Exclusive Orioles Hangout Interview: One on One with Mike Elias

[DrungoHazewood]

8 hours ago, Luke-OH said:

Great stuff Tony, lots of great information and actually something that I (as someone who has listened to pretty much all of Sig and Mike's interviews and follows the use of analytics in MiLB, MLB and the draft very closely) had never heard anything about before. I think it's actually completely new to the public sphere, which is hard to get out of a savvy guy like Elias.

That is the info that Sig has a projection model for each level of minor league baseball and that those projections are used to inform decisions on prospect promotions. Major League Equivalency projections are pretty commonplace and there are even a few public sphere ones (steamer, ZIPs, PECOTA, etc), but to my knowledge this is the first I've heard of a AAA equivalency, AA equivalency, etc. It makes a lot of sense, but I don't think I've ever heard of those existing before.  

The foundations for that type of modeling were laid 30+ years ago:

"1. Minor-league batting statistics will predict major league batting performance with essentially the same reliability as previous major-league statistics." 

- Bill James, Breaking the Wand from the 1988 Baseball Abstract

[Tx Oriole]

1 hour ago, baltfan said:

Good interview.  Interesting how it wasn’t a surprise to him that people were talking about Brady maybe having been let go.  I hope that Brady can help and not interfere like he is saying.  I believe Brady’s intentions have always been good. 

Hope Brady is gone.

[clapdiddy]

Great questions, Tony!  Thanks for posting this.

[Luke-OH]

21 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

The foundations for that type of modeling were laid 30+ years ago:

"1. Minor-league batting statistics will predict major league batting performance with essentially the same reliability as previous major-league statistics." 

- Bill James, Breaking the Wand from the 1988 Baseball Abstract

That’s not what I was talking about, Im completely aware of that. I’m talking about predicting AA performance using A+, which is obviously similar methodology, but I’d never heard of anyone doing it.

edit: my response comes off as annoyed, but that’s not my intent, just wanted to clarify.

[DrungoHazewood]

7 minutes ago, Luke-OH said:

That’s not what I was talking about, Im completely aware of that. I’m talking about predicting AA performance using A+, which is obviously similar methodology, but I’d never heard of anyone doing it.

I don't know that I'd heard of that, either.  And I guess there's some value, but there's not much difference between putting everyone on a common MLB baseline, and putting them on a AAA, AA, etc baseline.

Although... it might be interesting to see the projected results for older players at lower levels.  And how they incorporate repeating levels.  We'll often see a journeyman org guy hit .300 with 27 homers at AA at the age of 28.  I'd be interested to see what the modeling spits out for cases like that, and how much that gets deflated translating to the major league level.

[interloper]

Interesting stuff. For Brady's sake I sort of hope he's added back onto the website and given some kind of title. Otherwise, well, that's still pretty weird to have him in a hiring capacity and not listed anywhere. 

Other than that, I love everything I hear. It's clear they still have a lot of work to do. Building the Latin American market "from scratch", etc. 

[Luke-OH]

9 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

I don't know that I'd heard of that, either.  And I guess there's some value, but there's not much difference between putting everyone on a common MLB baseline, and putting them on a AAA, AA, etc baseline.

Although... it might be interesting to see the projected results for older players at lower levels.  And how they incorporate repeating levels.  We'll often see a journeyman org guy hit .300 with 27 homers at AA at the age of 28.  I'd be interested to see what the modeling spits out for cases like that, and how much that gets deflated translating to the major league level.

Elias said pretty much that Sig has a method for projecting how a player promoted to the next minor league level is going to perform and that tells them a lot about when a player is ready for the next level. So they are even running promotion decisions through a model, which kinda makes sense if you are trying to make data based decisions.

[Frobby]

7 minutes ago, Luke-OH said:

Elias said pretty much that Sig has a method for projecting how a player promoted to the next minor league level is going to perform and that tells them a lot about when a player is ready for the next level. So they are even running promotion decisions through a model, which kinda makes sense if you are trying to make data based decisions.

