Doing it the old-fashioned way
Not everyone pays attention to these numbers, of course. While teams such as the Mariners, Red Sox and Detroit Tigers, who improved greatly on defense in 2009, peruse and subscribe to these stats, some teams still just won’t buy them—literally or figuratively.
“I think defensive statistics are the most unpredictable stats there are,” says Charley Kerfeld, a former big league reliever who now serves as a special assistant to Phillies GM Ruben Amaro Jr.
“And since I’ve been here, we don’t have an in-house stats guy and I kind of feel we never will. We’re not a statistics-driven organization by any means.
“I’m not against statistics. Everybody has their own way of doing things. But the Phillies believe in what our scouts see and what our eyes tell us and what our people tell us.”
...As far as the open market for players is concerned, Dewan says Boston’s recent splurge on expensive leather might jack up the value of defense even more.
“Now you have a big-market team doing it,” Dewan says. “Now it’s going to be adopted, no question. Teams are going to think, ‘If it works for Boston, it should work for us.’
“And that’s great to see.”
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1. bjhanke Posted: January 11, 2010 at 01:51 PM (#3433776)Kerfeld would have among the LAST that I would have predicted would ever get a front office position.
And I think a lot of these "anti-stats" statements are just for public consumption and don't reflect the reality of how the team operates. For reasons I cannot fathom, its seems important to appear "old school".
(not to mention blue collar)
Do they mean the 2009 off-season here? Off the top of my head, I would guess that no team worsened on defense by more from 2008 to 2009 than the Red Sox.
I would guess this is just a coincidence. There just aren't that many title winners between those two teams.I don't understand the "we don’t have an in-house stats guy and I kind of feel we never will" approach. I could understand having a stats guy and not taking his word by itself. I could understand having a stat guy and giving his opinion less weight than that of your coaches and scouts. But I don't understand wby on earth a team would think it was a good idea to cut off that avenue for understanding players entirely.
Well, they might take the attitude that what can be learned from statistics reliably is something they can teach themselves, and that the cutting edge might be adding more noise than signal, but with some kind of "firmness" that could delude them into making bad decisions. They might even have a point. With defense, in particular, for a very long time after people started trying to address it with statistics, the "eyeball" test was more reliable than the statistics. It's only been about a decade, out of three of trying, where we've had some deserved confidence in statistics. It's been even a little bit less time since stats people realized that toolsy players with the same numbers as non-toolsy players in the minors were much better prospects. Scouts judging defense do something a lot more like UZR than like Joe Reporter saying Jeter looks good out there. They actually will watch hours of video on a player to see whether he gets a good break on the ball has range to his left and right, etc. They'll make some educated guess about whether a player's positioning is poor, so that he could improve a lot with better coaching. I can understand teams not wanting to have some other guy come in with one or two numbers.
Kerfield didn't say "We don't care about on base percentage or park effects." He just said he didn't see the need to pay someone to work for the team. There is a really good question to be asked about whether the teams that do hire stats people are getting good value for their money. We have no idea, because we don't know what they've figured out that isn't in the public domain.
By the way, has David Pinto quit publishing the PMR defensive results? Since his methodology is distinctly different from UZR and +/-, and I always liked comparing PMR results to other systems.
It was clumsily worded by I read it as the Tigers being the team that improved greatly (though at least by DER they did not).
What about something more complex, like Comerica? Is the Tigers' improvement down to defence? Or does it have something to do with getting all those hitters? It seems to have become a hitter's park in recent years. Does that have something to do with getting all those hitters? Or does it reflect changes in other ballparks?
***
the winning teams were the ones that were built around the features that the home ballpark most suppressed
This is a commonly held belief, isn't it?
Bill James did a study in the 1986 Abstract, focusing on teams that played in extreme parks, and concluded that those teams tended to accrue talent in opposition to the park - AKA The Devil's Theory of Park Effects. He pointed out that the teams that "succeeded" in those parks, however, were the ones that understood the park effects well enough to realize that a player with superficially good stats in the aspects that the park supported were not necessarily all that good.
-- MWE
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