Anderson: How baseball agents are negotiating the information gap in MLB
From R.J. Anderson at CBS Sports on August 15, 2017:
In the 14 years since the publication of Moneyball, baseball’s fascination with numbers has become a well-known condition. Teams are using complex mechanisms to evaluate players, and are reaching farther and farther from the league and its data providers to get their quantitative fix. You can’t dust a general manager’s shelf without numbers flying all over the place.
The ongoing data revolution has obscured a simple fact. With teams receiving improved information, their greatest competitive advantage is perhaps no longer over one another. Rather, the information gulf now resides between the teams and the players — or, precisely, the players’ agents. With the league investing in new data sources, like Statcast, the gap could continue to grow.
The agents know it, too.
“The intelligence level on that side has grown, and that’s the difference,” Octagon Baseball statistical analyst Rod Blunck told CBS Sports. “The effort that teams are making to know more about the sport is on a different level than the agents’ side.”
Read the full article here: https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/how-baseball-agents-are-negotiating-the-gap-in-information-and-analytics-in-mlb/
Originally published: August 15, 2017. Last Updated: August 15, 2017.