Stone on the M’s stathead-y-ness, Olkin’s still consulting
Larry Stone has an interesting piece up about the M’s direction which includes some meaty quotes with Mat Olkin, who it would appear is still consulting for the team.
“I feel safe saying Bill was always interested in having that perspective,” said Olkin, who remains on staff. “The thing I can’t speak to is how he weighed that against other voices he listened to. I think he would have been a fool to listen to only me, and not to a lot of the other very qualified men he had on board.
I’m happy to be wrong and a little surprised to hear this — Olkin was repping the Royals recently at a conference where the Lookout Landing guys were, and it would be unusual for someone with an ongoing consulting relationship to work for more than one team. Usually, team consulting gigs are, to oversimplify, “Be on retainer to answer questions about stuff” (as you see Olkin’s job is) or “We want you to run a study on defensive deterioration in free agent first basemen.” (this is usually quickly followed with “Pay? Why would we pay you? You should be happy to run a study for us!” and “No, you can’t publish.”)(I am totally not joking). The contracts of the first kind that I know of are generally team-exclusive or through NDA/limited non-competes manage to effectively limit the work to one team… but on the other hand, I’ll freely admit my knowledge of this kind of thing is a couple years old.
Olkin’s role, traditionally, is not so much resident stathead (and does consulting count as “on staff”?) but as he described it:
“Part of that was by design. Bill always tried to protect me by not giving me any more information than he had to. He wouldn’t say, ‘I want to do this, what do you think?’ He’d say, ‘I have option A, B, C or D. I’m not going to tell you which one I like. You tell me which one you like and why.’ He always gave me the feeling he was very interested in what I had to say.”
One of the examples Olkin gave before was “here’s a list of minor league guys we’re giving you for no reason, are any of them particularly interesting?” and then later you’d find out that was the list of possible players the M’s could get back in trade.
Which is to say, in the sense of organizational approach, not a lot of influence, but they did seek his opinion on particular decisions.
Anyway, I’ve got a line out to Mat, so we’ll see what he says, and I’ll update everyone if I hear back.
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I am Dazed and Confused
Olkin was also quoted as a Royals consultant by the Wall Street Journal in this piece, which may be coming out of the same conference.
Sorry for posting something a bit unrelated, but [deleted, unrelated]
Also note that if Bavasi is careful about not disclosing his preferences to a consultant, it can be to avoid shaping the answer in advance, but it could also be to protect himself if the consultant has dealings with other clubs.
Glad to hear you’re following up. The whole thing struck me as very odd, as I can’t really point my finger at any dealings over the past few seasons (at least at the major league level) in which I felt there was any sabermetric justification. The idea that his input was valued at the level of minor league acquisitions makes a lot more sense.
I met Mat at spring training this year and he’d said he was still working for the M’s so I was kind of puzzled by the mention here that he wasn’t (I assumed you heard he’d been let go). Glad this has been cleared up. Hopefully the next GM will utilize Mat’s opinions more than Bavasi did.
Listen all of y’all it’s a sabotage!
Without saying too much, that’s generally how it works with consulting to MLB teams.
I love this in Stone’s column from Armstrong:
Ronald Reagan had a degree in economics, but it was literally pre-Keynes. Not sure how helpful that was when he was in the Oval Office.
I know at least a couple of things have changed in my profession since I graduated in the 1970s. As a scientist, I’ve worked with a lot of engineers, and they tend (I am definitely not saying this applies to everyone) to be driven by applying information that science comes up with, and there is a tension between the two outlooks. Because they are responsible for projects with concrete objectives (no pun intended), they also tend to be pretty conservative and go with what’s worked before. Again, that’s completely reasonable for their profession, but it’s the opposite of my mindset as a researcher. However, in no way does a degree in engineering with a minor in statistics imply to me keeping up on the new baseball statistics. You know, the ones that have been around for decades now.
#9:
As one of my old engineering profs preached to us: You can lead a man to data but you can’t make him think.
Steve–Tee hee. 😉
[formatting]
Hmm. I quoted myself instead of quoting you. That’s kind of funny!
Given how well the M’s and Royals have been doing, I wonder if maybe he secretly works for Bud Selig or Joe Morgan.
Well they ought to ask him whether or not they should have a team of aging sucky veterans who don’t know what those puzzling leather things on their non-dominant hands are for.
It’s clear that they need more stats help than they’re getting, since they don’t seem to understand how to judge talent. If they could just get the concept of pitchers who get Ks or a lot of ground balls, or hitters who walk and hit doubles/hrs are better, that would be good.