[Cambridge]

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School held their inaugural Sports Business Conference this past Saturday on the MIT campus. The focus was on the increasing role of analytics in the sports industry, and baseball was well represented with Bill James, J.P. Ricciardi, Rob Neyer, and Los Angeles Dodgers Vice Chairman and President Jamie McCourt. Here is some of what they had to say:

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Question #1: The best minds in baseball have always thought analytically. How has that changed in recent years?

ROB NEYER: It's a combination of a couple of things (at least), including great work inspired by Bill James over the last twenty years. A lot of people in the game today grew up reading him, or reading people who read him. And the other thing is that the ownership has turned over almost completely in the last 20 years. There was no way that people like Clark Griffith would embrace analytics. Griffith grew up in baseball and didn't want people telling him how to run his team. Today there are owners who used analytics to make their money, John Henry being perhaps the best example. I think that's the big difference. They don't want a general manager who just tells them what; they want somebody who also tells them why, and it's a lot easier to do that with objective analysis.

JAMIE MCCOURT: I think that analytics are being redefined. People were already collecting statistics, but Moneyball broadcast sabermetrics to an audience that didn’t realize the importance of a lot of them. I look at analytics as being more than just statistics, though. Stats can be a tipping point, but they’re like carrots in a carrot stew. They’re just one ingredient.

BILL JAMES: If you ever talked to Tom Seaver. . .nobody is more analytical than Seaver. He breaks everything down very systematically, very scientifically. Branch Rickey was certainly analytical, but Branch Rickey was a genius. Genius is not contagious. What is different now is that we have analytical methods, based on research, which can be used by anyone who takes the time to learn the methods. You can't really study Branch Rickey and acquire Branch Rickey's knowledge. But you can study sabermetrics and pick up a hundred or 200 ways to analyze different questions.

Question #2: Has the internet had more impact on baseball insiders, or on fans?

ROB NEYER: I'm actually a little discouraged in how little fans have changed. If you ask a cross section of fans to vote who was better, Jim Palmer or Nolan Ryan, probably 85 percent would say Ryan. Maybe that means I haven't done my job very well over the last 11 years. I think that a lot of what fans pay attention to is more related to fantasy baseball than real baseball. There was fantasy baseball before the Web, but it's obviously a lot easier now. So I think insiders have been impacted more, at least in the positive sense. One thing that's happened is that the flow of information has been enhanced. Twenty years ago, Bill James would correspond with people like Craig Wright and John Dewan via the United States Postal Service. Which worked fine, but it was of course slow. Now everybody can share their ideas at the speed of light.

JAMIE MCCOURT: This is pretty subjective, because I’ve never really thought about it before, but I think fans have been impacted quite a bit. Not only do they have a lot more access to metrics, they also have more real time access to information. I don’t know that I can really make a comparison, but the Dodgers front office is very aware of the information and analytics that are available.

BILL JAMES: The internet is part of the air we breathe. It's like asking whether the air is more important to one species than to another.

A few quotes from the presentations and panel discussions:

BILL JAMES ON PROPRIETARY RESEARCH:

"There’s a real limit to how much good work you can do in a closet. One thing that changed when I started working for the Red Sox is that I’d talk to Theo and John Henry, but couldn’t run out and talk to other people as I always had. Science is conversation. Knowledge is community property. When you cut yourself off from that, you lose something. If you respect (confidentiality) too much, it’s like your thumbs have been cut off. You can’t go anywhere."

JAMES ON SIGNING PLAYERS TO LONG-TERM CONTRACTS:

"Long-term decision making is antithetical to human nature. If you go out on a date with a girl and she has bad breath, or he has bad breath, you don’t look at it as a small sample size. You move along. If you go to a restaurant and your food is bad, you don't go back four or five times to get more data. If a player comes up from the minors and struggles, people want to move on. That's just natural. I always see it as being my role to argue for the longer-term view, maybe suggest some mouthwash."

JAMES ON SABERMETRIC ANALYSIS:

“People who don’t understand what we do think it all has to do with details. But it’s not about what a left-handed hitter hits against a certain team under a full moon. The opposite is true. What analytics are is stepping back and looking at the bigger picture.”

J.P. RICCIARDI ON THE DRAFT AND SIGNING INTERNATIONAL PLAYERS:

“When we draft, we do it for need and cost effectiveness, and to help our team. We don’t care if Baseball America doesn’t rate our draft highly. That’s not our goal. We know which players we like.”

“I wish Major League Baseball would go to an international draft so we could compete with teams like New York and Boston. That way you could draft for talent rather than an ability to sign them.”

RICCIARDI ON STATISTICAL ANALYSIS AND PLAYER ACQUISITIONS:

“It’s important to value statistics, but you also need to value the information gathering of your scouts. For instance, is a player an American League East kind of guy? It takes a mentally tough player not to crumble when he walks into a place like Yankee Stadium.”

“We had every statistical breakdown possible when we signed Kerry Ligtenberg. We did our due diligence, but he stunk anyway. Kerry is a great guy, but he didn’t do the job for us.”

“With Scott Schoeneweis, we did every possible breakdown and saw him as a situational guy; more of a left-handed specialist. We told Scott Boras that; that we weren’t looking at him as a starter. We were able to sign him, and he was very effective for us.”

“Frank Catalanotto had four great years for us. His on-base-percentage is a lot better than most people realize. He was a gift that kept giving, but ultimately we weren’t able to re-sign him.”

“I’m glad I don’t run the Giants. From a baseball standpoint I think (Barry Bonds) is probably a good signing. From an ethical standpoint, I’ll pass.”

“Sometimes you have to take a step back and not talk yourself out of someone by looking at too much information. You need to say, ‘This guy is a pretty good player.’”

“Sandy Alderson is the guy I’d tip my hat to. He was like Socrates. He was always asking why.”

[coloradojack]

i loved that post Cambridge....i especially enjoyed JP Ricciardi's thoughts on the subject, thank you...

[fenwayfrank34]

That was an interesting read. Thanks Cambridge.