Projecting the 2012 Cubs: Right Field

http://www.chicagonow.com/cubs-den/2012/03/jeff-samardzijas-switch-to-starter-shows-some-old-fashioned-outside-the-box-thinking/

My comment…

John, thanks for the link back to Obstructed View. Great work here.

FWIW, I don’t think any statistical analyst would say that stats answer the entire question. I’ve been reading them for many years now and for a long time they’ve said it’s half the picture. As tangotiger likes to point out, look at stats and scouting as different lenses. To get the best picture of a player you combine the two. The larger the sample size the less valuable the scouting is and vice versa.

I wouldn’t really call this decision outside the box thinking. It’s something organizations have done for years including Jim Hendry. There’s also no doubt that those you spoke to are right in that dramatic improvement happens, but I’d ask those people how often they’ve been right about which players they thought improved? We hear it every year. Scout A talks about changes to someone’s game and then we see the same player. Every once in awhile there is a change, but most of the time the scout was simply wrong.

This doesn’t mean you ignore scouting. You can’t. It’s as valuable as stats, but the information is only valuable when it’s detailed information. A scout saying “I think this guy has turned a corner” isn’t detailed information. It’s an opinion and it deserves some weight, but why has he turned a corner? Objective analysis includes some subjective opinions, but as few of them as possible. What is it about Samardzija that has improved? Is his fastball a mph faster and showing some movement? Is his slider biting more? Do the batters appear to be more confused by what he’s throwing? There are many other questions of course, but it’s that detailed information that is added to the mountain of statistical information to create one picture of the player.

If you combine Scout A’s opinion about this you may as well include Statistician A’s opinion about it too and then you end up with an old-school front office making decisions based entirely on opinion rather than objective analysis.

@ Rice Cube:
I don’t think there’s that much to it, RC. These scouts are supposedly good at their job, but like GW has said before, the different in scouting talent is probably pretty small. It’s not like McLeod is doing something any of the others aren’t. If he was and it was successful every other organization would do it. The scouts the Cubs are basing this decision on are no different when it comes to talent than the ones they’ve had before. They’re reaching their decision in the same way. McLeod is a scouting director. i don’t want him to be influenced by stats. He should turn in the scouting data to the GM and the stats department should turn their data in. Then the GM makes a decision. in this case, I think it’s really simple: the Cubs pitching sucks and F7 had a good ERA last year and throws hard. I’d be surprised if there’s anything to it more than that. This is an example of the organization letting Sveum do what he wants or it’s an example of the front office ignoring statistical data in favor of scouting.

Neither decisions are necessarily bad. Sometimes it may be that you’re better off weighing the stats significantly lower than other times. Maybe they think this is one of them. I have no idea, but I think people are trying to look too much into this decision to make sense of it in terms of the new, progressive front office. This same front office did stupid things in Boston and San Diego and they’re going to do stupid things in Chicago. Maybe this is one of them. Maybe it’s brilliant, but it will be brilliant in the same way it was brilliant that the Cubs managed to get 2 WAR from Glendon Rusch after he was the worst pitcher in baseball the year before.

I’ve said before that I trust this front office will make more good decisions than bad decisions and I still believe that, but they’re going to make a lot of bad decisions. They’ll make the same stupid decisions that Hendry made. They’ll make Hendry look like a genius at times. They’ll make Hendry look retarded other times. In the end the hope is that he is better than Hendry and better than the others in the NL Central.

Anyone else getting a virus message when they try to access The Book Blog (I wouldn’t try it if you have Windows): http://www.sophos.com/en-us/threat-center/threat-analyses/viruses-and-spyware/Mal~Badsrc-M.aspx

I emailed Tango, but I’m pretty sure his site has been hacked. I was just wondering if anyone else had visited there over the last hour and had that problem.