I guess what I should have said is that he significantly out performed his salaries.
Brantley $5.349M per WAR
Yuli $4.260M per WAR
Altuve $3.850M per WAR
Springer $2.162M per WAR
Bregman $1.328M per WAR
Correa $0.946M per WAR
Tucker $0.143M per WAR
By the way, all of these are very reasonable results. The front office had no bad contracts among these.
On that I think we can all agree…
Dana Brown beefs up the scouting side bringing in someone he previously worked with in Toronto…
I’m not sure War is a good way to assess value of contracts because it rules out two important areas that show not all players have the same opportunity.
1 Rookie Contracts and Arbitration contracts are heavily ruled and influenced by the MLBPA contract. Therefore they are likely to always team friendly and look like the players are under paid.
A quick google search said the value of a WAR in the free agent market on 2021 was around 7 to 8 million. By that standard all of those players outperformed their contract because the Astros typically don’t do the 10 year free agent deals other teams do.
Interesting quote in an article on Bove from 2017 at The Athletic $$ about analytics changing a scouts work:
“Unfortunately, it has,” he replied. “It’s a battle, but they do have a place. I just get a little concerned when you start using analytics on high school players. It’s just so hard to compare apples and apples (at that level). But we’re fortunate. Joe Sheehan, who’s our analytical guy, is very flexible.”
He goes on to talk about Bo Bichette as an example of a high school kid he had to advocate to draft because his analytics weren’t very good as a HS kid.
One of the paragraphs on Bichette implies the analytics at issue were the more general ones like “high school hitters are risky,” where I think the most important ones to the present-day Astros are their bat speed and swing path and swing decision metrics that are basically just quantified versions of what scouts have evaluated forever.
I think the opportunity for collaboration between old school and new school is a lot greater nowadays as things have converged. Hopefully that’s how it goes in Houston.
This. I think “analytics” equates for some to (outcome-based) “stats” whereas we are now able to gather data on things like spin rate, bat speed and several dozen others that together can paint a clearer (if not more accurate) picture of a player’s “developability”.
I think this is also a big part of why Luhnow & co. thought they could get by with such a small scouting department. The more they can automate the collection of data teams traditionally relied on scouts for, the less they needed the actual scouts themselves. Or so the thinking went. Never mind that scouts are more than mindless data collectors. Same story in so many industries where managers think they can cut out the human beings who keep their businesses running. Hubris.
Not to mention analytics doesn’t shed any light on a kid’s makeup.
Does he have an ugly girlfriend?
Right. Scouts provide information that cannot be measured and increasingly precise measurement systems can quantify some of the reality behind that informed judgment. If the two work together, there is a good chance of improving outcomes over either alone. Endless arguments over which is best are not productive.
Note: my comment is NOT in reference to this “mostly peaceful” discussion.
The once-heretical thence-provocative now-agreed consens-i is that that is BS and everything can be measured.
The consensus exists only in your feeble mind.
You are an idiot. You would make a lot of folks happy if you would go away.
Sure thing.
Ignore is our friend.
I am.
Create a poll and see the results.
Even if everything could be measured, it doesn’t mean that it always needs to be. As was mentioned, a lot of the “analytics” is simply identifying the same things scouts have identified for decades. “The numbers say this guy’s bat speed is low”. Yeah, that’s not a revelation, we could see that by watching him swing the bat.
There is this myth, perpetuated by those who don’t have a lot of evaluation experience, that scouting and analytics are in conflict. They’re not. Number can sometimes help alleviate bias, and perhaps even be persuasive to some that are skeptical of the observation, but scouting can identify some intangibles like attitude. It’s not dichotomous, one way or the other. Relying on one and ignoring the other, either way, is not the most effective. The Astros have built a very good system using both.
I’ve been in organizations that were obsessive about quantifying everything. Everything needed a “metric”. To some extent, I understood it. I have lived through the pre Walter Deming days of product going together and working because a machinist knew to tweak the part and the technician knew to set the machine just so and nobody measured anything beyond the part drawing itself. However, my particular niche, new product design and development, is a process that can only be institutionalized and measured to a limited degree.
I remember an argument with a denizen of “Mahogany Row” about why we couldn’t automate or at least train new engineers to invent stuff at an ever increasing rate. I asked if I should call him at 3:00 AM when I was awake and sketching out the mechanism that solved the problem that had been churning in my head for weeks or more. That way, he could record all the “metrics” in real time.
I could be a problematic employee.