THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Huntington definitely knows what UZR is.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he said “Ultimate Zone Rating” and it was just shortened to “Zone Rating” by the author during transcription. 

The funny thing is that Huntington isn’t even a stats guy - he was the scouting half of the Assistant GM tandem (with Antonetti) for several years before moving into a lesser role last year.  But his background is all traditional, old school analysis.

I’ve done some minor work for CLE and have a minor relationship with one of their guys. And of course Keith Woolner works for them, whom I know a little.  I don’t know anything about Huntington.  The The Pirates’ brass can only go up as far as competence goes, though.  All it would take for a poorly-run team to rewrite its legacy would be for a “sabermetric” GM to come aboard, along with a manager who was smart enough to realize that he knew squat about some (lots of)things, and/or a GM who was willing to tell a manager what to do, and a manager who was willing to listen (and act).

And if anyone wants to hire me again, they are going to have to pay through the nose.  I would not recommend it (to them) though, as there are lots of other good sabers willing to work for A LOT LESS than I would.  Again, ANY team has to be less than completely smart NOT to have a small (or large) team of sabers working for them, considering the amount of money they could pay them and the amount of money they would “save in cost/gain in revenue”.

He might have meant all of the different Zone Ratings such as RZR, UZR, ZR, maybe a couple more.

Anyway this should be very exciting for Pittsburgh fans. Huntington obviously has a good idea of how to evaluate performance, and his scouting background won’t lead him to undervalue that part of the process.

Was nice to see wOBA mentioned, but I thought the quote was quite odd overall. Why look at OPS if you are aware of better estimates of hitters’ skills? Why look at WHIP if you know about pitchers’ walk rates and batted ball tendencies? And so on…

Word out of the Cleveland papers was that the Pirates offered the GM gig to Chris Antonetti, the Sabermetric half of the two assistant GMs in Cleveland (Huntington being the other), but Antonetti turned them down.