MLB: How baseball has changed over the decade
By Bill Felber
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Part of what’s driving all this change in the way the game is played is a substantially expanded MLB front office structure. That change has taken two forms.
Until Billy Beane nurtured the concept, no major league front office devoted much time or energy to the statistical analysis of talent. Beane stole most of his ideas from Bill James, whose seminal 1980s work created the concept of SABRmetrics, as a defensive measure. Beane’s Oakland Athletics lacked the money to compete with his richer competitors on normal terms.
Within a few years, Beane clones – Dan Evans and Paul dePodesta in Los Angeles, J.P. Ricciardi in Toronto and Mark Shapiro in Cleveland – spread his gospel. The Boston Red Sox went the rest of baseball one better hiring Bill James himself as a consultant.
They didn’t all succeed, but within a few years virtually every big league team had come to the same conclusion: they needed to understand – and to at least some extent build their team around – stat analysis.
That realization led to the decade’s second major development: the creation of full departments tasked with developing game and lineup-related strategies that made statistical sense. Today, every team has such a department, and their influence is so profound that in some instances they have been accused of supplanting field managers as decision-makers.
Indeed, as the decade ends one of recurring points of debate is whether decisions once the sole province of the manager – who bats second, when a pitcher is replaced – are now being made by some suited Ivy League graduate nerd who never stood in a batter’s box at any level higher than Little League…and whether that’s a bad thing.