Wren and Coppolella Talk Stats and Scouting at Georgia Tech
February 13, 2012 at 8:08 pm by Ben Duronio under Atlanta Braves, Front Office
Frank Wren and John Coppolella (Director of Professional Scouting) spoke at Georgia Tech today, where a colleague of mine over at Fangraphs, Albert Lyu, happens to attend school. Albert’s twitter (@thinkbluecrew) has all the meaningful quotes he heard while in attendance.
Coppolella, if you had not already known, is one of the most statistically inclined members of the front office. He is huge on scouting also, which is obviously necessary as the director of professional scouting, and Eno Sarris, also of Fangraphs, conducted an interview with Coppolella from before the 2011 season. That should give you a good background of who exactly Coppolella is.
They had some very interesting things to say today, especially for readers of this blog. As known, this is one of the more statistically inclined blogs, and hearing two executives in the organization speak about statistics is certainly something noteworthy for those who find this blog interesting.
They use WAR, Coppolella said, and they tend to use Fangraphs WAR due to how often they visit the site. It is gratifying that the guys in charge of the team we all follow visit the same site that we reference here so often and that you likely frequent. There is tons of great information on Fangraphs, and we now know that Houston’s GM, Jeff Luhnow, and the front office in Atlanta use the website as reference tools. I expected that was the truth and I am sure many of you also did, after all this is what they do for their full-time jobs.
Coppolella also referenced a statistic they use called DOM, which is strikeouts over walks plus hits. The statistic does not exactly sound revolutionary and I am sure they use it as a single tool — not an end-all-be-all metric — just like we do with many of the stats we often use. Joe over at Chop-N-Change did the calculations, and it seems to be a pretty decent stat when looking at who was on top and who was on bottom. I personally had not heard of the stat, but apparently it is used in some fantasy leagues, specifically on Baseball HQ.
Worth noting also that they mentioned FIP, which has been one of the stats of choice on this blog for quite some time. Again, no stat tells all, but a lot have value — it is good to see that this is one of the numbers they feel is valuable. The audience was Georgia Tech students, many of whom likely do not get into this type of statistical analysis, so I am sure they have more in depth numbers that they felt would be difficult to explain people new to sabermetrics.
The rest of the quotes can be seen on Albert’s twitter. They speak about how difficult scouting is, what they thought of the Moneyball movie, and other interesting things you would like to hear from a front office. The Braves are definitely more stats-heavy than a lot give them credit for. They understand the importance of scouting and developing players using methods they have used for decades, but they also understand that in order to succeed in an evolutionary business that adapting is necessary.
Loading ...
Very interesting that Wren and Coppolella were able to take the time for this. Would have been fascinating to hear but I’m glad the information was able to passed along through twitter.
Also good to know the FO very welcoming to sabermetric stats. I know a guy who works as director of regional scouting in the system but haven’t been able to pick his brain lately about some of these types of things (he was very pitching geared) Definitely one of the “old school” guys though who wasn’t big into breaking down stats himself. Guess thats what the guys like Coppolella are for.
Anyways, good write up!
I should say that the class is titled “Sports Analytics” and is a one-credit class at Tech and students are encouraged to take on an end-of-semester project — attendance is required, so every class (once a week) is simply a speaker event.
Wren was specifically asked by the professor to come out to speak, and that he said yes and brought John along too, to me, says a lot about their openness to stats as well as willingness to take time out of their busy schedules to connect with students.
Yet they continue to support Fredi; who is clearly an old school guy.
Didn’t Fredi attend SABR one year? I don’t think Fredi is straight old school at all. I just don’t think he gets it…
How advanced is Bloomberg Sports Analytics? I would imagine Bloomberg’s more professional nature would appeal to Front Office individuals, but I have no idea if it contains the more cutting edge stats.
Albert, you should of asked if they read CAC as well.
It’s gratifying that there are people in the Braves organization who use analytics, but the organization still seems to make a lot of decisions that fly in the face of what analytics would tell them. To name just a few, the reacquisition of Matt Diaz, and giving significant playing time to Constanza. One baseball web site, I believe it was Hardball Talk, recently ranked organizations into three categories, analytically inclined organizations, old school organizations, and those that were somewhere inbetween. The Braves were ranked as an old school organization.
In my opinion, though the Braves may have people who are well versed in analytics, they need to make more use of those techniques in player use and acquisition.
I go to GT, how did I not hear about this?!?
Good to hear that FanGraphs is used as a reference in the FO.
damn management majors get all the best classes. And here i thought i was the only GT kid that paid attention to these stats while at school. Hopefully they will start listening more to these stats and less about wins, average, rbis
How are the reacquisition of matt diaz and playing constanza evidence that the braves aren’t in touch with sabermetric principles or stats?
I guess this class came about in the 8 years since I graduated.
[...] Braves have a reputation among fans as a relatively traditional front office, but that may be a bit misleading. Of course, every team in baseball utilizes some degree of “objective analysis,” but [...]