Red Sox owner says team will rely less on analytics after last place finishes
After back-to-back last place finishes, Red Sox owner John Henry said his team will rely less on analytics going forward.
By
Mike Axisa
•
2 min read
The last few seasons have been very interesting for the Red Sox. I guess interesting is the right word. They won the World Series in 2013, but that is also their only postseason trip since 2009. Boston has finished in last place in each of the last two years and three times in the last four years, plus they had that monumental collapse in 2011.
With each passing season, that World Series title becomes more of an outlier in the Red Sox's recent history. The club brought in former Tigers GM Dave Dombrowski to run their baseball operations last August, signaling a significant change in the front office structure. GM Ben Cherington, who had been with the team since 1999, stepped down.
On Wednesday, team owner John Henry told reporters the Red Sox will rely less on analytics going forward as they look to erase their recent string of disappointing seasons. From Nick Cafardo of the Boston Globe:
“I spent at least two months looking under the hood, and I came to the conclusion we needed to make some changes,” said Henry, who also owns the Globe. “One of the things we’ve done — and I’m fully accountable for this — is we have perhaps overly relied on numbers, and there were a whole host of things.
“We have a very hands-on president of baseball operations [Dave Dombrowski] and a general manager [Mike Hazen] who worked extremely well together. We have made significant changes. The biggest thing is players on the field have to perform.”
...
“Perhaps there was too much reliance on past performance and trying to project future performance. That obviously hasn’t worked in three of the last four years.”
The Red Sox are not scrapping their analytics department entirely -- that would be foolish -- they're just going to deemphasize stats and give more credence to old school scouting.
Interestingly, Henry made his fortune in hedge funds using data analysis -- "Over the years, we’ve had success relying on numbers, but that has never been the whole story," he said to Cafardo -- and the Red Sox themselves had a lot of success using statistical analysis from 2003 through 2009 or so. The last few seasons have been different.
Dombrowski has a reputation for being an old school executive who relies on scouts over stats, and while that's true, he's not oblivious to the analytics either. No successful executive is. Dombrowski blends stats and scouts as well as anyone. Henry feels the Red Sox have skewed too far on the analytics side.
Every team in baseball has a statistical analysis department these days, though some are more invested than others.
