Though the Diamondbacks have a strong anti-analytics reputation, team president Derrick Hall told Ken Rosenthal of FOX Sports that they’ve hired a pair of full-time employees and two interns recently to add to their growing analytics department. Chief baseball officer Tony La Russa disputed the notion to Rosenthal as well, noting that he feels the data provided by D-Backs analysts is important for game preparation. La Russa wants manager Chip Hale and his coaches to employ “observational analytics” during games, though — that is, to adjust based on what they see on the field and in their guts. That, of course, sounds like a decisively non-analytical approach. The additions to the staff are noteworthy, to be sure, but it’s worth questioning how much buy-in there is at the top of the food chain given quotes such as this one from La Russa: “But once the game starts, you’ve got to really make sure that you don’t let some of the preparation change what your guts and brain are telling you when you look out at the field. During the game, you observe. That supersedes what you would have learned from the preparation going in. … You have to allow your managers and coaches to make adjustments. That’s how you can win extra games.”
Here’s more from the NL West…
- Daniel Hudson has spent the season in the Diamondbacks’ bullpen and seen his velocity tick up to triple digits while working in relief, but the former starter and two-time Tommy John victim tells the Arizona Republic’s Nick Piecoro that he believes he can return to the rotation. “I’d really like to try it again and if we get to a point where we say, ‘Well, we don’t know if this is the smartest thing to do,’ then I’ll be perfectly fine doing whatever they need me to do and just going like that the rest of my career,” says Hudson. As Piecoro notes, the righty was initially placed in the ’pen because doctors didn’t want him tossing more than 80-90 pitches per outing, and there were questions about how deep he could work into games early on as he reestablished his control.
- We’ve touched upon the state of uncertainty in the Giants future rotation several times recently, and Henry Schulman of the San Francisco Chronicle is the latest observer to offer his take of the situation. The upcoming rotation market has a lot of talent, of course, but many of its better arms of it will at least start out looking for nine-figure guarantees. Schulman says the “most likely scenario” for San Francisco is to try to bring back Mike Leake, who he pegs in the six-year, $90MM range, while also looking to deal for another mid-rotation arm.
- The Padres face ongoing shortstop questions, and Dennis Lin of the San Diego Union-Tribune takes a look at the early returns from the latest player under consideration at the position: Jedd Gyorko. Still just 26 and locked up for years to come, Gyorko has come alive at the plate in recent months. While he’s only logged 103 frames at short, Lin suggests that he’s shown enough at least to merit a continued look the rest of the way. With an upcoming shortstop market that is fronted by players like Ian Desmond, Asdrubal Cabrera, Jimmy Rollins, and Alexei Ramirez, there are certainly some free agents that could warrant consideration as everyday options — to say nothing of the possibility of a trade. But Gyorko’s work at short potentially gives the team some flexibility in its acquisition plans.
Gyorko played 2B and SS in high school and college. I see no reason why he couldnt play shortstop until the end of the season and see if he can stick. Spangenberg and Gyorko in the lineup at the same time certainly makes the Padres a better team.
Reasons why he shouldn’t play shortstop until the end of the season include his lack of arm, his lack of range, and the fact that in barely 100 innings at the position, +/- says he’s already cost his team almost as much as the decidedly-mediocre Jimmy Rollins has in 10 times the innings.
So you are using a stat that by definition needs 450 GAMES of data to be anywhere close to accurate to gauge how a player has done over 100 INNINGS? Ok. If you say so . From what I have seen he has committed no errors at short and has had no obvious bad plays.
On the statistical front, you should note that while all defensive stats take a while to stabilize because of variability of game-state and play distributions, +/- gets there faster than UZR. Three years is what you need to get to granularity between whether a guy is #2 or #3 at his position over time. Usable trends emerge (great, in the middle, awful) emerge much earlier than one season in.
On the observational front, if you’ve watched any significant portion of his innings at shortstop and find that he has had no obvious bad plays, you need to (a) get better at identifying bad plays and (b) understand what plays a typical shortstop makes which he’s been nowhere close to even having an attempt on.
Should we go out on a limb and assume you’re also part of the Padres fanbase who thinks Matt Kemp is something other than awful defensively?
The Padres knew Kemp wasn’t a defensive gold glover. But he wasn’t brought in for his defense, he was brought in for his bat. You know when the last time the padres had a 100 RBI player? Chase Headley in 2012. He’s got a wRC+ of 112 even playing majority of the games in Petco.
He’s got a .271/.318/.449 line with 21HRs and 94RBIs so far.
Despite Gyorko’s troubles the past few years he STILL managed to lead the Padres in RBIs in 2013 and 2014. He may not be defensively great, but if he’s found his bat he deserve to be in the lineup because he’s proven he has power at Petco.
wRC+ is context adjusted, so “even in Petco” makes no sense in that statement. (If anything, the park adjustments right now probably over-value offensive contributions in Petco a bit.)
And my point on Kemp was simply that there’s a subset of Padres fandom who genuinely seem to think that Matt Kemp adds value defensively – an opinion which takes a shocking lack of knowledge about baseball. I agree that Kemp’s offensive contributions have been of real value to the club, and think especially if they’re going to have Jankowski in CF next year, they can live with Kemp’s awful defense until the DH comes to the NL.
Baseball is a game played by computers or people? Fill in your answer here: __________
No one is saying baseball is played by computers…unless they are talking about baseball computer games…but why not use analytics if they can help your team be better? A mixture of the eye test & analytics is possible and a good thing imo.
The entire “anti-analytics” angle is being exaggerated, as a way of trying to divide baseball into old and new schools. Every team is using data in one way or another. They always have. The real question is how much to trust mathematical models to tell you everything you want to know about how real world systems work. This is an important issue in the use of statistical models in the sciences and is no less so in baseball. Understanding the limits of your data and math is key to making a model better. So the point here is we are being presented with a false choice.
Yes and you may see my full answer if it gets through the arbitrary filter.
People do a better job of predicting human performance than computers do about _______ percent of the time.
I was sure nobody would get the point and you proved it… mathematically!
You are 100% right, obviously!