The sight of old-time baseball men John Schuerholz, John Hart and Bobby Cox sitting together and talking about "The Braves Way" was enough to send some fans of the team into a rage. Was it going to be the same old thing when the Braves pick their new GM and (maybe) manager?
The idea that Braves assistant GM John "Coppy" Coppolella, viewed as the next baseball wunderkind, might replace Frank Wren is enough for many of those same fans to get excited. Is the "Braves Way" going to be something different after all?
It's Old School vs. New School, Jocks vs. Geeks, Gut Feel vs. Nothing but Numbers. But it doesn't really have to be that way for the Braves. In fact, it's really not that way in baseball anymore, not in the post-Moneyball era.
Nate Silver broke down the new baseball dynamic in his 2012 book, "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don't." Silver created a successful baseball projection system (PECOTA) before he gained fame as a political forecaster who puts the pundit class to shame and drives reactionaries crazy(ier).
To begin with, Silver writes that it was a “slipshod” reading of Moneyball in the first place to characterize it as the depiction of a war between scouts and statheads. To be sure, there was animosity between the groups—Silver recounts how he went to the Winter Meetings in 2003, the year Moneyball was published, and discovered that the “baseball lifers” and the “nerds” hardly interacted and each considered the other group “arrogant and closed-minded.”
Silver figures most of that had to do with a perception among the baseball lifers that scouting budgets were being cut and the geeks, who worked on the cheap, were a threat to their jobs. But he says the two sides have since reached a truce of sorts:
"It's now been a decade since the publication of Moneyball, however, and these brushfires have long since burned themselves out. The success of the Red Sox, who won their first World Series title in eighty-six years in 2004 with a fusion approach that emphasized both statistics and scouting, may have been a key factor in the détente. Organizations that would have been classified as "scouting" organizations in 2003, like the St. Louis Cardinals, have since adopted a more analytic approach and are now among the most innovative in the sport. "Stathead" teams like the Oakland A's have expanded rather than contracted their scouting budgets."
Silver writes that statheads eventually realized they can have their own biases, chief among them the tendency "to assume that if something cannot be easily quantified, it does not matter." That led them to dismiss the value of defense for years, but when measures for it improved eventually even Moneyball protagonist Billy Beane had to change his view when the A's shoddy defense held them back.
Also, the statheads realized that scouts have a lot to offer, especially when it comes to projecting the major-league potential of prospects. Silver writes that it’s not so hard to predict what a major leaguer will do from one year to the next, and there are statistical systems that do a pretty good job of projecting a big leaguer's production over the long term. Where it gets tricky is figuring out which minor leaguers will become good big leaguers.
According to Silver, the players on the scouts' lists of top 10o prospects from 2006 to 2011 ended up generating 630 big-league wins (as measured by WARP) while PECOTA produced 546. The scouts were about 15 percent better at those projections than a purely statistical model. That's a significant edge.
When evaluating prospects scouts use a “hybrid” approach that includes numbers, eyeballs, radar guns, and stopwatches. Writes Silver:
"This type of information gets one step closer to the root causes of what we are trying to predict. In the minors, a pitcher with a weak fastball can rack up a lot of strikeouts just by finding the strike zone and mixing up his pitches; most of the hitters he is facing aren't much good, so he might as well challenge them. In the major leagues, where the batters are capable of hitting even a ninety-eight-miles-per-hour fastball out of the park, the odds are against the soft-tosser. PECOTA will be fooled by these false positives while a good scout will not be. Conversely, a scout may be able to identify player who have major-league talent but who have yet to harness it."
The post-Moneyball era in baseball is a mixture of approaches, so it shouldn't be surprising that "Coppy" has become a top baseball man in spite of not having much of a baseball background. That he did so with the Braves should be encouraging to their statistically-inclined fans. That means that the Old School vs. New School baseball battle isn't raging in the Braves' baseball operations and they could become the next club to successfully blend the two schools into a championship cocktail.
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