MLB_Management
MLB_Management
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
?The Marlins have a posting for potential interns. I'm asked a few times about jobs in MLB, and this job highlights the kind of things you should be muscling up on: be a baseball fan, and learn some language of some sort to be able to process through millions of rows of data. It doesn't matter which, be it SQL, R, Python, C/C++, Java, among many others. ANY of them is good. Just be good at one of them. Some of the stalwarts here swear by Basic and Fortran, so, no old technology is too old.
Sunday, August 28, 2016
?Nice job by Craig in giving us the update.
I say this all the time, so I'll say it again. Talent is the causative agent to wins. Well, talent plus random variation.
Talent is the causative agent to payroll. Well, talent, plus service time, plus some inefficiency.
So, when you try to correlate wins and payroll, you aren't correlating a cause-and-effect. Indeed, you can't even say that more wins leads to higher payroll, or higher payroll leads to more wins. Both are effects of the main causative agent: talent.
In order to take the next step, you really need to talk about the central point: talent. Then you need to talk about the second important point: service time.
Craig has indeed touched upon these ideas in the past, so, he's well positioned to take these next steps.
Wednesday, June 08, 2016
?Here's the news.
Thursday, May 05, 2016
?Fangraphs has the job posting, and it looks like a good one. Tell 'em you heard it from Tango. Not sure it'll help, but it won't hurt. And if you deal with Sig, he's probably the nicest guy I've ever dealt with on email. MGL has met him I think, and I'm sure he can tell you more.
Tuesday, April 26, 2016
?The swarm is everywhere. Thanks to Ben and Rob for highlighting it, and for Michael Lewis for opening the door.
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
?As we know, MLBPA has had as a point of principle to never split revenues with the owners, and instead let "market forces" determine compensation. These market forces are purportedly free market forces, but they are hardly that. In the pre-Moneyball era, the market forces were simply owners taking the savings on pre-free agents and throwing it to free agents. In the Moneyball era, GMs started to understand the dollar value of a win.
At some point, rational market forces will make it so that the players will get 30% of all revenues. And when that happens, players will be begging for irrationality to come back. Matt Swartz proposes that the players should stem that tide, and get a share of the revenue not tied to winning.
Imagine if you will all teams shared all revenues equally. In that case, no player should earn more than any other player. There'd be no point to giving Kershaw 30 million $, since a win won't give the Dodgers one more dime. Every player would get the league minimum. Well, except for ego. Even though you could get away with spending just 5% or 10% of your revenue to salaries, owners would give up a huge profit if it meant getting Kershaw and Trout on the same team.
Anyway, without getting too extreme, Matt simply proposes that a share of the non-winning money go to the players.
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
?This looks like a terrific opportunity, especially for my fellow Canadians. Tell em you "heard it from Tango".
Tuesday, April 05, 2016
Here's another nail in the coffin. As an aside: how many nails do we need for this coffin?
When I look at social change in USA, I'm always thinking "well, this is what we went through in Canada twenty years ago". You'd think people would learn from others, and simply accelerate their thinking. But it seems, no, everyone has to actually grow into the right(*) position, that they can't accelerate to a point. Or we have a revolution, and instead of accelerating, you simply jump to where the right spot is.
"In every revolution, there is one man with a vision."
-- Jerome Bixby (through William Shatner, as Capt Kirk, to the uneasily-evil Mr Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy)
(*) Yes, some things are right and wrong.
Friday, March 18, 2016
Joey Votto, John Jaso, Max Scherzer, Brian Bannister and Zach Greinke are my top 5. Given what Figueroa has said, I may need to make that a Top 10:
Figueroa said this idea of backspin was a myth, the swing plane he was using was not optimal. He explained what he really wanted to do is hit the ball as squarely as possible with a slight upper cut. He explained how upon contact with the bat, the ball briefly condenses like flattening a ball of pizza dough. He had the science to prove it: a Dec. 2014 study by University of Illinois professor, Dr. Alan Nathan, showed spin has little effect on batted ball distance.
“It's an arc and upper (cut swing) that creates the home run power and trajectory you need to hit the ball out. ... As a power hitter, it is proven that's the plane you want to swing on,” Figueroa said. “When you hear ‘level,' you think the bat is level to the ground when really that is not the case, the bat is actually level to the direction of the ball.”
..
But he's also perhaps the most mathematically gifted player in the Grapefruit League. In clubhouses that still have varying degrees of resistance to new-age thought, Figueroa is using analytics, coding skills — yes, he writes his own computer code — and physics to give him an edge.
Figueroa long has been interested in mathematical principles.
He found calculus and physics fascinating in high school and at the University of Florida. Earlier this spring, he recited Pi out to fifty digits to a reporter. His Twitter bio declares he is “Specializing in the process of decision making in .400 milliseconds,” or the amount of time in which a hitter has to decide whether to swing at a pitch.
...
Seeing the vast amount of data pouring into the game, and thinking about how to take advantage of it, he began to teach himself code, ‘R,' or programming language.
