Armour and Levitt: The evolution of baseball ops
From SABR members Mark Armour and Dan Levitt on Our Game on March 9, 2015:
Seven months from now two baseball teams will meet in the 2015 World Series. Pitches will be thrown, balls will be hit, and catches will be made, as the fifty players on the two rosters rightfully take center stage. There may be a distraction or two over a manager’s decision or an umpire’s call, but we can be confident that the skills of the talented players involved will ultimately determine which side will hoist the trophy on that late October night.
Among the millions watching will be two groups of very interested people: the Baseball Operations staffs whose collective efforts to scout, evaluate, draft, develop, sign or acquire these players ultimately determined the composition of the two rosters. All of their decision making will have been analyzed and graded as never before by fans and writers, many of whom feel comfortable second-guessing not just major league trades but also the drafting of high school prospects. While most of us tried to play baseball and gave up our big league dreams as teenagers or earlier, that has not stopped us from imagining that we could be the general manager of our local nine.
There have always been debates in schoolyards and bars about trades that should be made or players who should be signed, but the discourse has become much more complex and detailed in the past generation with the explosion of available data about players and the rise of analytics. Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, released in 2003, was a best-selling book in which the heroes were not players performing wondrous athletic feats, but smart guys arguing about baseball, a demographic which is easier for most of us to imagine fitting into.
Read the full article here: http://ourgame.mlblogs.com/2015/03/09/baseball-ops-welcome-to-the-evolution/
Originally published: March 9, 2015. Last Updated: March 9, 2015.