BPro: Prospectus Q&A: Neal Huntington

Woo-hoo! Huntingtonball…the greatest thing to hit Pittsburgh since crazy George Blaisdell invented the Zippo lighter in 1932!

DL: In the same interview, you said, “we’ll rely on the more traditional objective evaluations like OPS, WHIP, Runs Created, Component ERA…” Have we reached the point where those metrics can now be considered traditional?

NH: I think so. Cleveland—led by Chris Antonetti and Mike Chernoff—does an excellent job of objectively evaluating players, and we hope to build upon that model in Pittsburgh. We look at “traditional” metrics as well as more advanced metrics any time we are breaking players down. As a matter of fact, as an organization I want us to go to the next level of metrics. I hope that we can get to the point where we’ve built an environment to create and utilize them in-house. We have a lot of work to do, but we have an outstanding statistical consultant on board, and we’re creating a computer system to help us not only store, track and access data but to also analyze the data that has been collected.