ESPN: Rubin: Original A’s analyst discusses Alderson

That’d be Eric Walker…

He has been involved with baseball with a team as recently as two years ago with San Diego. So if anyone had the perception that things had passed him by, that the theories of 20 years ago aren’t applicable, it still works?

Absolutely. If you read a lot of what people write about analysis, or sabermetrics as they like to call it these days, you see an awful lot of all kinds of complex measures and all sorts of complex equation writing and so forth. But as I said somewhere a few months ago in an article I did for The Baseball Analyst, you mustn’t confuse precision with accuracy. And the fact that you can calculate things out to two or three decimal places doesn’t mean it’s particularly more accurate than what we did in the good-old days. In 1982 in my book, I had a formula that involved nothing but at-bats, walks, hits and total bases for predicting runs. And I just happened to look today. Its average accuracy applied to 2010—30 years later—is 3 percent. The most accurate formulas available, if you tweak everything and fine-tune everything down, you’re going to get down to 2.3, 2.35 percent. So the major principles are very clear, very straightforward. They still work. And I think that’s probably what Sandy is going to be looking at. Basically, he’s going to be getting guys who help produce runs. Or, if they’re pitchers and fielders, help reduce runs. You really don’t have to be very fancy with that. It’s not a question of being a dinosaur. I’m sure Sandy knows all the modern measures.

It’s not going to be like he’s a stat-head who comes in and says, “This is all we’re going to do, by the numbers.” But he’s going to let the numbers have an important voice, in my opinion.