Front Office Fail

Dave Cameron writes about the if it would be a good idea to fire the Diamondbacks front office.

In a rare case of agreement, I’m actually with LaRussa and Stewart on the idea that they shouldn’t be fired simply because the team performed badly in 2016. The results of one season, whether positive or negative, don’t provide enough information about the quality of the decisions made, and especially not the quality of the decision makers.

But I think the Diamondbacks should clean house anyway.

If there’s one underlying theme in most of the analysis and commentary we publish here, it’s that good processes lead to good decisions more often than not, and we’re generally better off judging the quality of a decision by the information available at the time rather than using hindsight to try and guess whether a person accurately predicted the future. To Stewart and LaRussa’s point, this wasn’t an obviously foreseeable result of the 2016 Diamondbacks season.

As the article goes on, however, we find plenty of problems with the process. After discussing the poor decisions of Tony La Russa and Dave Stewart:

On their own, these issues could be waved away, especially if there was an obvious strength that this group brought to the table, but the collective pattern shows that the Diamondbacks current front office simply doesn’t value baseball players the same way the rest of baseball does, and they’ve yet to show that their valuations are regularly more correct than the rest of the league. Sure, they’ve got Jean Segura as a feather in their cap after he’s run a .360 BABIP to reestablish himself as a big leaguer, but by and large, the limbs they’ve gone out on have broken underneath their weight.

This Diamondbacks front office has essentially set themselves up as something like renegades relative to the current trends in MLB. There’s nothing wrong with zigging when everyone else zags if you’ve actually got some interesting ideas and can find ways to exploit deficiencies in the market. But, realistically, what competitive advantage should the Diamondbacks believe that their current front office has been trying to exploit by going against baseball consensus the last few years?

The idea that defense isn’t important? That’s been proven wrong. That evaluating pitchers by ERA is still a good plan? That’s not working out so well. That a team’s baseline expectation for the future is simply the number of games they won the year before, plus some upwards adjustment to account for the offseason acquisitions? That isn’t how baseball works.

Cameron nails it right there. I was somewhat surprised when Tony La Russa took over that he wanted to go more old school than most of the front offices in baseball. Given that he came from the Athletics and the Cardinals, two organizations known for their front office analysis, I thought La Russa would be on board with that type of analysis. He’s not Pat Gillick, who didn’t like the computer part of Moneyball but could do the same thing in his head. La Russa found out the hard way that the rest of baseball knows what it is doing.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2bcyk7Z