Lindbergh/Arthur: Statheads are the best free agent bargains in baseball
From SABR members Ben Lindbergh and Rob Arthur at FiveThirtyEight on April 26, 2016:
It’s getting more and more crowded on baseball’s bleeding edge. As sabermetrics has expanded to swallow new disciplines and data sets,1 the number of quantitative analysts in MLB front offices has multiplied to keep up, producing an army of number crunchers, modelers and decision scientists who would have seemed out of place at the ballpark even a decade ago.
Because we, too, are statheads at heart, we’ve mined the data and charted the proliferation of these numbers-savvy front-office staffers over time. Yes, there are more of them now than ever, and yes, they’ve had a demonstrable effect on their teams’ fortunes. But contrary to the “Moneyball”-era hand-wringing about battles between scouts and statheads, their rise hasn’t come at the expense of old-school analysis. Rather, the two main points of contention are how much the “Moneyball” mindset has spread from the game’s most frugal teams to the richest ones; and why the front-office hiring boom hasn’t helped its gender diversity.
Read the full article here: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/statheads-are-the-best-free-agent-bargains-in-baseball/
Originally published: April 26, 2016. Last Updated: April 26, 2016.