Q&A with Red Sox general manager Ben Cherington
From SABR member David Laurila at FanGraphs on January 13, 2012:
The name and the face are different, but when it comes to the bigger picture, Ben Cherington looks, and sounds, a lot like Theo Epstein. The new Boston GM is his own man — make no mistake about that — but like his predecessor he is cool, calculated, and sabermetrically savvy. Befitting the Red Sox model, Cherington is all about information and assigning value.
David Laurila: In a May 2009 interview, Andrew Friedman said of the Rays’ organization “We have guided ourselves by the principle that information is king.” Do the Red Sox have the same approach?
Ben Cherington: I think that every team is looking for the most precise information that applies to their particular situation. Every team’s situation is different, so the way that each team applies that information is different. The business of baseball in Boston is different than the business of baseball in other cities.
We may be looking for some of the same information that other teams are, but we may apply it differently. Ultimately, we’re trying to do the same thing that every other team is trying to do, which is to use our resources in the most efficient way possible within the context of our baseball and business models.
We’re looking for any information that can help us assign an appropriate value to a player, regardless of the segment of the market that player is coming from. It could be a teenager in the Dominican, it could be an amateur player in the States that we’re evaluating for the draft, it could be a minor league player with another organization, or it could be major league player. It’s also our own players, both in the minor leagues and at the major league level.
With every player that is a potential target for us, or is someone that we need to assign a value to, we’re looking to acquire as much information as we can about that player. We try to be as precise as we possibly can.
Read the full article here: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/qa-ben-cherington-red-sox-gm/
Originally published: January 13, 2012. Last Updated: January 13, 2012.