The M’s New Addition
With the lockout in its third grueling month, it would be easy to miss. At a time when players on the 40-man can’t workout at team facilities, when MLB.com can’t show player pictures, and when numerous free agents are forbidden to talk with teams, I’d just sort of assumed that the Mariners couldn’t really do anything to improve right now beyond training minor leaguers while not paying them. (Damn it, this is *not* a cynical post).
I’m happy to learn that I was wrong. Yesterday, Seattle Times beat writer Ryan Divish tweeted that he ran into none other than Dave Cameron on the backfields at M’s camp. The M’s hired Dave away from San Diego, where he’d worked for the Padres since leaving Fangraphs in 2018. Dave Cameron, founder of this site and leader of Fangraphs, works for the Mariners. It’s…amazing.
I think for readers who weren’t around in this site’s – or sabermetric blogging in general – formative years, it’s hard to overstate just how outside the mainstream all of this was. It’s not just that Dave and DMZ presented ideas around player value or team-building strategy or even in-game strategy that was out of step with what you’d hear on a broadcast. It was that all of that strategy was undergirded and supported by equally radical notions about fundamental things like how runs are scored, or how you could evaluate a pitcher’s season. This is just years after Voros McCracken’s defense-independent-pitching-statistics article and around the time FIP was created as a DIPS measure.
If you weren’t on rec.sport.baseball.analysis where McCracken first presented his ideas, and where the founders of this blog met and argued about baseball and the Mariner Moose, all of this must’ve seemed pretty weird. But that’s where Dave shined. He was great at laying out the logic behind what he was saying. You didn’t have to agree (and I think most of my initial comments on this site were some small argument or nitpick to a Dave argument), but you always came away seeing how the pieces connected. You could follow the logic in a way that you often couldn’t when the color commentator would assert something on a broadcast.
But what really drew us to it all was not simply that we’re baseball fans. We were *Mariner* fans, and thus the relevant data points, the examples, the decision points all involved our team. Dave presented these interesting new means and deployed them to a great, great end: making the Mariners suck less (this was 2003-2012 or so). But again, it wasn’t just that this was often out of step with how teams were run, and how the M’s in particular were run at the time. Rather, there was a kind of dark comedy in just how FAR out of step it was. There seemed like an innate hostility from baseball lifers whose views were skewered mercilessly by Cameron, and the bloggers, ridiculed as over-confident non-entities not just by teams, but often by the media. This felt like a club. Insular, often absurdly so, but passionate.
That tension was perhaps always overstated. 2003 saw USSM created, but it also saw the Red Sox hire Bill James. Sure, the Bavasi-era M’s didn’t seem to be run the way Dave/DMZ/JMB would want, but the FO was often open to events with the readership – a tradition carried on by his successors. And it wasn’t like baseball – flush with new revenue, and increasingly convinced that ERA wouldn’t cut it – never hired saber/analytic people. Bavasi’s M’s had an analytics group. Still, part of the fun was reading Dave’s offseason plan or how Dave evaluated free agent pitchers all the time and watching the M’s do…something else.
One of the big things I remember, though, went way beyond criticizing the Carlos Silva deal or M’s draft picks. It was the excitement around a teenage phenom dealing in short season ball, and the growing fervor around his progress. JMB gave him a nickname, and it took. By the time of his debut, we were at fever pitch. And in those final years before all games were broadcast, that insular club (er, some of them) got to watch a single static camera broadcast King Felix’s MLB debut in Detroit. He was ours, and he looked every bit the royalty we wanted him to be. And that’s why his 2006 and early 2007 performance was so frustrating. And so, Dave wrote perhaps the most famous post in this site’s history, An Open Letter to Rafael Chaves. We may be coming at this in a different way, but we all want/need Felix to be great. Chaves passed it to Felix, and while Felix had a lot more to do with what happened next than Dave, it was a shocking turn of events for readers here. Insular, passionate, and perhaps able to have a real-world impact on our club?
It feels kind of amazing to think that it’s now Dave’s literal job to have an impact on the Mariners and the players they develop. Things have changed a lot since the letter and since this site began. Not only were some games *gasp* not televised back then, but we couldn’t even conceive of pitch tracking data, that MLB itself would roll out searchable databases with everything from pitch height, release point, movement and spin (what?). Despite the growing influence of data, and despite the massive increase in the volume of data and the concomitant rise in importance of data scientists and database programmers, there’s still a role for people asking really good questions and communicating ideas across an enterprise that probably looks a bit different than an FO looked in 2003. It’s part of why Jeff Sullivan’s with the Rays, or why the MLBPA hired Fangraphs’ Craig Edwards not long ago (give ’em hell, Craig). But there’s something so satisfying, like a multifaceted plot wrapped up *just so* about this hire.
The tension between a place like this and the M’s FO is kind of baked in. It was there more or less explicitly from the start, and the M’s provide so, so many reasons to be cynical. We love the Mariners, but we do not always see eye to eye with the people assembling and/or managing the team. Despite Dave’s presence among them, that doesn’t really change. I’ve never subscribed to the idea that I’m smarter than the FO. That kind of idea can’t survive first contact with some in the M’s analytics group, and, well, that was when I tapped out. But that doesn’t stop sites or writers from pointing out things that need improvement or signs that things aren’t quite working the way we were told. So I wish Dave well, and know that he’s probably more motivated for his new challenge than he’s ever been, or at least since June 27th, 2007. But I know for a fact he’s got thick skin. The development of our long-hyped prospect group is now, at some level or another, in Dave’s care. That gives me confidence. But I’d have more if the M’s seriously improved the line-up for 2022, you know. Just saying.