He spent hours at Coursera.org — the Web site reassures a new visitor one can “Code Yourself!” — where there are step-by-step instructions in learning how to code and program.
With his nascent coding skills, he began to research and refine data given to him by the Rays, though the Rays kept much of their data off limits from their proprietary database.
He created models to understand how a player with his skills would age. He studied players with similar physical and statistical profiles. He studied what skills would age well, which would age poorly. In three consecutive seasons in Triple-A, he improved his on-base percentage.
...
What does his dad think about coding and physics?
“My dad thinks I should just see the baseball and hit it, he's more old school,” Figueroa said. “But he understands you need to evolve.”
Figueroa believes there is a divide between many players and new-age information because so much of the data isn't “tangible.” He thinks swing- and mechanics-mapping technology, including some produced by Pittsburgh tech startup, Diamond Kinetics, can help change that. But there also is a divide, Figueroa believes, because the new-school perhaps hasn't communicated its ideas well enough.
“People in general, it's easy for them to say ‘I'm not good at math,' ” Figueroa said. “And if someone tries to feed you something you don't understand, you put up that wall. ... Tampa does a good job of ... giving players (manageable data) to consume.”
...
Figueroa understands what pioneering coder Grace Hopper once said: “It was no use trying to learn math unless they could communicate it.”
Sunday, March 13, 2016
?Looking at Willie talking about Dan Wilson, and I think you can get a good crowdsourcing project, going after players, and trying to figure out who they think would be a good manager.
GS: It has been surprising to me that none of the players on the early 2000s Mariners have turned out to be managers, at least not yet. I think Jay Buhner would make an excellent manager.
BLOOMQUIST: Yeah, Jay has the personality to do it.
GS: He’s got that Lou personality, where guys would run through a wall for him. Buhner and Dan Wilson are the guys I think would make the best managers.
BLOOMQUIST: Dan Wilson is the guy I was going to say.
GS: What about Jamie Moyer?
BLOOMQUIST: (laughs) Jamie, he’d be an interesting one, that’s for sure. I think Dan Wilson would make a great manager, very smart, knows people.
Thursday, March 10, 2016
?Yet another terrific research and analysis piece by Craig, this time focusing on the qualifying offer. Just a couple of weeks ago, I asked how often does the Qualifying Offer actually get extended to a player that a team developed. Craig goes through all the slicing and dicing, and you get 25% of the players. And if you limit it to a small-market team, it's just Upton. The entire reasoning for the QO system is "oh, well, we spent so much time and money developing these players... we can't just lose them".
There's two huge things wrong with this:
1. Most players offered QO don't even meet this criteria.
2. Even if it were true, like it actually is in the case of Upton, the pre-free agency players are paid 30 cents on the dollar during their MLB time. Upton for example generated for the Rays 142 MM$ in performance value, while being paid 16MM$, so he was actually paid about 11 cents on the dollar, an enormous discount already. Sure, there's the cost of developing him in the minors, etc, but that just inches the numbers closer, barely. He was also brought up just a bit late, thereby not qualifying for Super 2 status.
So, even the single one player this system was most designed for was completely unnecessary since he rewarded his team with an enormous amount of value already.
The QO system is not the system it's being sold as. Before Craig gave us the data, all we had was talking heads Trumping us. We had nothing solid to counteract. Thanks to Craig for giving everyone the data so everyone can see it.
Tuesday, March 08, 2016
?I don't know anything about drugs outside of Tylenol and Advil. So when Sharapova gets suspended, I have no idea how to react. If the drug is not on the banned list one day, I'm supposed to be ok, like corticosteroids is ok (Kirk Gibson, Curt Schilling). If the drug is on the banned list the next day, I'm not supposed to be ok. This sounds straight out of 1984. Orwellian logic makes no sense to me, and I'm not going to react based on how someone is telling me how I should react.
By the way, I think corticosteroids is banned in the Olympics? If it is, I'm not supposed to enjoy Kirk Gibson v Eck in 1988. Doesn't it seem weird that I'm supposed to consult some list to know how to react to something that has already happened?
Tuesday, March 01, 2016
Our buddy ?Kyle is hiring. Tell him you heard it from Tango.
Friday, February 19, 2016
I recently pointed to an article that showed that the arb values that I established almost ten years ago no longer apply.? I asked for an aspiring saberist to confirm those numbers. And someone did... one week before I asked.
Whereas I had 1st year as getting 40% of their value and 2nd year at 60%, we are now at the point that 2nd year are getting 40% and third year are getting 60%. For all intents and purposes, MLB players have lost a year of service!
Anyway, the author of the latest paper has done tremendous research, breaking down whether a player actually entered arbitration or signed away his arb rights.
This further confirms yet another recent finding at how extensions are working out very well for teams. Given that I thought that paper was a leading contender for research of the year, and given that the Camden article merges the findings of two excellent articles, one week before those excellent articles actually appeared, this Camden article now stands as my pick for research of the year.
