MESA, Ariz. — Since the beginning of the advanced-analytics movement in baseball, there has been an ongoing debate about how much credence can be given to sabermetrics and similar new data.
If there is one thing baseball executives can agree on today, it's this: Advanced metrics can no longer be ignored.
Three prominent general managers made that much very clear Friday at the first Society of American Baseball Research Analytics Conference, stressing that no club today can operate efficiently without using advanced analysis to some degree, and that means much more than statistics.
"You want to be as informed and as educated as you can in any decision that you're making," Los Angeles Angels GM Jerry Dipoto said. "If you're not analyzing all the information available to you, you're probably not making a good decision."
Milwaukee Brewers GM Doug Melvin and Cleveland Indians GM Chris Antonetti, speaking alongside Dipoto at the event, echoed similar sentiments that new data must be acknowledged. That extends to medicine, player development, psychology and more.
Where the GMs and their organizations differ, though, is just how much they use advanced analytics to help make baseball decisions.
Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane is typically credited with sparking the rise of advanced analytics by taking an all-in approach, particularly to statistics. Some teams have followed that model.
"We use analytics to inform our decision-making process at all levels of our operation," Antonetti said. "Whether that's player personnel moves or major league team decision-making, that's a factor in all our decisions. Our goal is to try to make the most informed decisions we can."
Other teams were more resistant to unconventional analysis, which SABR has been promoting since its inception 40 years ago. Arizona Diamondbacks president and CEO Derrick Hall noted Thursday night that his organization at one point mostly ignored advanced metrics before jumping in maybe a little too deep. They've now found a solid middle ground, he said, with GM Kevin Towers looking to the numbers more than most think.
Melvin, who comes from a more traditional background of scouting and player development, has taken a similar tack when it comes to statistics. He joked last season that Milwaukee's version of "Moneyball," the term given to Beane's statistical approach in Oakland by Michael Lewis' book of the same title, is to ask owner Mark Attanasio how much money the team has and go play ball. While he jokes and has expressed skepticism in certain analyses, Melvin knows advanced data must be utilized.
"When it comes to metrics, the toughest job right now is to filter through all the noise of the numbers," Melvin said Friday. "I keep asking my people and challenging them, 'What's the five or six most important (statistics) that can help us to mesh with the five tools scouts bring to the table?'
"Every day, there seems to be something new that's coming aboard, whether it's FIP (fielding-independent pitching) or batting average on balls in play."
There's clearly a disparity in how much advanced statistics are valued by GMs such as Melvin and Dipoto, who began his front-office career in Boston under known stats advocate Theo Epstein. Executives can agree, though, that no stats by themselves tell the whole story.
Dipoto said that, for him, player makeup might be the single most important nonperformance element in evaluating players, possibly even outweighing the physical tools scouts evaluate. Personal situations and how a player handles them can have a great effect on how a player performs.
"There's so much going on," Dipoto said. "We all have something going on in our own lives every day. Some days it's easier to do your job than the others. Players are no different."
Melvin offered an example — from his days with the Baltimore Orioles — of a 17-year-old catcher with enormous leadership potential drafted and assigned to a minor league club on the East Coast only to learn upon his arrival there that his parents back in Utah were getting divorced. His performance and leadership suffered.
Such scenarios have led to advanced personal research, another nonstatistical metric widely utilized today.
"In today's day and age, particularly with advancement of social media, we have so many different outlets to essentially find out what we need to find out about a player," Dipoto said. "There's no one way to measure it in a metric, but it becomes maybe the most important analysis that you'll go through or perform in a given year."
Added Melvin: "We always used to think, 'You've got to be tough to play this game,' but the human element is a huge part."
There's still progress to be made in evaluating players' makeup and how they might fit with an organization — Antonetti offered troubled outfielder Milton Bradley as an example — and the same can be said of medical analysis.
Strides are also being made in analyzing defense, with various analytics attempting to calculate range and similar attributes, but Melvin noted that differing conditions can make that difficult.
It's clear that not all organizations will be on the same page any time soon when it comes to advanced analytics, but their prevalence in the game today is indisputable.
Athletics right-hander Brandon McCarthy spoke at the event Thursday to talk about the way he benefits from sabermetrics and cited Pitch f/x, a pitch-tracking software that shows the exact trajectory of the ball from the mound to the plate. It's one of the many tools available today that can add a layer of depth and specificity to the visual information collected by scouts and executives, with more becoming available all the time.
And that begs the question: With the movement continuing to grow, what's next in sabermetrics?
"I think where the future of analytics could be is taking all those different data sources and combining them into a comprehensive predictive model," Antonetti said. "A lot of attention is focused on statistics and what guys have done ... but I think the ability to take all the information streams and combine it in a comprehensive model that leads to a better prediction of what a player may do in the future is where I think there's future opportunity to grow analytics."
