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John Henry says Red Sox will rely less on analytics
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Post by jimed14 on Feb 25, 2016 11:32:20 GMT -5
"Whatever process led to anything we did in 2014, do the opposite." Kinda, but what we did in 2014 was pretty much the same thing that we did in 2013. It's kind of hard to blow up a World Series winner, even though they should have.
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Post by James Dunne on Feb 25, 2016 13:33:41 GMT -5
In 2014 Cherington made the Sandoval signing (long term contract for big money pretty indefensible at the time, worse in hindsight), the Lackey deal (strange to focus on 2015 return for a player like Lackey who figured to be very good in 2015, a disaster in hindsight), and Ramirez (four-year deal, I sorta liked it at the time to be fair, but it was garbage. Compare that to 2013 (and the previous offseason) where they made mid-level signings to varying success to supplement a strong existing core (Victorino, Napoli, Gomes, Dempster, Mujica) where a miss wasn't going to hurt them long term.
There was no coherent structure to the moves they made in 2014, AND they were pretty bad in a vacuum too. If they were using "analytics" (and I put that in scare quotes not because I am skeptical of quantitative analysis in baseball by any means, but because analytics has sort of become this catch-all term when people really mean statistics) to key on Sandoval and Craig, then they were doing it wrong. Like, really really wrong.
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Post by telson13 on Feb 25, 2016 13:52:10 GMT -5
The crazy thing about 2013 was that there WAS a lot of bad luck early. Hanrahan went down. Bailey went down. Miller went down. Buchholz went down. But yeah, the roster construction and depth gave them Koji to step in, Lackey came back strong, Papi came back from the Achilles rupture...
Calling 2012 Cherington's "fault" is like blaming Obama for the housing and stock market crashes. He inherited that team. 2013 was his success, because he made the moves that resurrected the team. And 2014/15 were his mistakes. 2014 was a bit unpredictable, pretty much everyone but Papi and Lester underperformed. But he made some roster mistakes as far as depth goes. And while I was always opposed to Sandoval, I thought Ramirez would hit and be a serviceable LF. I think most of the poor performance during Cherington's tenure has been because the team had such a dearth of impact talent in the 2008-2010 drafts. They didn't have any young depth. That wasn't Cherington's doing. He recovered from 2012 with some astute veteran signings, but other than Koji those guys fell off a cliff in 2014, and the potential impact talent that they did have (JBJ, Bogaerts, Betts, Swihart) was still a year or two off. Cherington built a tremendous farm system by holding on to talent and making some key picks in the IFA market (Devers, Espinoza, Moncada) and a great pick in Benintendi. They missed on Ball, but so what? Those four hits are all top-50 (or top-20, if you trust BA). Cherington had his strengths and weaknesses as a GM, but the assertion that he was an unmitigated disaster is, to me, a very superficial and pretty juvenile one.
Frankly, I feel the exact same way about Grady Little. He took an inferior team to extra innings in game seven of the ALCS. He gets crucified for leaving Pedro (his best pitcher) in the game, but not one of the hits NY got when they came back was well-struck. It was a series of cheapies. Bad luck. Now, he had options...and good ones. But he also had the best pitcher in the world at the time, on the mound, and NOT laboring. Pop-up doubles happen, and they're *really* rare. NY got incredibly lucky. It happens. People, probably influenced by reading too much eloquent whining by Dan Shaughnessy and/or too much banal, unsubstantiated "analysis" from Cafardo, have turned that into Grady Little's "failure" legacy. Screw that noise. I mean, seriously, it's foolish. There's a lot of room between God and The Devil, and the vast majority fall very, very close to the middle.
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Post by jimed14 on Feb 25, 2016 14:30:02 GMT -5
In 2014 Cherington made the Sandoval signing (long term contract for big money pretty indefensible at the time, worse in hindsight), the Lackey deal (strange to focus on 2015 return for a player like Lackey who figured to be very good in 2015, a disaster in hindsight), and Ramirez (four-year deal, I sorta liked it at the time to be fair, but it was garbage. Compare that to 2013 (and the previous offseason) where they made mid-level signings to varying success to supplement a strong existing core (Victorino, Napoli, Gomes, Dempster, Mujica) where a miss wasn't going to hurt them long term. There was no coherent structure to the moves they made in 2014, AND they were pretty bad in a vacuum too. If they were using "analytics" (and I put that in scare quotes not because I am skeptical of quantitative analysis in baseball by any means, but because analytics has sort of become this catch-all term when people really mean statistics) to key on Sandoval and Craig, then they were doing it wrong. Like, really really wrong. I thought we were talking about forming the 2014 roster before the season began. They were pretty much hoping for a repeat of 2013. I agree the "instant rebuild" at the 2014 trade deadline was a terrible idea. I hated the Lackey and Lester deals and the Pablo signing. I also hated only having Sizemore to backup Victorino and JBJ.
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Post by jerrygarciaparra on Feb 25, 2016 15:02:18 GMT -5
Praise be to God......Our long national nightmare is over.....(insert any available genteelism here).
