The Futility Infielder

A couple of years back, Baseball Prospectus' Dayn Perry took a look at the post-Moneyball backlash that pitted traditional scouting against performance analysis and coined a metaphor for the ages. "Should you run an organization with scouts or statistics?" asked Dayn, before providing the solution himself. "My answer is the same it would be if someone asked me: 'Beer or tacos?' Both, you fool. Why construct an either-or scenario where none need exist?"

But despite Dayn's wisdom and the abilities of most intelligent people to reconcile multiple inputs, tensions between these two views persist. Those tensions are exacerbated in part by the hacktastic reactionaries who populate all too many of the nation's sports pages, hurling epithets like "Google Boy" at Paul DePodesta as if some Luddite brand of senile dementia were the day's blue plate special.

Intelligent debate on the topic is rare, which is why you should read this Baseball America transcript of a Winter Meetings roundtable between two top scouts and two top analysts, moderated by Alan Schwarz. The scouts are represented by Gary Hughes, assistant GM of the Cubs, and Eddie Bane, scouting director of the Anahiem Angels of Assville, California*, while the statheads are ably represented by Gary Huckabay of Baseball Prospectus (and now a consultant for the Oakland A's) and Voros McCracken, a Red Sox consultant best known for birthing the Defense Independent Pitching Statistic concept. Schwarz is a senior writer for BA, a columnist for the New York Times and ESPN, and the author of The Numbers Game, a book on the history of baseball statistics that includes nods to BP, the Moneyball A's, and McCracken -- making him an eminently qualified go-between.

Cherrypicking a choice quote from each of them so that you can sample the flavor:

GARY HUCKABAY: I think it’s important to understand that a lot of people have overclaimed what you can do by statistical analysis. It’s a tool. A car is a tool as well—you can use it to drive to the store, or you can use it to drive into a tree. I think there’s more of a dichotomy between good statistical analysis and bad statistical analysis. But all the information you can get your hands on—as long as you understand what it’s good for, and what its quality is—is always a good thing. We’re all after the same thing here: We’re out to build a great baseball team. As long as you have X number of pieces of information, whether it’s performance data—a term I prefer to use rather than statistics, because these things are records of what happened on the field—and then also, if you’ve got people who have tremendous insight who are well trained, they know how to scout a guy, give me that information too. I want both of it. What I don’t want is someone going, “I want this guy because he had 120 RBIs.”

VOROS McCRACKEN: Certainly, we in Boston are not antagonistic to the concepts in “Moneyball” either. Obviously they hired me as a consultant. When they promoted Theo, basically the idea was he was going to try to meld the two approaches and get them to where they were not only getting along, but are complementing one another. The stats can help the scouts zero in on the guys they should be zeroing in on. And the scouts, once the stats are sorting things through, can tell you who exactly are the best guys to go after. The success of that can obviously be overblown because a World Series championship is a big thing, big news. How much it had to do with stats, how much it had to do with improved scouting . . . I think the point is that Boston has at least tried to reconcile the two positions.

GARY HUGHES: It seems like the teams that are so-called Moneyball teams -- I’m not going to get into names of individual people or teams -- those teams seem to really lack communication skills within their organization. They don’t talk to each other. They talk within their little comfortable niche of people, and the rest of the organization has no idea what’s going on. That seems to be by design. And guys are leaving baseball—just walking away—rather than work with people who just aren’t going to listen to them.

EDDIE BANE: I will have read this (statistics) stuff before I go into the ballpark. But I'm going to evaluate him myself as a scout -- just as a scout -- and I'm going to call Pat Gillick, if he had him in Toronto or Seattle in the past, and go, "Tell me about him." I'm going to get information from the press box. I'm going to work other scouts over. I'm going to know everything I can about this guy. "Yeah, I heard his elbow was hurting him." "No, it wasn't his elbow, he pulled a hamstring." "He had a drinking problem in the past." I'm going to have the DIPS information already. I mean, this stuff if fabulous. But I've got to have the other stuff too -- the intangibles.

