Carmine the computer

fwiw, I would very much like to see Eric discuss this too.

When they laid me off in January of '09 (with six months severance pay!), Zack Scott told me that they had been ordered to lay off all their consultants except one, whom they could hire full time.

They were hiring Tom because he still hadn't finished Carmine. Being a former coder myself, I laughed.

I have no idea if Tom goes into that on the podcast, which I'll listen to soon (maybe even tomorrow). I suspect they kept on adding features and hence moving the goalposts on him.

I never glimpsed Carmine, and never felt the lack. Tom and I worked completely independently (and in fact I never set foot again in the Fenway baseball ops office after my initial interview). Ditto for me and Bill James, and I'm guessing for Bill and Tom. They liked getting three independent views.

[pathetic rambling] The one comparison I got back was when I told them that there was nothing negative statistically I could find about a college guy having a big down year relative to his previous level of play; adding that didn't change my model, which was based on the final year only. So there was no reason to shy away from Jed Lowrie, whose junior year numbers had been really disappointing. Whereupon Jed Hoyer says, "Interesting. Bill had the opposite finding." But everyone was aware that the study of college stats (which they had painstakingly compiled) was primitive.

(I really wanted them to draft Chase Headley with the 57 pick that they spent on Joathan Egan. Headley went 66. But the guy I liked even more was Stephen Head (who went 62), a 1B / closer, provided they made a LH throwing catcher out of him! Moot idea, because he never hit well enough in the minors to even make it to MLB as a catcher. [/pathetic rambling]

I'll add this ... Jed Hoyer in '05 was the guy who passed all the consultant data on to Tito. Zack Scott inherited that job in '06 (when Jed was promoted to Asst. GM upon the departure of Josh Byrnes) and didn't do nearly as good a job of convincing Tito to do the right thing. But I believe he's been doing that job ever since, and he and Cora seem to be acting as one brain.