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Post by costpet on Feb 25, 2016 15:19:52 GMT -5
Does analyzing statistics include the numbers on the weight scale?
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Post by James Dunne on Feb 25, 2016 15:50:47 GMT -5
In 2014 Cherington made the Sandoval signing (long term contract for big money pretty indefensible at the time, worse in hindsight), the Lackey deal (strange to focus on 2015 return for a player like Lackey who figured to be very good in 2015, a disaster in hindsight), and Ramirez (four-year deal, I sorta liked it at the time to be fair, but it was garbage. Compare that to 2013 (and the previous offseason) where they made mid-level signings to varying success to supplement a strong existing core (Victorino, Napoli, Gomes, Dempster, Mujica) where a miss wasn't going to hurt them long term. There was no coherent structure to the moves they made in 2014, AND they were pretty bad in a vacuum too. If they were using "analytics" (and I put that in scare quotes not because I am skeptical of quantitative analysis in baseball by any means, but because analytics has sort of become this catch-all term when people really mean statistics) to key on Sandoval and Craig, then they were doing it wrong. Like, really really wrong. I thought we were talking about forming the 2014 roster before the season began. They were pretty much hoping for a repeat of 2013. I agree the "instant rebuild" at the 2014 trade deadline was a terrible idea. I hated the Lackey and Lester deals and the Pablo signing. I also hated only having Sizemore to backup Victorino and JBJ. Yep, I meant the 2014 calendar year. Just a disaster. Management-wise I can't remember a six-month span where a Sox GM did a worse job than July to December 2014.
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Post by humanbeingbean on Feb 25, 2016 15:52:09 GMT -5
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." And of course, more importantly, there is the Kimbrel trade Yup, I didn't want to jump to that length, but I was definitely thinking so as well. I really hope that Dombrowski didn't just say, "I want Kimbrel and I'll do what it takes to get him," but I fear that that was the case and will continue to be. And this will be all I say regarding that trade, as I know we've spent countless hours on it before.
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Post by ray88h66 on Feb 25, 2016 16:14:08 GMT -5
I don't think it's a big deal. I never liked the "if the eyes don't match the stats, believe the stats". I think if they don't match up you should want more eyes on, and more stats.
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Post by grandsalami on Feb 25, 2016 17:12:38 GMT -5
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Post by Oregon Norm on Feb 25, 2016 18:23:41 GMT -5
Just read through this edition of Speier's newsletter. My own take is that Cherington was so successful with his acquisitions before the 2013 season, that he may have gotten fooled into believing that it was a template he could rely on going forward. Player evaluation, projection really, is not that simple. Using past performance to get a bead on who you might be willing to take a chance on is still a crapshoot, and analytics only get you so far. That's especially true for players who are approaching the witching hour, those who are 30 or older.
There was more than a little luck involved that season: Saltalamachhia, Victorino, Napoli and Drew all punched above their expected weights, in the first two cases way above, performing at levels none of them will ever approach again. Lackey came all the way back from TJ, getting better and better as the season went on, and Buchholz was ridiculously dominant in the first half. Carp and Iglesias coming off the bench were fantastic, and Uehara other-worldly. There's no other word for it. All of that allowed them to build up such momentum, that they led the division for all but 17 games, including all of August and September.
A few people on the board mentioned at the time that this was a tremendous break for them, to have won a championship during what was an obvious time of transition what with the young talent starting to make it's way up through the minors. That success may have fooled the front office a bit. That wasn't a rubber stamp they could apply to every season. My impression is that reservoir of that sort of talent, very cheap for the taking, has almost completely dried up. It wasn't going to be repeated, and they dug themselves a hole trying to catch lightning in a bottle again.
Cherrington is buried in that hole, though he'll undoubtedly re-emerge at some point, brush himself off, and take on another front office job at a new location, wiser for the experience. The team isn't abandoning analytics, in my opinion. What they did figure out was that relying on that alone to build what you hope will be a winning team is a mistake.
I'm not a bow-hunter, but the first time I let one fly while visiting a friend who is, I put it right through the center of the target he'd setup. All it took was a few more shots to prove to him that there was a bit of dumb luck involved. That's a useful metaphor for that 2013 season.
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ericmvan
Veteran
Supposed to be working on something more important
Posts: 8,931
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Post by ericmvan on Feb 25, 2016 22:14:49 GMT -5
The way I read Henry's remarks, he had become skeptical of one thing only: too much reliance on analytics for player projection. It's pretty clear that they had some spreadsheets that said Sandoval would be great in Fenway, and very likely some that said his weight and/or free-swinging would not age poorly.
I can see the sense of this. As a GM, I'd still want all of those kinds of studies, and the best possible projection system, but the purpose of that is to give you a baseline. You have to let your scouts have their say.
When I did the '05 draft for the Sox, I discovered that I couldn't find a player in the database with a college K rate as high as Tulowitzki's who had succeeded as an MLB hitter. But if your scouts can find a good, credible reason why his college K rate doesn't reflect his pro rate going forward, than you discount it. Too much allegiance to those college numbers would have had you passing on him.
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