Scape Goat TRTT Part 5: A Good Day to Ken Hard

[CharlieKelly]

One Astros player I am absolutely stoked to see win a World Series: Evan Gattis

This time ten years ago, he was a janitor for an IT company, then he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for anxiety, depression and substance abuse. His dad picked him up, as he was driving him home, talked him into playing baseball again. Got drafted in the 23rd round by the Braves in 2010. Now he's a World Series champ. Much love and respect to this bloke.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Gattis

 

[edgie]

Oh s**t. Thought it was you who was driven nuts by Finn's over-exuberance and "whoahs" in TFA? Hell, it was someone in this thread, lol..

I was driven nuts by inappropriate lines and humour at bad times, not woahs, but you might be thinking of me.

 

[edgie]

******* hell Magpiespower I can't stop watching this

 

[Magpiespower]

******* hell Magpiespower I can't stop watching this

Haha, yeah I love it. Also, I'm a big Hall & Oates fan. My late brother-in-law was a dead ringer for John Oates, lol...

 

[chiwigi]

Vans v Converse?

I've always been a Vans man but...

Converse, unless you are 12.

 

[bomberclifford]

Vans

Converse, unless you are 12.

lol

 

[Dylan8]

Hate 2 inform you old chumps but when I was 12 only girls liked Converse.

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

Regardless of what side of the political fence these pollies are from it's getting a bit ridiculous that someone who was born in Australia, and has convict ancestory on his mother's side that goes back to the mid 1800's is judged to have dual citizen ship because his old man came to this country when he was a kid under the 10 pound pom scheme 60 odd years ago.

Yet someone like Don Cameron, who struggled to talk without spitting when he was a union leader is apparently a dinky di Aussie.

That's the law - constitution - and the high court for you. Practical common sense has no say. I reckon if you look at a few past prime ministers and plenty of members of parliament pre 1970's they would fail the test. There was still a fair bit of the ( ex 1st Canadian PM Sir John A McDonald's) British subject I was born, a British subject I will die mentality pre 1960's in Oz politics.

 

[Pappagallo]

You’re not cool unless you’re wearing LA Lights.

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

Regardless of what side of the political fence these pollies are from it's getting a bit ridiculous that someone who was born in Australia, and has convict ancestory on his mother's side that goes back to the mid 1800's is judged to have dual citizen ship because his old man came to this country when he was a kid under the 10 pound pom scheme 60 odd years ago.

Yet someone like Don Cameron, who struggled to talk without spitting when he was a union leader is apparently a dinky di Aussie.

That's the law - constitution - and the high court for you. Practical common sense has no say. I reckon if you look at a few past prime ministers and plenty of members of parliament pre 1970's they would fail the test. There was still a fair bit of the ( ex 1st Canadian PM Sir John A McDonald's) British subject I was born, a British subject I will die mentality pre 1960's in Oz politics.

 

[manureid]

You’re not cool unless you’re wearing LA Lights.

Aerosport dude

 

[Contested Marx]

Aerosport dude

Year 9. Aerosports. Had a friend who wore the same. Didn't feel so bad about it.

Year 10. He's wearing nike. I'm still wearing (new) Aerosports.

 

[powermacs]

Hate 2 inform you old chumps but when I was 12 only girls liked Converse.

You’re not 12??

 

[Dylan8]

You’re not 12??

no

 

[Trewth]

British Knights

 

[Visenfest]

You’re not 12??

no

Liar.

 

[Dylan8]

World Industries

 

[Steve Dore]

You’re not cool unless you’re wearing LA Lights.

Well that would be much healthier than smoking them.

 

[Doctor Feel]

In walks a redeployee from Holden. Turns out the government just handed out jobs to ex-holden employees. Not sure how I feel about this.

 

[Visenfest]

In walks a redeployee from Holden. Turns out the government just handed out jobs to ex-holden employees. Not sure how I feel about this.

Is it a role he/she has at least been trained for, or have they been more or less thrown in?

 

[El Zorro]

Yet someone like Don Cameron, who struggled to talk without spitting when he was a union leader is apparently a dinky di Aussie.

How are these two things mutually exclusive?

 

[Grave Danger]

Astros win, first ever World Series title

Check the date on this Sports Illustrated cover:

Are we going "beyond moneyball" with our pick-ups this off season...?

 

[Eddie Dingle]

Converse, unless you are 12.

Decision was taken out of my hands as they found a pair of vans in my size.

Guess I am a 12 year old boy who doesn't wear cargo shorts.

But I am possessed to skate!!

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

Check the date on this Sports Illustrated cover:

Are we going "beyond moneyball" with our pick-ups this off season...?

Here is the article from the SI Vault 30 June 2014. Front cover player is George Springer - he hit his 4th consecutive world series championship series games home run earlier today. First man to ever do so and joins the great NY Yankee of the 1970's Reggie Jackson in hitting 5 home runs in the world series championship series games as he hit a home run in game 2 when Houston won 7-6, and his homer was in the 11th innings and it was a two-run home run hit.

Author Ben Reiter would have been happy tonight.

