🔮 NEVER FORGET 🔮 June 30, 2014 'YOUR 2017 WORLD SERIES CHAMPS' ⚾️:
such thing as being too drunk. Sometimes they staggered over to a blackjack table manned by a young dealer named Sig Mejdal.
Mejdal, who is now 48 and married with a stepson, would go on to earn two master's degrees from San Jose State, in operations research and cognitive psychology. He would perform research for NASA in which, essentially, he disproved the perceived utility of napping. All along, though, Mejdal's mathematically driven career had stemmed from his passion for the most mathematically driven of sports: baseball.
Luhnow hired Mejdal to run the franchise's new analytics department in 2005, around the same time that Luhnow was elevated to director of amateur scouting. Over the next seven seasons the Cardinals would draft more players who became big leaguers than any other organization. Of the 25 players on the team's World Series roster last October, 16 were drafted under Luhnow's watch. But he was not in St.
Luhnow and his men envisioned a decision tree, with that 56-win team at its roots and a sustainable championship club at its tip. Their only goal, with Crane's blessing, was to reach the top as quickly as they could. That meant every decision they made, no matter how painful, would be based upon the probability that it would be helpful in the long term. They would, in other words, hit on 16 against a seven every time. "We didn't want to be mediocre for a decade," says Elias.
It is one thing to commit to only making decisions that will lead to a long-term goal, and another to figure out how to make those decisions. Blackjack is an exercise in hard probabilities. Evaluating baseball players is something else. Some information you can gather about a baseball player is hard: how fast he can throw a fastball, how quickly he can reach first base. But much of it is soft: how diligently he will work, how his power stroke might develop, how likely he is to become injured.
The Astros' decisions since the end of 2011 seem to have genuine promise. The farm system is now ranked among the game's best. The major league team, buoyed by recent promotions of top prospects like outfielder George Springer and first baseman Jon Singleton, went 15--14 in May, its first winning month since September 2010. Springer and Singleton have complemented holdovers like diminutive second baseman Jose Altuve , but more impressive has been the improvement of the young staff.
TO CLUBS picking first overall—one-one, in baseball shorthand—high school pitchers are terrifying. They have displayed a greater chance of flaming out, due to injury or a failure to develop, than any other category of player. "There have been some wild successes," says Elias, "but the list of those picked high is littered with injuries and disappointments."
For the next 100 minutes the room discussed the prospects one by one. As each player's name was announced, his video clips were projected on a screen. First, the area scout who was responsible for the player would introduce him. Then anyone else who had seen him—Elias, national cross-checker David Post, special assistants—would chime in. Luhnow, who had also seen each of the six in person, would ask questions.
"If the stuff stayed the same as it is right now," said Post, "it's more than enough to pitch and have success in the big leagues." "Nolan, how hard did you throw at his age?" a scout asked the alltime strikeout king, who had watched Kolek pitch in person. Before the season they'd hired a manager they felt was the right man to guide their players through such a stretch. Bo Porter understands the necessity of losing, or at least he professes to. "We had to go through that," says Porter, who is 41. "The biggest mistake organizations can make is the misevaluation of their own players.
The criticisms fell into two categories. The first was that the Astros' analytics-based approach dehumanizes players. "It was a difficult thing for me to read, because I spend so much time personally getting to know our players, and so does our staff," says Luhnow. "There is a perception that anybody who is doing analytics in a serious way is doing that at the expense of the human element. It's just not true, in our case.
The Astros' leadership bristles at the notion that it thinks it knows how to operate better than anyone else. All it knows is what it believes to represent best long-term practices, based on the information it has acquired and processed. "We're far from perfect," Mejdal says. Even what they believe to be optimal decisions often don't work out. Sometimes a righthanded pull hitter goes the other way. Sometimes players they discard, or decline to draft, turn into stars.
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