Lemire: Throw BP, know SQL: the modern baseball coach’s job description
From Joe Lemire at SportTechie on May 18, 2018:
Sam Fuld retired from the outfield last fall, leaving behind an eight-year playing career in the big leagues and joining the Phillies in a newly created role: major league player information coordinator.
Fuld is as well educated as any ballplayer. He has an economics degree from Stanford, interned at Stats, Inc., while in the minors, and was working towards a master’s degree in statistics before he got the call up to the majors. In his playing days, Fuld would study his opponents more deeply than just the mainstream metrics of a pitcher’s strikeouts and walks, checking key peripheral stats like the groundball/flyball ratio against that opponent’s heater. “That told me a lot about fastball characteristics,” he said.
That resumé made Fuld an ideal candidate for sharing complex data with players. But it didn’t quite prepare him for the day in spring training in Florida this year when he had to teach the Phillies players about advanced stats because, well, he had never needed to use PowerPoint before. “Hopefully I’m a lot better PowerPointer by the end of this year,” he said with a laugh.
Read the full article here: https://www.sporttechie.com/mlb-data-analytics-sabermetrics-sam-fuld-jeff-luhnow/
Originally published: May 18, 2018. Last Updated: May 18, 2018.