Astro-Matic Baseball: Houston's Grand Experiment
There are rebuilding projects ... and there's what the Astros are trying: an unprecedented burn-the-house-down overhaul. There are innovative front offices ... and there is Houston's, which includes a Nerd Cave led by a former blackjack dealer turned rocket scientist. Can it work? By October 2017, it might seem silly to ask By Ben Reiter

IN THE late 1980s, when people got too drunk and were kicked out of the other casinos in Lake Tahoe, they ended up at High Sierra, a place where there was no such thing as being too drunk. Sometimes they staggered over to a blackjack table manned by a young dealer named Sig Mejdal.

Mejdal was an undergraduate at UC Davis, studying mechanical engineering and aeronautical engineering. During the summers he'd head 120 miles west, clip an oversized bow tie to his collar—"Looked like a dead cat around your neck," he says—and sling cards at Tahoe's seediest betting house. He loved the job. It was fun, it was social, and he learned things that he could not back in the lab at Davis. He learned that human beings do not always make decisions that serve their own long-term self-interest, even when they are equipped with a wealth of experience and knowledge of the mathematical probabilities that ought to guide their choices.

Blackjack is a probabilistic game. For any combination of cards, the player's and the dealer's, there is an optimal action for the player to take to increase his chances of winning—or, as is generally the case, of losing less. Sometimes the course of action is obvious: You hit a 10 no matter what the dealer is holding. Often, though, players know what they ought to do—but they do something else because their intuition has told them to. "Hitting a 16 against a dealer's seven, it doesn't feel right," Mejdal says. "With a hundred-dollar bet, it feels even less right. But that doesn't mean it isn't right."

Sometimes players would ask other dealers what they ought to do with a difficult hand. The dealer would, without meaning to, offer the wrong advice. "This person sees a million hands a year, with immediate feedback," Mejdal says. "I thought that illustrated well the limitations of human capabilities"

Mejdal, who is now 48 and married with a stepson, would go on to earn two master's degrees from San Jose State, in operations research and cognitive psychology. He would perform research for NASA in which, essentially, he disproved the perceived utility of napping. All along, though, Mejdal's mathematically driven career had stemmed from his passion for the most mathematically driven of sports: baseball. In 2003, when he was 37, he read Michael Lewis's Moneyball, and he realized that there might be a place in the game for someone like him.

Soon Mejdal was sending out résumés and proposals in an attempt to land his dream job. He traveled to the 2003 winter meetings, in New Orleans, hoping to get a general manager's attention. Finally, in '04, one of his pitches caught the eye of a baseball executive whose CV was almost as unusual as his: Jeff Luhnow, who had joined the front office of the Cardinals the year before.

Like Mejdal, Luhnow had two undergraduate degrees (in chemical engineering and economics, from Penn), as well as a master's (an M.B.A. from Northwestern) and a varied professional career. He had designed suits intended to protect troops from nuclear, biological and chemical warfare. He had helped start an Internet business, PetStore.com, and another that produced customized apparel on a large scale. He had also spent five years as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, and he believed that one engagement (in the company's parlance) he'd worked on there had prepared him for his job in baseball more than any other. The project involved advising one of the world's largest casino operators.

"I learned a lot about how the gaming industry works, and about probabilities," says Luhnow, a trim 48-year-old with neat gray hair. "How if you have a large number of occurrences, even though luck is involved, you can still make things pretty predictable. For the player, when you do start to follow your gut, or you've had a couple drinks and think you've seen a lot of 10s, you're just basically giving the house back some money. The odds are the odds."

Luhnow hired Mejdal to run the franchise's new analytics department in 2005, around the same time that Luhnow was elevated to director of amateur scouting. Over the next seven seasons the Cardinals would draft more players who became big leaguers than any other organization. Of the 25 players on the team's World Series roster last October, 16 were drafted under Luhnow's watch. But he was not in St. Louis to see the Series, because in December '11 the new owner of the Astros, Jim Crane, hired him to be Houston's general manager.

Luhnow brought Mejdal aboard to be his director of decision sciences. The new director of amateur scouting was Mike Elias, a 31-year-old Yale graduate who had worked in the Cardinals' scouting department. The new assistant GM would be David Stearns, a 29-year-old Harvard graduate who had most recently worked for the Indians. The new director of pro scouting would be Kevin Goldstein, who had been a respected writer for Baseball Prospectus but had never worked in pro baseball.


The job facing Luhnow was different from the one he'd faced in St. Louis. There he had to keep a healthy organization healthy. In Houston he was asked to figure out how to defibrillate a club that was dying.

The Astros reached the World Series in 2005, but in '10 they finished at least 10 games below .500 for the third time in four years. In '11 they went 56--106, their worst record to that point. Their club's longtime core was gone—Lance Berkman and Roy Oswalt had been traded; Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio had retired. Worse, the farm promised no quick replenishments. Before the 2010 season, Baseball America ranked Houston's minor league system as the game's worst.

