Originally Posted By: BASAMS The Plumber
But spending doesn;t equal wins, it only makes teams that do not have a grasp on what makes a winning team able to compete more easily. A lot of GM's are stat freaks like Animalman and they don;t understand that winning baseball is way more than OPS and other silly stats. But if you throw enough money at those guys and accumulate enough it makes you more competitive. Prime example is the Yankees last year, higest payroll in the majors and not in the playoffs.


I am very much a baseball outsider, so I'm not privy to the inner-workings of your typical MLB front office, but my opinion is that most GM's really aren't what you term "stat freaks". If you get a chance to check out the winter meetings(this year they were in Las Vegas, next year they're in Indianapolis I think), you'll find traditional scouting methods still dominate baseball thinking, for the most part, and even as talent evaluators begin to incorporate certain metrics into their lexicon, they're often years behind those within the sabermetric community. OPS is a nice, easily calculated stat, but its not the end all be all. One thing that I can't stress enough is that I don't say that any stat is important; just the right stats, placed in the proper context. Raw stats like OPS lack that context, and context is everything.

There are only about a half-dozen teams around the league right now that are generally recognized as being statistically progressive in their thinking, and in my view, its no coincidence that many of these teams are among the leagues best, such as Boston and Tampa Bay(and those historically successful, like Oakland and San Diego).

Despite the presence of Brian Cashman, the Yankees are definitely not a "stat freak" team. No stat freak team would start an outfield with Johnny Damon, Brett Gardner and Xavier Nady.

MisterJLA is RACKing awesome.