Them's good eats. Bane pops up in another venue this week. Rich's Weekend Baseball Beat features an article in which Rich Lederer discusses the Angels' standoff with first-round draft pick Jered Weaver, picking up on a statement in the roundtable where Bane dismisses the notion of comparing Weaver's stats to those of Mark Prior:

I’m in the middle of a negotiation right now (with Jered Weaver) where a guy wants to compare our first-round pick’s stats to Mark Prior’s. And to me, there’s no correlation whatsoever.

Lederer runs the two pitchers' stats -- they're two of the top hurlers in NCAA history, by the way -- accounts for park adjustments and makes note of schedule difficulty, and replies:

Like it or not, Eddie, Weaver’s and Prior’s numbers can be adjusted and compared quite easily. This point, in fact, is one of the major issues separating the stats vs. the scouts debate. A lot of the scouts simply don’t want to believe the numbers because doing so dilutes the value of their worth (or so they think)

... I’m sorry, but it is simply disingenuous to say that there is “no correlation whatsoever” between Weaver’s and Prior’s stats. Bane knows the stats are incredibly similar so he is trying to play a little three-card monte on the public by proclaiming that they aren’t akin to one another.

This isn't the first time Lederer has tweaked someone about the Weaver situation. Recall that during the Winter Meetings he threw Weaver's agent, Scott Boras, a curveball as the agent was holding court in the hotel lobby and offering hardline answers to softball questions about his free-agent clientele. Here he's lobbying for the Angels to shut up and sign the young pitcher:

Boras is believed to be asking for a deal similar to the five-year, $10.5 million contract Prior signed with the Chicago Cubs in August 2001. Given their comparable stats and competition, is that so unreasonable?

The whole thing is really quite silly when you think about the fact that Jered’s brother Jeff is scheduled to earn $9.25 million in 2005. I know Jeff is a more proven pitcher at the big-league level, but who would you rather have for about the same amount of money -- Jered Weaver for the next five years or Jeff Weaver for one year?

Having spent the past two-and-a-half seasons with Weaver on the staffs of my two rooting interests, I'll give up the washer and dryer for what's behind Door #2.

On the topic of Lederer, a pair of congratulations are in order: he's ESPN columnist Rob Neyer's "Link of the Month," and a column of his on Jim Edmonds, co-written with Brian Gunn of Redbird Nation, was chosen by the Wall Street Journal as one of the top 10 sports columns of 2004 (the only one to come from a blog). Congrats, Rich!

Back to Perry, I had a chance to bend elbows with him last weekend as he passed through New York City. Alex Belth, Alex Ciepley, Dayn, his romantic interest Leanne, my gal Andra and I all trekked out to Queens to visit our favorite authentic Thai restaurant Sripraphai (of which Alex B. wrote so glowingly after our first journey there several weeks ago). It wasn't beer and tacos -- though we had plenty of the former as the night went on -- but it was good food and good times. Fans of Perry's work will be pleased to note that he's got a book forthcoming as well as contributions to the Baseball Prospectus annual and the still-unnamed BP Red Sox project discussed a few days back.

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* We're going to have some fun with those silly Angels, kids. I don't really have a dog in this hunt between the faceless, Disney-driven hell of Anaheim and a baseball owner insistent on insulting everybody's intelligence. But as I've never cottoned to either the New York Giants of East Rutherford or the New York Jets of East Rutherford, I'll concede my sympathy to the unrepresented taxpayers who foot the stadium bills. Besides, Angels owner has made a much more immediate and correctible mistake and deserves to have as much scorn and ridicule heaped upon his actions until the right thing is done. So today it's the Anahem Angels of Assville, CA, tomorrow it may well be the Los Angeles Angels of "Screw You, Anaheim," and the day after that the Angels of Arte Moreno's Ass. Consider yourself forewarned that I'm just going to beat this ugly with the ugly stick for my own amusement. Feel free to offer your suggestions; good taste is hardly a prerequisite.

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Speaking of McCracken and DIPS, several people have emailed to inquire about whether I'll be publishing this year's stats. Indeed I will, hopefully some time over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, I've updated several links on last year's page to compensate for the trainwreck induced by Baseball Primer's relaunch as Baseball Think Factory. If anybody can help fill in more of the missing links, please email me.