Luhnow and his men envisioned a decision tree, with that 56-win team at its roots and a sustainable championship club at its tip. Their only goal, with Crane's blessing, was to reach the top as quickly as they could. That meant every decision they made, no matter how painful, would be based upon the probability that it would be helpful in the long term. They would, in other words, hit on 16 against a seven every time. "We didn't want to be mediocre for a decade," says Elias. "We wanted to be really good as soon as possible."

They would not make cosmetic decisions, such as wasting money on a free agent or hanging on to a veteran who might instead be converted into future assets, in an effort to keep up appearances. This was partly a financial decision: When Crane bought the team from Drayton McLane, it was running, sources say, an annual deficit in the tens of millions. Crane was not driven to spend more than necessary while the team was losing—a period he planned would last no longer than a few years.

"You look at how other organizations have done it, they've tried to maintain a .500 level as they prepare to be good in the future," says Luhnow. "That path is probably necessary in some markets. But it takes 10 years. Our fans have already been on this decline, from 2006 to 2011. It's not like we're starting fresh.

"Would it be the right strategy for somebody else who had a great farm system and up-and-coming players already at the big league level? No. But for us, it was. When you're in 2017, you don't really care that much about whether you lost 98 or 107 in 2012. You care about how close we are to winning a championship in 2017."

It is one thing to commit to only making decisions that will lead to a long-term goal, and another to figure out how to make those decisions. Blackjack is an exercise in hard probabilities. Evaluating baseball players is something else. Some information you can gather about a baseball player is hard: how fast he can throw a fastball, how quickly he can reach first base. But much of it is soft: how diligently he will work, how his power stroke might develop, how likely he is to become injured. "How do you combine the soft information with the hard information in a way that allows you to make the best decisions?" asks Luhnow. "That is the crux of what we're trying to do here."

They are trying to do it in a way that synthesizes quantitative and qualitative information about players. This represents an evolution from the processes that Billy Beane's A's used a decade ago—at least as they were described in Moneyball. "For all the wonders that the book did, the portrayal was a dichotomous one," says Mejdal. "It's either the scouts or the nerd in the corner of the room. But from the very beginning in St. Louis, Jeff framed it as an andquestion. The question was not which one to use, but how to combine them." The goal is to use all that information to produce a metric that will render a decision on a player as simple as the one in blackjack: hit or stay.

To that end Mejdal and his analytics team—which has grown to four and occupies a room in the Astros' offices that they have named the Nerd Cave and decorated with a Photoshopped image of scientists examining Vladimir Guerrero in mid-swing—created an evaluation system that boils down every piece of information the Astros have about prospects, and about every player for that matter, into a single language. The inputs include not only statistics but also information—much of it collected and evaluated by scouts—about a player's health and family history, his pitching mechanics or the shape of his swing, his personality. The system then runs regressions against a database that stretches back to at least 1997, when statistics for college players had just begun to be digitized. If scouts perceived past players to possess attributes similar to a current prospect, how did that prospect turn out? If a young pitcher's trunk rotates a bit earlier than is ideal, how likely were past pitchers with similar motions to get hurt?

The end result is expressed as a numerical projection which roughly translates into how many runs a player can be expected to produce compared with what the team is likely to have to pay him—a single value partly derived from a player's stats but mostly from scouting reports. "They're not asking us to be sabermetricians," says Ralph Bratton, a Texan with a thick white mustache who has spent a quarter century as an Astros scout. "They're asking us to do what we've always done." The twist is that Luhnow's front office processes that information differently and makes decisions largely based on the result—even when that result, like a directive to hit a 16, feels wrong.


The Astros' decisions since the end of 2011 seem to have genuine promise. The farm system is now ranked among the game's best. The major league team, buoyed by recent promotions of top prospects like outfielder George Springer (who energized the club with both his constant dance moves and his 13 home runs in his first 58 games) and first baseman Jon Singleton, went 15--14 in May, its first winning month since September 2010. Springer and Singleton have complemented holdovers like diminutive second baseman Jose Altuve (who is batting .336 with an AL-leading 26 steals), but more impressive has been the improvement of the young staff. Since May 1 the Astros have an ERA of 3.75, the league's sixth lowest, behind suddenly maturing starters like 26-year-old Dallas Keuchel (2.45), 24-year-old Jarred Cosart (2.84) and 24-year-old Brett Oberholtzer (3.32).

 

[Grave Danger]

Here is the article from the SI Vault 30 June 2014. Front cover player is George Springer - he hit his 4th consecutive world series championship series games home run earlier today. First man to ever do so and joins the great NY Yankee of the 1970's Reggie Jackson in hitting 5 home runs in the world series championship series games as he hit a home run in game 2 when Houston won 7-6, and his homer was in the 11th innings and it was a two-run home run hit.

Author Ben Reiter would have been happy tonight.

Astro-Matic Baseball: Houston's Grand Experiment
There are rebuilding projects ... and there's what the Astros are trying: an unprecedented burn-the-house-down overhaul. There are innovative front offices ... and there is Houston's, which includes a Nerd Cave led by a former blackjack dealer turned rocket scientist. Can it work? By October 2017, it might seem silly to ask By Ben Reiter

Hope we don't have to wait 3 years, although that would tie in nicely with our 150th