing, but you need a spreadsheet to spit out the numbers. The formulas are not trivial and make a lot of assumptions based on empirical data (like using a run expectancy matrix). As a fan, I get to enjoy the fruits of their labor. I don't have to do any of the math, so in that respect it is pretty simple.
I don't even know where to begin with the fielding stats. I'm just getting a handle on the hitting/pitching stuff, but I'd like to start learning more about DRS and UZR and whatnot (those are part of WAR calculations). I really like thinking about the game in new ways. It's an interesting body of work, all this baseball stat stuff, I like poking around in it.
You had to figure heads would roll in Baltimore. <a href='https://www.mlb.com/news/os-to-dismiss-buck-showalter-dan-duquette/c-296967586">Both manager Buck Showalter and GM Dan Duquette are let go.</a>
From 2012 to 2016 they won 93, 85, 96, 81, and 89 games. In 2017 that dropped to 75 games and plummeted to 47 this season. Things change fast in this game!
Matt Arnold and Chaim Bloom are two names floating out there as GM candidates. This month I expect will be Full-Blown Rumor Time, and I also expect the Giants to play things close to the vest.
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