SEATTLE — OK, it’s confession time.
I’m something of a baseball nerd.
The past couple decades, Major League Baseball has undergone something I would call the slide-rule revolution, if anyone actually knew what a slide rule was. Advanced statistics and analytics have flooded into baseball, leading to the rise of the math-major class in the baseball world, complete with pocket protectors and engineering paper.
I’ve been riding that advanced statistics bandwagon ever since picking up my first copy of the Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract in the late 1980s. Though in many ways the statistical revolution has since passed me by — the formulas, equations and terminology have far surpassed by mathematical comprehension — I still believe in the basic tenets unearthed by statistical analysis, such as the importance of on-base percentage.
Therefore, at Monday’s press conference at Safeco Field when the Seattle Mariners unveiled Scott Servais as their new manager, I felt compelled to ask Servais his take on the advanced stats movement. Is he a believer in the new math, or does he remain loyal to the old-school scouting methods that seemed to be favored by his predecessor, Lloyd McClendon?
“I think it’s very important,” Servais replied. “That’s the way the game is going. I think if you try to fight it you’re going to end up losing. Why not? It’s information, you have to use it and put it in play. I’m not the guy who comes up with the formulas and spits out the numbers, I’m smart enough to know what I don’t know. But what I do know is when somebody’s showing me we have a deficiency in a certain area, my job is, ‘How are we going to fix it? How do we attack that deficiency? How are we going to get it better?’”
Hallelujah!
Now, I don’t subscribe to the Pythagorean notion that, “Number is all.” I don’t believe baseball can be crunched down to smaller and smaller data points, such that all aspects of the game can be completely understood by staring at a computer screen, rather than the field. Indeed, during my time as a player in my youth I was a part of teams I believe underachieved based on their talent levels or numbers, largely because to team chemistry issues. The human element, which is not completely rational the way numbers are, is still something managers must navigate.
But the numbers matter, too. I followed up that first question to Servais by asking him which advanced statistic he found most useful. His answer produced an anecdote that referenced a different sport:
“I look at myself as a football coach in a baseball uniform,” Servais said. “I used that line a little bit in the interviews and I got some weird looks when I said it. What I meant by that is I think football coaches are the most prepared and detailed of any of the coaches because they practice so much. They have to be.
“In football the game is won at the line of scrimmage,” Servais continued with the analogy. “Where is the line of scrimmage in baseball? For me the line of scrimmage in baseball is the strike zone. You have to control the strike zone, whether you’re on the mound or in the batter’s box. Controlling the zone, swinging at good pitches, getting deep into counts, walking maybe a little bit more. On the flip side of controlling the strike zone, keeping the pitch count down, getting deep into games, having a chance to win games as a starting pitcher. That’s where it happens, in the strike zone. Looking a the numbers, is there any particular number? Walks-to-strikeouts. Pitching side, hitting side, that’s where the game is won, in my opinion.”
With that answer Servais touched upon one of the Mariners biggest problems the past two seasons under McClendon, particularly on the offensive side. According to FanGraphs.com, the past two seasons Seattle was in the bottom 30 percent in the majors in terms of both walk percentage and strikeout percentage. The Mariners drew walks in 7.2 percent of their plate appearances, which ranked 22nd out of 30 teams, and they struck out in 21.6 percent of their plate appearances, which ranked 24th.
Time for the Mariners to beef up on that baseball line of scrimmage.
It’s not enough for just the manager to make use of advanced statistics, it needs to be an organizational thing. But the Mariners appear to be in good shape there. New general manager Jerry Dipoto is an advocate of analytics, having joined SABR (the Society for American Baseball Research, which is the organization that gave rise to the term sabermetrics) while he was still an active player. And Dipoto and Servais worked hand-in-hand in the past when Dipoto was the general manager of the Los Angeles Angels and Servais was one of his assistant GMs. Dipoto even talked about how he and Servais have long discussions about the concept of the strike zone being baseball’s line of scrimmage.
“Even today after 20 years of analytics being a critical part of what happens in the game, we talk about it like it’s the new frontier that we can’t possibly cross over that,” Dipoto said. “If there are 30 organizations, there are 30 organizations that are in tune with the analytics with the game, and there’s 30 organizations that are smart in how they carve up the numbers. Some do it better than others, clearly.”
Perhaps Seattle now has the personnel in place to be one of those better teams.
I wasn’t a particularly good player when I played, but I had a secret weapon: my height. Being short allowed me to draw large numbers of walks and I was constantly on base. My coaches, seeing I couldn’t hit worth a squat, often left me on the pine. Because of my immersion into the analytics world I sulkily considered myself ahead of my time.
So I was pleased by Servais’ answer when asked about what was missing from the Mariners’ current team:
“We need to do a better job of getting on base,” Servais replied. “That’s the one thing we have to get better. We have to create more opportunities to score runs.”
It shows Servais is paying attention to the numbers, and that can only be a good thing for the Mariners.
Check out Nick Patterson’s Seattle Sidelines blog at http://www.heraldnet.com/seattlesidelines, and follow him on Twitter at @NickHPatterson.
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