John Henry says Red Sox will rely less on analytics

His whole spiel was pretty meaningless with zero context to anything he said

Seems like this was bound to happen after moving from Cherington to Dombrowski. Cherington was on the high end of that spectrum huh?

...that's especially interesting, considering this exchange (which surprised me, if true)

9:30
Ben: Hi Jeff, what are the MLB teams that invest most/least in their analytics departments?

9:31
Jeff Sullivan: I don’t know the whole spread of actual money invested, but the Dodgers obviously have a lot going on. On the flip side, you’d be shocked by the current state of the Red Sox and the A’s

from -

www.fangraphs.com/blogs/jeff-sullivan-fangraphs-chat-21916/

lol relax.  They didn't even change their staff that much.  If there was a huge change, there'd be an entire overhaul, and there hasn't been one.  Any backpedaling on analytics is probably already evident in how Dombrowski operates within player evaluation (trusted scouts, his own eyes, etc.)

Anyone who actually listened to what Henry said rather than just believe what the media manipulate his words into, clearly heard him say they are looking to find the right balance between the traditional "scouting" outlook and the analytic outlook. It was heavily insinuated that Ben Cherrington was too absorbed in analytics that it lead to bad decisions.

Additionally, he termed it evolutionary. Not revolutionary.

Jeez. So Cherington was really the devil, heh? Who knew. And those damn Analytics. Surely things will be great now that he's gone.

Actually, Henry never mentioned scouting at all.
I'm not sure I understand the reluctance to accept his formulation at face value; it was entirely self-impelled, and came within the context of him describing a 2-month process where he became convinced there were serious problems; he chose to mention "over reliance on numbers" foremost.

Now, of course it is virtually impossible to know exactly what he means, viz. how he intends to operationalize the change. It would be helpful if he would have provided a concrete example as illustration. And of course the problem with finding fault with an application of "numbers", is that it can be countered with a plausible counter claim that the numbers were merely misapplied

I know he never mentioned "scouting." That's just what I called it because that is pretty much how most around here differentiate between the two methods that are using in professional baseball.

Start bloody ST games already. At least that can give us something maybe potentially useful.


This comment from Henry probably means nothing, and is at most a shot at some prior employees, because hey, they might as well blame people who are not there anymore for some of the deals they're stuck in, though the two deals in particular are not that bad if the two players can even become semi-competent

I dunno. But they now have a guy running their team who uses RBI when describing what kind of offensive player a guy is, which I heard with my own ears by Dombrowski the other day re: Pablo Sandoval.

It seems to me that there is literally nothing that would convince some people that this team is not going to be using information in the most progressive way possible. They can hire Dave Dombrowski, the owner can come out and say it blatantly, and still we get people here saying, "What's the big deal? They're not really gonna do it."


BTW, if you say they "lucked" into a World Series in 2013, or it was a fluke, you're a moron. I'm sorry, you just are. You are no better than the average idiot that calls into WEEI.

I think it's a lot to do about nothing. If Henry meant that the Sox are going to go back to old school Red Sox baseball, then that would be monumentally stupid. Bill James might as well step down.

I doubt that's the case. These days just about all major league teams have a dept of analysts. It's not like the Sox are hugely ahead of the curve as one of the few teams doing it as they were a year ago. I don't know that any team has a huge edge in that department anymore.

The Red Sox made a lot of bad evaluations and most of it from the major league level either was from going with just the numbers and ignoring major league scouting or bad major league scouting. Henry kind of indicated it was the former more than the latter. I can't say I disagree. Dombrowski is more inclined at using the eye test, although I would hope it wouldn't be against a ton of statistical data to the contrary.

It seems to me that according to Henry when the Sox would look at past performances and use their projection systems, that the results varied too wildly from what they had been projecting, which means that either their projection system was lacking or there wasn't the foresight from a scouting perspective to say something like Player X is projected to do this, but it's not taking factors Y and Z into account or it doesn't know that the player is now completely healthy, or whatever.

Ideally a team should use a balanced approach between analytics and scouting.

Jerry : Well here's your chance to try the opposite. Instead of tuna salad and being intimidated by women, chicken salad and going right up to them.

George : Yeah, I should do the opposite, I should.

Jerry : If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.

George : Yes, I will do the opposite. I used to sit here and do nothing, and regret it for the rest of the day, so now I will do the opposite, and I will do...

something!