Sam Fuld: The synthesis of player and stat geek

Sam Fuld is the synthesis of the on-field and stat analysis sides of a front office  

The Philadelphia Phillies’ hiring of Sam Fuld as general manager may mark a sort of ‘third wave’ synthesis of approaches in the way major league front offices operate.

Fuld is a former player who is also experienced in analytical approaches to team-building. That gives him recognition from and appreciation for both the scouting and SABRmetric divisions that operate in mutual tension within some major league front offices.

For much of the latter half of the 20th Century, MLB front offices were run by former players. In the 1990s alone, 15 teams hired general managers who had big league experience on their resumes.

Some, like Al Rosen in San Francisco and Billy Beane in Oakland, were successful. But many of the best players — Dal Maxvill in St. Louis, Ted Simmons in Pittsburgh, and Bob Watson in Houston — were not.

But when Beane succeeded by adopting a more SABRmetric approach to team building, the pendulum swung hard. In assuming his job with the Phillies, Fuld becomes only the third former player to be employed as a major league GM. The others are Jerry DiPoto in Seattle and Chris Young, recently hired as general manager of the Texas Rangers.

In stark contrast, 23 of the 30 current general managers hold bachelors and/or advanced degrees from private colleges, including nine from Ivy League institutions. Fuld, with a degree in economics from Stanford, is among the 23.

Beyond that, he is the only one of the 30 with legitimate credentials both on the field and in what might be termed the Theory of Baseball. He played eight years with four teams, after which he was hired by the Phillies to be their player information coordinator and then director of integrative baseball performance.

Both jobs essentially involved ensuring that the approaches developed by the analytical nerds got effectively meshed and integrated into the dugout. He was, in short, the bridge between the organization’s brains and brawn.

There is of course no guarantee that Fuld’s hiring will mark a movement away from front office dominance by the analysts and toward something more harmonically balanced. But he is the perfect candidate to lead such a synthesis. In fact, the trend may have started a few weeks ago with the Rangers’ hiring of Young, who comes to the job with both a big league resume and a degree in politics from Princeton.

But Young doesn’t quite synthesize the potentially conflicting elements of front office planning because he has never worked in the analytical side of a front office. Prior to being hired as the Texas GM, he worked in the commissioner’s office.

If Sam Fuld’s hiring is to be the start of a trend toward the synthesis of scouting and analytics into a ‘third wave’ conjunction, the first step will take place when teams weave former players into their analytics operations. Only a small number of teams have done that on a meaningful basis to date.