U.S.S. Mariner: DMZ: This guy works for the Mariners

If you have a subscription, run over and check out this Baseball Prospectus interview with Tony Blengino. Loooooot of great stuff. If you’re looking for interesting stuff to talk about at our event next week, this is a gold mine.

News on what they’re doing building a stat analysis organization (Tom Tango’s consulting!)

Here’s my favorite quote

But we want independent opinions, and we want people in our office to disagree. We want some degree of conflict. If everyone agrees, and says the same thing about each transaction, you have too homogenous of a group together. You need to have people coming at issues from different angles, and I think that we’re in the process, in the short time we’ve been together, of having that.

DL: Among established defensive metrics, which do you feel are most meaningful?

TB: I like the Hardball Times revised zone ratings [RZR] and out of zone plays [OOZ]. I think you can take their statistics and couch them a certain way, and get some really good indicators. There are a lot of other ones out there as well, like the Plus/Minus and the UZR, and I think they all have value. I think it all comes down to being able to come up with a measure where you have a baseline that you’re comparing to, and I think that with the Hardball Times metrics you can come up with a baseline fairly easily and know what you’re talking about, whether a guy is above or below average at a certain position, and watch trends over the years fairly easily. So I think that there is value in a lot of the different metrics, and I think they’re being advanced on an annual basis. It comes down to the user and what he’s most comfortable working with, and that he has a logical premise that his analysis is based on.