NUMB3RS: Jays Add Sabermetrician To Front Office

Blue Jays GM Alex Anthopoulos has overseen a major overhaul of the scouting and player development side of the organization in his less than 6 months on the job. Doubling the size of the amateur scouting staff to 36, he has been able to more adequately cover the regions where prospects are most consistently produced. On the pro scouting side, he's brought the team's staff up to 21, giving them the ability to focus more scouts on fewer teams to hopefully get better looks at players at all levels of pro-ball. He's also added experience to that staff by bringing in former GM's Jim Beattie and Ed Lynch. And now he's given his player development side another shot in the arm, hiring statistician Tom Tango as a consultant.

According to an article in the Toronto Star, Tango is a self-taught authority on sabermetric (the attempt to quantify baseball performance in as accurate and objective a way as possible) stats from Montreal who has previously worked with the Seattle Mariners. Some of the quotes about him are encouraging, to say the least:

"There's nobody better than (Tango) in the world," said Wayne Winston, a professor of decision sciences at Indiana University and author of Mathletics.

"He's a genius. He knows everything about baseball. I think he'll help (the Jays) a lot to make better decisions."

Theo Epstein may be the boy-wonder who pieced together the two Red Sox teams that won championships in the last decade, but he also counted amongst his front office advisors Bill James. James coined the term "sabermetrics" and is one of the foremost thinkers in the pursuit of objective baseball knowledge. Among James' innovations are Pythagorean Win/Loss (which analyzes a team's run for and runs against and produces what a team's record should be), Range Factor (which calculates how involved a player is defensively in a game) and Runs Created (duh). His ability to crunch the numbers and constantly create new formulas for evaluating performance have given the Red Sox a competitive edge over the past 7 years. Obviously the Jays will hope Tom Tango will bring with him similar innovations.

It's easy to gauge and evaluate players based on sabermetric stats, but its tactical application goes beyond just a player's strengths and weaknesses. Hard data on major league baseball games go back decades, giving stats analysts a gigantic sample size for studying and projecting ratios that predict with startling accuracy the way various in-game situations often turn out. Want to really know how to pitch Alex Rodriguez? Scouts can help, but so can detailed information on his performance and results in 9,611 career plate appearances. Want to know whether to attempt a steal in a late inning situation? Piece together scouting reports on the speed of the runner, arm strength and accuracy of the catcher and pace of the pitcher's delivery with 60 years of data on the average steal success rate in major league baseball and you can predict with near certainty the outcome.

Reliable and detailed scouting information is an invaluable evaluation tool, but it can only give you anecdotal evidence. Likewise statistical analysis can give you probabilities and provide great information for tracking a player's development, but it can't provide you with information on a player's physical and mechanical strengths and weaknesses. You need both to succeed in modern baseball, and it's good to see the front office realising this. Now they just need to find a manager with enough of an open mind to actually take advantage of all this information.