Question

Business Cases

The Business of Blue Jays Baseball

Baseball has long been called “America’s national pastime” with a long history of traditions such as large groups of scouts watching thousands of games to find players for their ball club. Commonly used statistics such as stolen bases, runs batted in, and batting averages that were typically used to evaluate players’ abilities and performances were becoming inadequate and poor gauges of potential.

The game changed with Sabermetrics, the use of advanced statistics to predict a player’s future performance. As the film Moneyball (based on an earlier book by the same name) ­emphasized, statistics—the “right” statistics—are crucial aspects of effective decision making in the sport of baseball. The central premise of Moneyball was that the collected wisdom of baseball insiders (players, managers, coaches, scouts, the front office) had pretty much been flawed almost from the onset of the game. Rigorous statistical analysis showed that on-base percentages and slugging percentages were better indicators of a player’s offensive potential.

It has turned the game of baseball into a game of number crunching. Take, for instance, Alex Anthopolous, the general manager of the Toronto Blue Jays. In 2013, he hired a baseball operations analyst to capitalize on Sabermetrics. He took a bold move in sending talented prospects to acquire R. A. Dickey, Mark Buehrle, Jose Reyes, and Melky Cabrera. Las Vegas odds had the Blue Jays as favourites to win the 2013 World Series. The Jays used an advanced metric called fWAR (Wins Above Replacement), a complete measure of a player’s contributions to his team. The WAR value indicates how many more wins the player contributed for his team than a replacement player would produce. The following table illustrates the projected fWAR in 2013 for the acquired star players and the actual 2013 data. It is not hard to see why the Jays did not make the playoffs.62

Player	Projected fWAR	Actual fWAR	Difference
R. A. Dickey	4.0	2.0	−2.0
Mark Buehrle	2.5	2.5	0.0
Jose Reyes	4.3	2.2	−1.9
Melky Cabrera	2.5	−0.9	−3.6

Source: “Toronto Blue Jays: Built to Win Yesterday,” Batting Leader, http://­battingleadoff.com/2014/01/09/toronto-blue-jays-builtto-win-yesterday/

The goal of all this number crunching? To make better decisions. Team managers want to allocate their limited payroll in the best way possible to help the team be a winner. The move to more systematic data usage can also be seen in college baseball. At this level, coaches have long used their faces (touching their ears, noses, and chins continually and constantly) to communicate pitch selection to the catcher. Now, however, hundreds of college teams at all levels have abandoned these body signals and are using a system in which the coach yells out a series of numbers. “The catcher decodes the sequence by looking at a chart tucked into a wristband—the kind football quarterbacks have worn since 1965—and then relays the information to the pitcher the way he always has.” Coaches say this approach is not only faster and more efficient, but it is not decipherable by opponents wanting to steal the signs. Since the method allows for many combinations that can mean many different pitches, the same number sequence will not be used for the rest of the game—and maybe not even for the rest of the season. The use of this kind of data analysis helps balance qualitative and quantitative decision making. It is not just the Blue Jays. The Edmonton Oilers and Toronto Maple Leafs have also begun working with advanced data analysis to make hockey decisions.

Questions

1. Is it appropriate for baseball managers to use only quantitative, objective criteria in evaluating their players? Why?
2. Describe how baseball front-office executives and college coaches could use each of the following to make better decisions: (a) rationality; (b) bounded rationality; and (c) intuition.
3. Can there be too much information in managing the business of baseball? Discuss.

Answer 1

1. I don’t think that it is appropriate for baseball managers to use only quantitative, objective criteria in evaluating their players. I believe that the personal feelings of the player matter to some degree, and have at least a minor effect on their performance during a game. Every single player has “off” games, a game where that player does not play to his or her fullest potential, and that needs to be factored in with every player in every single game that they play in.

2. Rationality could be used by managers to make the right plays at the right time. An example of this would be when the bases are loaded, you would most likely want the person with the record of the most homeruns under pressure to be at bat.

Bounded rationality could be used by managers to put in a pinch hitter when the bases are loaded, to almost guarantee a score for that play.

Intuition could be used, and is used, when switching players out between innings, especially after something bad happens to the team, such as a complete strike out for all three players at bat.

Evidence-based management is probably the hardest to relate to baseball, although I would say that a manager using evidence would use a certain pitcher’s pitch for the rest of the game, because it has been effective in the past.

3. I think that there are too many different variables that are at play in baseball to be able to reliably predict what will happen within a game to manage it effectively. Managers usually take up one type of thinking, whether it is linear or non-linear thinking, and use solely that type of decision making process when managing baseball. However, baseball, with all of its intricacies, needs to be looked at with both types of decision making processes.