Throw BP, Know SQL: The Modern Baseball Coach’s Job Description | Sporttechie.com

(Photo by Allen Kee / ESPN Images)

This is a glimpse of the future of baseball. It's like in the movie "The Graduate" only instead of plastics, the word is data analytics. If you're looking to get into baseball these days you either have to get on board the train or get run over by the train.

from sporttechie.com
https://www.sporttechie.com/mlb-data-analytics-sabermetrics-sam-fuld-jeff-luhnow/

Throw BP, Know SQL: The Modern Baseball Coach's Job Description

Joe Lemire May 17, 2018

The Phillies have begun using more advanced data under manager Gabe Kapler (above) with Sam Fuld as the liaison to the players. 

Sam Fuld retired from the outfield last fall, leaving behind an eight-year playing career in the big leagues and joining the Phillies in a newly created role: major league player information coordinator.

Fuld is as well educated as any ballplayer. He has an economics degree from Stanford, interned at Stats, Inc., while in the minors, and was working towards a master's degree in statistics before he got the call up to the majors. In his playing days, Fuld would study his opponents more deeply than just the mainstream metrics of a pitcher's strikeouts and walks, checking key peripheral stats like the groundball/flyball ratio against that opponent's heater. "That told me a lot about fastball characteristics," he said.

That resumé made Fuld an ideal candidate for sharing complex data with players. But it didn't quite prepare him for the day in spring training in Florida this year when he had to teach the Phillies players about advanced stats because, well, he had never needed to use PowerPoint before. "Hopefully I'm a lot better PowerPointer by the end of this year," he said with a laugh.

Still, his message appears to have gotten through: Philadelphia's offense has shown marked improvement in the two obscure hitting stats the coaching staff emphasized: wOBA and wRC+. Phillies' pitchers, meanwhile, were surprised to discover just how effective certain overlooked pitches in their repertoire actually were.

Fuld is among the leaders of a new breed of baseball coach: an analytics translator. The advent of Statcast's radar- and camera-tracking technology in 2015 exponentially increased the number of measurable actions on the field. Data now governs decision-making throughout every organization, from lineup construction to player evaluation. But that knowledge doesn't always filter downwards.

"Front offices spend so much time looking at this information that it's almost assumed that everybody knows it," Fuld said. "Players just have a rough idea unless you go out of your way to search that information.

"We're all very flawed as humans in our ability to accurately measure how much we throw a pitch or how well we hit against it."

As recently as three years ago, I conducted an informal survey around the major leagues and found that shockingly little of the voluminous advanced data collected and studied by front offices actually reached the players. The Pirates had the most visible integration, although data-minded clubs like the Astros and the Rays had good communication lines in place, too.

A scan of 2018 organizational directories, however, shows the proliferation of these data-minded coaching roles. The Dodgers employ game planning/communications coach Danny Lehmann, the Rays tabbed Rocco Baldelli as major league field coordinator, the Pirates list Bob Cook as major league quantitative analyst, the Astros employ major league advance information coordinator Tommy Kawamura; and the Red Sox have dubbed Ramon Vazquez as its liaison.

In 2016, the Astros created a development coach role called for a couple minor league affiliates, hiring Kawamura and Aaron DelGiudice. Mickey Storey and Jason Bell were embedded with Houston's farm teams in 2017, as was the organization's top analyst, Sig Mejdal—the right-hand man of general manager Jeff Luhnow. Mejdal formerly held the exotic title of "director of decision sciences" but now is a special assistant to the GM for process improvement. He immersed himself with the Class A Tri-City Valley Cats last summer and is doing the same with the Double A Corpus Christi Hooks this season.

According to Luhnow, the job description for those development coach roles included just two requirements: "They had to be able to throw batting practice, and they had to be able to understand SQL." (SQL is a programming language used for managing databases.)

The cross section of those candidates was small. "We found all of them," Luhnow said.

The task for the new employees was to take the innovation coming out of the Astros' front office in Houston and help implement advanced data in the minors. The Astros' farm teams became "learning laboratories," the GM said, to test efficacy of different ideas and to familiarize the players and staff with the concepts before reaching the majors.

"Now we have a roster of hitting coaches and pitching coaches that are very technologically capable," Luhnow said. "In fact, they're pushing a lot of the advancement now."

 *****

Sent from my iPhone