Towers: “Cash Does It The Right Way”

Last week, Ken Rosenthal published a fascinating article on how the Moneyball philosophy continues to impact the game. One prominent passage discussed Brian Cashman’s efforts to implement changes to keep pace with the Red Sox:

The Yankees, a perennial post-season qualifier, also held low draft positions. When Cashman secured more power before the 2006 season, one of his goals was to improve the team’s farm system. At the time, the feeling among many rival executives was that the Red Sox were about to blow right past the Yankees.

Cashman, in his quest to play catch-up, hired Joe Kerrigan, the Red Sox’s former pitching coach and manager who had been replaced at the outset of the Henry regime.

“How they approached their pitching program was of interest to me,” Cashman says. “I was throwing out much more (pitching) talent than the Red Sox had and they were having more success. It goes to execution, game plans, stuff like that.”

Cashman’s shift toward statistical analysis caused friction with then-manager Joe Torre, who said in his book, “The Yankee Years,” that he told the GM to remember the human element, and “never forget that there’s a heartbeat in this game.”

Joe Girardi replaced Torre before the 2008 season. The Yankees won the World Series in ’09. And today, they are among the most aggressive teams on the statistical side, with more than 20 people working on analytics, according to Cashman. The A’s, by contrast, employ one such person — “and he has a host of other duties,” Beane says.

Diamondbacks GM Kevin Towers, who worked a special assignment scout for the Yankees last season, says he was impressed that Cashman leans on not only a group of analysts led by Michael Fishman, a Yale graduate who is the team’s director of quantitative analysis, but also on top baseball people such as Billy Eppler, the team’s pro scouting director, and Gene Michael, a special adviser who is a former player, manager and GM.

“Cash does it the right way,” Towers says. “The way he works the room in meetings, it works. If he wants the analytical view, he asks (the analysts) a question and they provide the information. They usually only speak when asked.

“With the Yankees, it’s not, ‘these guys and us.’ They’re all kind of one.”

I strongly encourage you to read the entire article.

Cashman’s way of doing things is both savvy and prudent. While statistics do measure performance and help give a general picture of things such as player value, there are plenty of holes in the statistical record where things cannot be quantified. For example, as highlighted in a number of sabermetric articles this season, catcher defense is a largely untapped statistical field, such that scouting is likely ahead of the metrics we have in terms of determining value.

Furthermore, while sabermetrics can often tell us what is happening, it is more difficult to divine why it is happening from the numbers. While we can look at the myriad numbers available to us to determine that Pitcher X is struggling, and we may even be able to pinpoint a particular pitch that is failing, scouting can tell a GM why it is failing and whether it can be fixed. A savvy GM should use statistics and scouting in unison to accurately explain and analyze a player’s performance using all of the information available to him. From Kevin Towers’ description, it seems that Brian Cashman does in fact do things the right way.