THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Mike Silva Chronicles - Part 10: Future

Where do you see advanced metrics in 10 years? Fad? Major part of a front office operation? Replace traditional scouting?

Fad?  You haven’t seen anything yet.  Wait until PITCHf/x, FIELDf/x, and HITf/x take shape.  You will wish and pray to get back to the simpler times of 2000s.  The 2010s will bring an avalanche of data.  It will absolutely be a major part of the front office.  The best-case scenario is that you have all these f/x systems set up at colleges and high schools.  Instead of one scout seeing one game of some prospect in one town, while missing a game on another town, you will have every single pitch charted, every swing charted, and every single fielder charted.  The question is to try to identify all of the contributions of each player to each pitch and each play.  Having a summary opinion without evidence is bullsh!t.  Scouts have summary opinion on limited amount of data (say they see 5% of someone’s games in college).  That’s valuable.  Now, imagine having a summary opinion based on 100% of the data?

And no, it will never replace traditional scouting, because as I said, you will always need two lenses to your glasses.  It will certainly make him more efficient.  Instead of seeing 5% of each player’s games, maybe he will see 30% of the games that the f/x system is high on, and only 2% for the less-than-stellar players.  It’s another tool they can add, in addition to their radar gun.

If the goal of this industry is not to advance it monetarily or its role in MLB, then why have it? What’s the point? It seems like a very time consuming hobby with little reward.

The hobby itself is its own reward.  You may as well ask the millions of bloggers why they blog.  Those things also consume time.  Why do you go watch a movie?  Why do you have dinner with friends?  In those cases, you actually pay with money to get your reward.  In this case, the payment is time.  And, we are more than happy to give it, especially if others also give their time.  We all benefit.

Making money and having a role in MLB is a byproduct.  I wrote The Book, and I spent several hundred hours on it, if not 1000 hours.  And I made less than minimum wage.  Based on your line of thinking, I’m crazy and stupid.  Yes, you are probably right.  But, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have done it, nor does it mean that others did not get a bigger benefit of it than I did.  Yes, I’d have loved it if we had sold a million copies rather than 1 percent of that, so I could turn my hobby into a full-time profession.  But this is true of anyone who has a hobby. It’s ideal if your hobby and your living can merge.  But you are not going to stop your hobby if you can’t make money out of it.  Your hobby is all about trading time for enjoyment.  My job is what I do.  My hobby is who I am.