Tuesday, October 20, 2009

John Abbamondi, assistant GM of the Cardinals, on quantitative analysis in the front office

If a club is weighing whether to acquire a particular pitcher, for example, one of the first questions is whether he's likely to stay healthy. "Of course we'll lean heavily on medical-staff opinion, but we also want to know what our scouts think of his pitching mechanics," Abbamondi says. "Do they see any red flags that might lead to injury? Meanwhile, the stats guy may look at the track record of other pitchers who have thrown this many innings by this age." The trick is to blend qualitative and quantitative analysis.

"The foundation of all analysis tends to go back to scouting, but that's one guy sitting in a ballpark, and you can't have people at every game," he says. Statistical tools like Pitch F/x, which delivers data on every pitch thrown, can help confirm or refute the more subjective analysis. "Say a scout went to see a prospect and wrote a glowing report," says Abbamondi. "We can check that game data to see if it's consistent with this pitcher's other games. If the data shows us that the pitcher was doing something a little different that day, maybe the scout caught him on a very good day. We might not realize it was an outlier without that data."