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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Bring out your dead!
[BRARP]
Bring out your dead!
[BRARP]
The problem is that there’s too much information out there now. 10 years ago if you wanted to find something like expected BABIP you would have to hire and independent stat provider and do all the calculations around it yourself. Now, any jerk with a blog can go to The Hardball Times, plug four numbers into a spreadsheet and get an answer in seconds for free. Want to know the league leader in line drives allowed last year? Give Baseball Prospectus 30 bucks and find out the answer. This has lead to some great things. People out there can take this information, produce new and interesting studies, and give it away all for free. But when you can get all of this for the cost of a Baseball Prospectus subscription and a couple of books, why bother hiring someone to do the same thing?
If you consider someone like me a replacement level stats guy, how many more wins can you get by paying someone several hundred thousand dollars a year to do the same thing? You might have access to better defensive models, or better projection systems, but how much better? How many wins can you get out of being able to rate defense five percent better than anyone else? I don’t know the exact answer, but it’s certainly is a lot less than the advantage you could get back when the other teams didn’t understand that on base percentage leads to run scoring. Investing in statistical research these days just seems like a case of diminishing returns. Sure by hiring the best and the brightest stat guys, you can get something of an edge, but it’s a lot of effort for what won’t result in a huge advantage.
...Sabermetrics became too effective own good. Now that everyone is doing it, any big advantages you could have gained from it are gone. If the message a team took away from Moneyball is that “stat based analysis is the one true way” then your team end up becoming just as irrelevant as Billy Beane thought his scouting department was. But that wasn’t the point of Moneyball. The real lesson to be learned was “think different”. The teams that continue to look for new ways to evaluate players are the ones that will continue to thrive in the end.
Repoz
Posted: April 23, 2008 at 03:05 PM | 24 comment(s)
Related News: General, Sabermetrics
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The author clearly has no idea of the salary scale in major league front offices.
The Braves certainly do still favor a certain region of the country as their base scouting area. I think that makes good sense, if it results in better information on players, both on and off the field. I mean really, how often do most teams really sit and watch a player that is drafted?
>$200,000 investment, maybe 10-15 games total? I don't really know, (Keith, Bradford? thoughts?)
A pitcher, what? 8-10 starts?
$50,000-$200,000, maybe 10 games.
<$50,000, 5 games?
I am just making up numbers here, but if the Braves are getting both a higher frequency and quality look at a player, from more eyes within the organization, aren't they going to be making decisions with better information on the players in their area?
isn't it "Sabermetrics Be Dead"
The Braves still draft on the basis of height and zip code; they still have a unique approach.
And it still works : )
Of course, it helps when your zip codes are the best or secondbest in the country at playing baseball. Perfect Game had a list of what states produced the most draft picks and most draft picks per capita and Georgia and Florida were both top 5 or 10 and Mississippi and Louisiana were in the top 5 or 10 too
EDIT-Florida was number two in total picks and number one in per capita picks
I know it is famously "cheap". But what is it really?
It depends on where the player is drafted. Guys who are likely to be at the top of a team's draft board will be seen dozens of times, by the area scout, the crosschecker, the scouting director, and sometimes a major league or minor league scout as well. The further down the draft board you go, the fewer times a player will be seen - sometimes it may be just the area scout, perhaps 2-3 times.
A guy who is just a stat analyst is certainly making less than $100K, probably less than $50K. The guys I know who are in the business and who are making more money than that do far more than "just" sabermetrics.
-- MWE
Chad Rogers from OH, Jeff Locke from NH, Freddie Freeman from CA, Mike Broadway from IL, Jeff Lyman from CA, Eric Campbell from IN, James Parr from NM, Jo Jo Reyes from CA, Luis Atalino from PR, Charlie Morton from CT, Adam Stern from Nebraska by way of Canada plus an Alaskan HSer in 99.
Ok, I'll take a stab. This is slightly more than an educated guess, but not nearly a certainty on my part. Perhaps K-Law can shed some light.
Entry level baseball ops employee OR area scout: $30k /year
Full time, established "stat" person OR regional crosschecker: $45-60k
Higher level (non-asst. GM) Baseball Ops administrator OR national crosschecker: $60-$80k
Scouting Director: $100-120k
Assistant GM - $200k-$500k
GM - $500k +
No you don't. That would mean they sucked horribly last year.
True.
I'm a UGA and Braves fan so I was dyyyying for a way for my Braves to get Gordon Beckham at 18.
I don't give a whit about losing a draft pick to sign a solid player but I wish we would have waited to see if the Mets even offered arb to Glavine, which i don't think they were going to, before we signed him. In signing him so early we lost the 18th pick. He was very likely to have been available at that spot after his soph. year but then he upped his stock a little by leading Cape Cod in HRs and RBIs and then - to really jack up his draft spot - he went/is going APENUTS on the NCAA. Even with his domination this spring there is a chance, though a small one, he could fall to 18 but now that wouldn't help us anyway.
Oh well...
Maybe we can draft Fields again, I don't know if he gave the Braves permission for that after he didn't sign this spring.
I would LOVE to see my boy in a Braves uni but I am 500-times more happy that he came back to own the SEC as a senior, even if it cost us the also-nasty Kevin Rhoderick. Its been a great year
Are you Linguo?
J.P Ricciardi: What? I thought it was a party principle.
Billy Beane: This is why I can't have nice things...
Nice.
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