There's tremendous opportunity here for these three saberists, and other aspiring saberists to build on everyone's work and come up with something even better.
Thursday, February 18, 2016
?I'm not an economist. I don't even play one on TV. But I've read JC's excellent baseball books, as well as all of the written works of Matt Swartz, and my "guts" to get a pretty good understanding on how people behave when given incentives.
At my company, the cafeteria food is subsidized (or so we're told). But given that the only competition for food are eating places that you have to go out of the building, what incentive is there for the food provider to actually offer "retail" prices to discount from? Say for example that a chicken sandwich is 4$ at your fast food place. The cafeteria however retails their sandwich for 5$, while our company says "come to our caf! you get a 20% discount!". Which now makes it 4$. Was that retail price of 5$ honest? I don't know, maybe it is. But I can't tell.
What I do know is that as a consumer, I just care about the bottom line price. If the caf retails for 6$ and the company subsidized 33%, or retails for 4$ with no subsidy, I'm still out of pocket 4$.
Now, what if the company only subsidized salads. Now, the caf may not want to have a run on salads. Instead, they may increase the "retail" price of salads, and offer their own "discounts" on non-salad foods. In the end, the subsidies that the caf gets simply goes in their pocket, while they continue to try to price their foods high enough to maximize profits without losing customers to outside vendors.
(You may think: competition. But if my company is any example, there is virtually no turnover in caf food providers. Basically, whoever is in charge of finding food providers at my company caf probably themselves have no incentive to find the lowest price!)
Let's talk free agency. There's about 4 billion$ in salary above the league minimum, and there's actually 1000 marginal wins to buy. That makes it a simply 4 MM$ per win as the fair price for wins (to the extent that teams really have no more money to pay out). Given that the expected revenue is 9 billion$, that may be a bit presumptive. Let's jump that up to 5MM$ per win as the fair market price. Teams are therefore saving 1MM$ because of "subsidies" of the MLBPA: the pre-arb players especially, but also 1st year arb-players, are giving teams huge discounts (as per CBA).
However, teams are not paying 5MM$ per free agent win, but rather at least 7MM$ or even 8MM$ (and more in some cases) per win. What's happening is that teams, even though they are offered a HUGE subsidy by the MLBPA have decided instead to take (most of) those savings and throw it right back to free agent players. Even though the actual value of those players is to generate 5MM$ per win, they instead get 8MM$ per win.
If all players were free agents, would they actually be getting 8MM$ per win? Well, that would mean they'd get 8 billion$ in salary above the minimum (plus the 0.5 billion$ of minimum), for a total of 8.5 billion$... compared to the 9 billion$ in revenue. It's unsupportable.
So, that's how the subsidies affect things. Whereas a rational market would not let you pay more than 5MM$ per win, the subsidies change behavior. And that's because sports is an irrational market: in addition to wins and dollars, there's prestige. It's what I call the Picasso effect (*). In our world, it's paying 30$ for the premiere midnight showing of Star Wars. There's no real good reason for doing that, but plenty of people did that. That's because they've got money to burn, and they've decided they had a 30$ budget for movies that month, and rather than watch 3 movies, blew it all on one movie.
(*) I think I called it that. Maybe Phil B originated it?
The question is if this is sustainable. There's been a huge influx of people in the front offices that are more responsible for the dollars spent, more accountable. At some point, it's going to happen that there's going to be a natural slowing of spending. We probably already are seeing this, given how low the share of revenues is going to player salaries. But there is still so much more to go, just based on rational market forces. The question is how much does prestige play a role.
Monday, February 15, 2016
Jason, newly from the Jays, is putting out the call.?
Sunday, February 14, 2016
Murray gives us some good data. Ideally, we'd have the number of tests performed, for both majors and minors. In MLB 2013, there were 5400 tests, and in 2014 there were 7900 tests. Assuming about 8700 tests in 2015, we get 22,000 tests in MLB over a three year period, with 28 positives, or odds of almost 800 tests to 1 positive. I'd like to know the odds for minor league players.
?
Friday, February 12, 2016
Others have talked about, I tweeted about this a few months ago, and Dave brings it up here.?
Not only do you have Bryce Harper becoming a free agent entering the 2019 season, Trout can be a free agent entering the 2021 season. Which really means that after Harper signs his free agent deal, the Angels will try to extend Trout with two years to go. Trout is almost a year older, and he will be signing two years out. But he's also better. All that might wash out as even.
So, it will be interesting to see after Harper signs, what the Angels do with Trout.
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Here's your chance.? This is an especially great opportunity for my fellow Canucks. And say you "heard it from Tango". It will help. Probably. Well, it won't hurt anyway.
Friday, January 29, 2016
Jobs abound in MLB, and here's another one.?
If you say you "heard it from Tango", it might be enough to get your big toe in the door. At least the pinky toe. It's a valuable appendage (youtube).
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