Interesting stuff going on in Seattle

[TakebackOPACY]

Nov. 15: Mariners Plan Department Devoted to Statistical Analysis

Dec 12: Mariners Ditching Advance Scouts, Transferring Duties to Stats Department

Jan 4: A spiral of links all seem to be pointing to this article as the source that the Mariners have hired Tom Tango as a consultant. I'm not paying for it (I've boycotted credit cards to the extent that I can), but the Tom Tango wikipedia page says he's now a Mariners consultant. This USSMariner blog says he is. This Baseball Musings post, which is where I found all this material, says he is as well.

[NewMarketSean]

Somewhere, Rshack is blowing a gasket.

[Mad Mark]

It will be interesting to see where this all leads. The Mariners have no place to go but up.

[SteveA]

Interesting....surprised to see they are ditching advanced scouts, though. Seems like they provide a function that the stats office would not, and that the two approaches could complement each other. Your next opposing starter seems to be favoring his pushoff foot and that's causing his wildnes sin his last two starts....an advance scout can observe and tell you that. To a stats guy, the wildness the last two starts is just a meaningless piece of info due to small sample size and the guy should regress to the mean.

[RShack]

Somewhere, Rshack is blowing a gasket.

Huh? Why? I think stats can be highly useful. I don't know why anybody would think otherwise.

I simply object to some of the dumb things people do with them around here.

I think the part about "ditching the advance scouts" is dumb, as would be reducing other elements of direct human evaluation, but the other parts make perfect sense.

[Migrant Redbird]

... I think the part about "ditching the advance scouts" is dumb, as would be reducing other elements of direct human evaluation, but the other parts make perfect sense.

Noticing the Bill James quote in your sig, I think it was he who said that statistics only tell you about 5 percent of the story concerning a player, with expert observation (scouts) providing the other 95 percent.

Bill's percentages are probably off, but I think he's correct in principle.

[TyCobb]

Noticing the Bill James quote in your sig, I think it was he who said that statistics only tell you about 5 percent of the story concerning a player, with expert observation (scouts) providing the other 95 percent.

Bill's percentages are probably off, but I think he's correct in principle.

I always consider Stats to be the cliff notes to a Baseball Players Career.