Innovation in any unmanaged market typically leads to the overturning of established practices and economic beneficiaries--simply put, innovation makes certain activities and skills obsolete that previous were highly valued. This process is usually described as "creative desctruction", an old term that is now generally attributed to Joseph Schumpeter.

Advances in player evaluation in baseball can certainly be viewed through this lens, as the integration of statistical analysis combined with advances in computing power (both software and hardware) make the evaluation of players more efficient and more accurate.

What's less known, I believe, is the actual destructive aspect of this creativity--namely, the impact on the scouting profession. I never really thought about the impact until reading this recent L.A. Times story about the Professional Baseball Scouts Foundation. The PBSF offers various kinds of assistance to scouts or their families based upon need (e.g. unemployment, lack of health insurance, etc.).

To be honest, I didn't think that the impact would be all that great, but as Ben Lindbergh recently pointed out, the weighting of advanced analysis relative to observational scouting as shifted in just about every organization in baseball. Some obviously weigh it differently than others, but the shift is pretty universal at this point.

What that has led to is a general decrease in scout staffing across the league.

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At the end of the year, I always find myself fidgeting around as I try to figure out what I'm going to write about now that the season is over. I didn't initially plan on writing about the orgy of fun that was last night; I was going to write about an NL Central All Star team, and merely mention what happened last night as an intro to the rest of the post.

But once I found myself actually thinking about last night, and actually writing about it, I realized something: if we aren't thinking, and talking, about last night, then we're not properly appreciating everything that this game is about. Because for one night, we were served the ultimate platter.

Everyone knew it could be special. We had four teams battling for two playoff spots, all of it boiling down to two games. It was like getting together a bunch of wizards, witches and fairies; a recipe for magic, if you will. But looking back, we really had no idea how crazy things would get. I'm guessing that nobody predicted what I'm dubbing now as The Inception Comeback: a comeback within a comeback.

You simply couldn't write this stuff (Chris Nolan, don't even try). I mean, seriously, how many times have the Rays appeared to be screwed this season? People thought they might be done in March, after losing Garza, Crawford, Pena and all of those relievers. Lots of people thought they were toast after Manny Ramirez left the team just a few games into the season. Pretty much everyone was ready to hand Boston the wild card while the Rays were staring at a 9.5-game deficit on September 2.

All of those things, they built into last night. Showing everyone that their roster, even after losing so many big names, was still worthy of competing in baseball's hardest division. Proving to the world that losing a hitter of Manny's caliber wouldn't hamstring the offense into mediocrity. Making up nearly ten games in the standings in just four weeks, when the odds of doing so were less than 1 PERCENT.

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Among yesterday's hysterics following Mariano Rivera closing his 602 game, an article was penned by ESPN New York's Wallace Matthews stating that the Yankee closer was the greatest Yankee of this generation. He muses,

"I realize that many will lean toward Derek Jeter...as the greatest Yankee of our era...And it is pretty much impossible to quantify the relative worth of a closer versus a shortstop..."

Impossible? Hardly. Difficult? Absolutely.

Though, it certainly isn't as simple as looking at both Jeter and Rivera's career Wins Above Replacement Player.  Evaluating relief pitchers has given WAR(P) a significantly harder than it has with position players. For those who are unaware, in addition to summarizing a player's total contributions to their team in one statistic, Wins Above Replacement (WAR or WARP) removes the context said contribution and focus solely on what an individual player controls and accomplishes.

But, what is a relief pitcher without the surrounding context of the game? The modern closer, while just a name for a misused relief pitcher, derives much of his value from coming in high leverage situations. If one was to attempt remove the context, as sabrmetrics does with its various WAR constructs for every other position, she wouldn't be getting an accurate representation of a closer's value.

The above discussion begs the question, how much credit should one give to relief pitchers for context they had no part in creating?

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Michael Lewis' quintessential Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game no doubt represents the entry point into sabermetrics for many of us, and now that Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman are starring in the film, maybe now would be a good time to ask if the book is still relevant?

In case you haven't read it, here's a quick synopsis: the book centers around Billy Beane, the Oakland A's, and the unorthodox approach that Beane uses to turn around the financially disadvantaged A's to compete with much higher spending clubs like the Yankees.

While most of the concepts are way past needing explanation at this point (on base percentage and slugging are better than average and RBIs?!), the important part here -- and often underplayed thesis -- is that the smaller salaried clubs should be looking for, pursuing, and signing undervalued talent. Essentially: find players with a skill set that most teams overlook and exploit the market deficiency.

Sounds easy enough, right?

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Try to think of the last great baseball team that didn't have any legitimate stars. Well...? No? Nothing? I didn't think so. It's just really hard to build a great team that depends solely on depth, consistency and team play to thrive. Sometimes, when the tides are rolling the wrong way, you need that big motor to push you in the other direction. And as much as Brad Penny wants it, he just can't churn remotely like a Justin Verlander.

And all of this has me worried about the San Diego Padres. In this day and age, you simply need stars to win. It's unrealistic to expect to be good at every position, so you have to recognize the places where you can actually be great. Even the best teams are forced to use the likes of Wilson Valdez or Ramiro Pena once in a while. Frankly, there just aren't enough good baseball players to go around. That's why you need some great players; inevitably, you're going to get stuck using someone that's probably not very good.

Which brings us back to the Padres, an organization whose lack of star-level talent is quite frankly a bit scary. Look at their current roster. How many of those guys realistically qualify as potential stars? Sure, there's Mat Latos, but he still needs to take that next step forward and prove to everyone that he can be a 200-innings-a-year guy. There's Cameron Maybin, but I'm highly skeptical that he can get that much better from here while hitting the ball on the ground nearly 60% of the time. There's Kyle Blanks, too. After what he did in the minors this summer, there's a non-zero chance that he proves to be an impact bat. But really, that's pretty much it. Chase Headley, Nick Hundley, Jesus Guzman and Will Venable are useful players, but they're far from franchise cornerstones.

This all has me wondering where exactly the Padres expect to get their stars. We've seen how good the Padres can be with a decent team and one star (What was his name? Andre?). It's not particularly impressive. They're going to need more star-quality players, and they're probably not going to be coming from the MLB roster. With most organizations, I'd probably be alright with this. The Padres certainly aren't the only team that can't boast a long list of young stars on its roster. But when you comb through their farm system for players with star potential, you really start to wonder if they're just banking on a Jose Bautista-esque lottery ticket.

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Houston Rockets General Manager, and a pioneer in the application of sophisticated analytics to professional basketball, Daryl Morey wrote a short blog post yesterday for the Harvard Business Review.

In that post, Morely claims that success--whether in the boardroom or the athletic arena--is more influenced today by the degree to which organizations can capture proprietary data rather than the quality of those analyzing the data. 

Here's a direct quote:

I see a world teeming with really good analysts. Fresh analytical faces are minted each year and sports teams are hiring them in larger numbers. If talented analysts are becoming plentiful, however, then it follows that analysts cannot be the key to creating a consistent winner, as a sustainable competitive edge requires that you have something valuable AND irreplaceable. If better analysts won't create an edge, however, what will?

The answer is better data. Yep, that's right. Raw numbers, not the people and programs that attempt to make sense of them. Many organizations have spent the last few years hiring top analysts based on the belief that they create differentiation. Smart companies such as Google believe they need savants to crunch those numbers and find the connections that regular humans could not. But my experience, and what I'm hearing from more organizations (sports and non), shows that real advantage comes from unique data that no one else has.

I couldn't agree more with Morey. I also couldn't disagree more.

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