Setting aside how old it makes me feel to hear that a team employee read Tom Tango’s “The Book” “while growing up,” these two stories -- here and here -- from Adam Kilgore of the Washington Post is a fascinating peek into how the Washington Nationals -- a team always characterized as “scouting-first” use advanced metrics and analytics in their baseball operations department.
Shock of shocks: they use scouting and sabermetrics. It’s almost as if those two things can work together rather than be the zero-sum game some old school columnists would have you believe.
Sad part, though: the analyst intern Kilgore talks with says that, while they like to see third party predictive analysis and thus look at a lot of websites like FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus, there is no mention whatsoever of the Nationals reading HardballTalk’s Best Shape of His Life reporting. I mean, what else do you need to know about how a guy is gonna do? Call me, dudes. I’ll totally hip you to that area of analysis.