And it could be that certain stats are more predictive of success at a particular level than they are at a different level.    E.g, walk rate might tell you more about the jump from low A to A+ then it tells you about the jump from A+ to AA.   (I’m making up that particular example; I have no idea if that’s true.)

[Tony-OH]

9 hours ago, Philip said:

I think it was revealing. When I probably hated most about Dan was that he was very condescending, And would talk a long time without saying anything important. If Mike is more upfront, that’s refreshing.

Agreed. Besides getting into specifics of how they use the data, which I did not expect him to reveal, he really was very upfront. We had some nice conversations before and afterwards that was not recorded as well. He's a hard guy not to be impressed by.

[Tony-OH]

9 hours ago, Sessh said:

Good interview, I like him. I especially like how he talks about AAA as though it's an actual level of development as opposed to promoting people from Bowie. I would have liked to hear his opinions on Manfred's proposed changes to the game next year, though.

He said he's willing to come and do an interview or come and do a video segment with me anytime in the future, so maybe be we'll shoot for something after the draft and then at the end of the season.

[Tony-OH]

2 hours ago, baltfan said:

Good interview.  Interesting how it wasn’t a surprise to him that people were talking about Brady maybe having been let go.  I hope that Brady can help and not interfere like he is saying.  I believe Brady’s intentions have always been good. 

I get the feeling that despite his bust schedule, not a loot gets by him. While I think he realizes being the defacto Scouting Director and Farm Director will need to be rectified in the future, he seems to have a very good ability to multi-task. 

[Frobby]

1 minute ago, Tony-OH said:

He said he's willing to come and do an interview or come and do a video segment with me anytime in the future, so maybe be we'll shoot for something after the draft and then at the end of the season.

After the draft would be awesome.   I’m really interested to see what his draft approach will be like, after the first round.   

[Tony-OH]

1 hour ago, Frobby said:

Terrific interview.    Obviously, the questions were at a level of sophistication that you don’t hear from the mainstream media, and I think Elias enjoyed that and was cooperative in providing as much information as he could without giving away state secrets.    My sense is that he’s made a lot of progress instilling his philosophies and methods into the organization, but we’ll see a lot more of it in Year 2 once he’s had a chance to recruit staff at the time of year when that’s traditionally done and is able to step back from doing triage.    

Yeah, my feeling is that he's using this year to know his current organization inside out, install his and Sig's philosophies and get his system into place. I think you will see some good hires at the end of next season so he can truly build up the team around him. The Sig and Koby Perez hires were just the start and as he said, he had to "promote" Perez to get him away from the Indians. I think Perez will be a guy I'll try to get an interview from next.

[Tony-OH]

1 hour ago, Obando said:

Great interview Tony!  Thanks for doing this and sharing it with us.  You asked some great questions, and it was very refreshing and informative to hear Elias’ detailed answers.  Elias & Sig are the main reasons why I have so much confidence that this rebuilding process will be successful.  They know what needs to be done because they have done this before, so as long as John & Lou stay out of their way and provide them with the resources they need, I think we as fans are going to be very pleased with the end result, even though it may take 3-5 years.

Thanks. Patience is certainly going to need to be part of the equation by ownership and the fans. I do believe interviews like this will hopefully help educate more fans on the quality of people (As well as philosophies/systems) now making the decisions and will hopefully allow them to have more patience during this rebuild time.

[Tony-OH]

1 hour ago, DrungoHazewood said:

The foundations for that type of modeling were laid 30+ years ago:

"1. Minor-league batting statistics will predict major league batting performance with essentially the same reliability as previous major-league statistics." 

- Bill James, Breaking the Wand from the 1988 Baseball Abstract

It may have been the foundation, but I can tell you that statistics are not the only evaluation tool. As he stated, the use of trackman data is a huge part of the collected data, and might end up a much clearer indicator of future success when it's all evaluated. I'd love to have more insight on how they are doing this, but it's part of their "secret sauce" at the moment.