A Tale of Two Baseball Successes: Red Sox Value Sabermetric Stats, Twins Eschew Them
There are fewer playoff spots in Major League Baseball than any other major North American leagues, but even in 2010, there are still many ways to secure them. Consider the divergent approaches the Boston Red Sox and Minnesota Twins are taking.
The Red Sox are focusing on defense this year, writes Amalie Benjamin, because Theo Epstein and the rest of the Red Sox brass saw that as their easiest road to improvement. The Sox have stellar pitching and an above-average lineup, but Jason Bay, Jacoby Ellsbury, and Mike Lowell were no great shakes with their gloves. Enter Mike Cameron and Adrian Beltre, two defensive whizzes who do enough at the plate to have decent shots at approximating the production of Bay together and can shore up spots that have been defensive liabilities.
The Sox have enough talent to win a World Series, and they’ve stayed highly competitive in the brutal AL East by making smart moves for years. The much-maligned J.D. Drew has been an on-base machine since a terrible 2007; homegrown products like Jon Lester and Kevin Youkilis have matured nicely; stockpiling talent allowed the Sox the flexibility to swing a trade for Victor Martinez last summer and still have enough left over to be considered a strong candidate to land Adrian Gonzalez.
Boston maximizes its advantages, like a big budget, Fenway’s dimensions -- it’s no accident Bay and Manny Ramirez, both below-average fielders, were stashed in left field where their mistakes were mitigated -- and faster, fuller adoption of advanced metrics, and the Red Sox have done the latter well enough to convince one of the more obstinately stat-averse sportswriters in America to give sabermetrics a look.
Oh, and they’ve built an organization that can run out a World Series contender every year.
The Twins do that, too. They just do it without the stats.
Rob Neyer highlights a Sports Illustrated article on sabermetrics' growing appeal in baseball, and notes that the Twins lag behind. Their front office doesn't know too much about the metrics, and doesn't seem to do more than pay lip service to the idea of factoring them into personnel decisions. And yet, Neyer picks them to win the AL Central. So would I.
That’s because the Twins have been stockpiling talent in their own way, drafting Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau and Scott Baker, acquiring Francisco Liriano and Joe Nathan for A.J. Pierzynski in one of the Aughts’ more lopsided trades, and picking up J.J. Hardy and Jim Thome this winter to add pop to a lineup that hit the fewest homers of AL playoff teams last season, but led the majors in singles.
They have been the class of the AL Central for almost a decade because they’ve been able to stay marginally better than the rest of a division that usually has a clunker or two. And winning that division gives the Twins a World Series lottery ticket every bit as valid as the one earned in the more arduous AL East.
If forced to pick between the two strategies, regardless of salary concerns and divisional competition, I’d side with the Red Sox’s more exhaustive method every time: The Sox don’t eschew the scouting and observation-based evaluation the Twins do, they just combine it with the smarts of people who analyze baseball differently.
But both work. Still, after all these years, there’s more than one way to play winning baseball.
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This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.
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