The Futility Infielder

If you have been following my yammerings about Defense Independent Pitching Statistics this winter, you'll recognize the name of Voros McCracken, the man who created DIPS. My recent foray onto the foreboding DIPS tundra was due to the facts that McCracken decided not to publish the numbers this year, and that he gave me his blessing and a bit of instruction to do so myself.

Having plugged and chugged in an attempt to fill the sabermetric void, I can now appreciate the sheer labor-intensity of that task and a man's willingness to let somebody else schlep through the spreadsheets and the formatting and the glaven (or did I mean Glavine?). But McCracken had other reasons for ditching the DIPS-work, and better ones at that. When we corresponded back in November, he couldn't be specific, but he didn't discourage my guess that he'd been hired to work for some team. On Tuesday, he revealed via his website that since October, he's been working as a consultant to baseball operations for the Boston Red Sox. "It's a dream come true and has already been a tremendous experience for me, and I'm thoroughly excited about the team and the nature of my work with them," he wrote. "The upcoming baseball season as undertaken a whole new dimension for me and I can't wait for it to begin."

McCracken is now on-board with Bill James, the Babe.. well, let's just call him the Ted Williams of sabermetrics, since we shouldn't get the Bambino mixed up in this. Also on-board is Theo Epstein, the boy-wonder GM whose own sabermetric influence fueled his precocious rise up the front-office ladder. Plenty about Epstein, James (whose official title is "Senior Baseball Operations Advisor") and the Sox being a laboratory for the application for sabermetric principles has already been hashed and rehashed in a score of threads over at Baseball Primer. Coming this summer, you're likely to see this the theme of a thousand weblogs publishing near you.

What's interesting to me at this moment is the chronology. Rob Neyer first broke the news of James's hiring in the first week of November. Back then, Epstein was still the Assistant GM, under interim GM Mike Port. McCracken coming on in October beats both of them to their current positions. It's probably folly to think that he could have been directly involved in Epstein's hiring. But given that McCracken is the one sabermetrician whose recent work James paid notice to in his New Bill James Historical Abstract, it's plausible that he played a role in that hiring, if only by offering it up as something more than a pipe dream. [Update: Sean Forman of Baseball Primer confirmed as much on a discussion thread: "Voros actually predates the hiring of Bill James. As I understand, he was on a look-see contract starting during the postseason and apparently now has been re-upped. Apparently, he has enough social graces to keep the job."]

Whatever. Anyway, it's going to be a very interesting season to see what the Red Sox do, and how much impact this new regime will have. Congratulations to Voros, and here's wishing him the best in his new endeavor.. no, not the best. Maybe just the Wild Card.