If Braves serious about cleaning up mess, they'll make changes at top

Huh...

"The Braves essentially fired general manager John Coppolella, but as in most walks of life where an executive is canned, there are people north of him desperately trying to deflect blame and hold onto their jobs."

Sound familiar? Has anyone on this board been saying exactly the same thing since this story broke? Hmmmm...

The most likely best case scenario for all of Braves country is Hart hires a yes-man GM/assistant, or nobody at all. Since they have no money to upgrade the roster, this team loses 85-90 games again, resulting in a total attendance of less than 2.5M in 2018. The horribly low revenue production will get Hart and his lackies canned.

Then the Braves will be free to hire an intelligent GM fit to run a modern MLB franchise in the 21st century...complete with computers, spreadsheets, databases, and a merry band of nerds to run it all (giving Glavine and Joe Simpson simultaneous annuerisms). Someone like McLeod who will hopefully bring in a manager who isn't stuck in the 1990s. Someone like Dave Martinez.

Then, and only then, will the Braves be able to compete with teams that currently have far superior think tanks in house.
 
Is it really that big of a mess? We've still got a farm full of good young players and a new stadium. Seem like more a PR mess than anything.
 
Enscheff said:
Huh...

"The Braves essentially fired general manager John Coppolella, but as in most walks of life where an executive is canned, there are people north of him desperately trying to deflect blame and hold onto their jobs."

Sound familiar? Has anyone on this board been saying exactly the same thing since this story broke? Hmmmm...

The most likely best case scenario for all of Braves country is Hart hires a yes-man GM/assistant, or nobody at all. Since they have no money to upgrade the roster, this team loses 85-90 games again, resulting in a total attendance of less than 2.5M in 2018. The horribly low revenue production will get Hart and his lackies canned.

Then the Braves will be free to hire an intelligent GM fit to run a modern MLB franchise in the 21st century...complete with computers, spreadsheets, databases, and a merry band of nerds to run it all (giving Glavine and Joe Simpson simultaneous annuerisms). Someone like McLeod who will hopefully bring in a manager who isn't stuck in the 1990s. Someone like Dave Martinez.

Then, and only then, will the Braves be able to compete with teams that currently have far superior think tanks in house.
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Would you be up for the job? You've had all the answers from the beginning and are clearly smarter than everyone here.
 
IslandBrave said:
Would you be up for the job? You've had all the answers from the beginning and are clearly smarter than everyone here.
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I'm not sure how he would be as a people person lol. But honestly if we are just going off advanced analysis of the game, Enscheff could probably do a decent job in some sort of role. I know how absurd that sounds, that someone off a message board could do something that people commit their entire lives too. But as abrasive as some on here find him, you can't deny the fact that he does have a really good mind for modern baseball. I also think guys like nsacpi and thewupk have similarly good minds for the game.
 
Uh, John Hart winning this power struggle wouldn't be as bad as people may think it is. It'd be John Schuerholz winning it that'd be horrible. He at least is admitting that analytics have to be taken into account and if he wins he's going to appoint a bench coach in the dugout that takes analytics into account with the bullpen/lineup/etc to help Snitker who seems to understand they're important but doesn't know how to use them (which is why Pendleton might get fired, if he doesn't agree to do this he'll get fired). But it would be a both worlds approach, not fully into analytics.

John Schuerholz wins? Woo boy, there'd be trouble. I don't care if he actually DOES have respect around the league (he might not even if Jeff Wren is 50% false), I don't want to deal with his nepotism and you can basically forget it with ANY analytics being factored into account. It's not really a case in which he'd be fired either, Terry McGuirk is a puppet that doesn't seem to care (he literally just said "No comment" on this saga). If the investigation doesn't get John Schuerholz forced out, he's going to stick around and be forcing back on some decisions until the day of his death.
 
I don't think anything is going to happen until the league comes down with their findings. It's just wait and see now.

Hart gave one vanilla statement about us being happy with where we are and I think that's all we're going to hear until then.
 
BeanieAntics said:
I'm not sure how he would be as a people person lol. But honestly if we are just going off advanced analysis of the game, Enscheff could probably do a decent job in some sort of role. I know how absurd that sounds, that someone off a message board could do something that people commit their entire lives too. But as abrasive as some on here find him, you can't deny the fact that he does have a really good mind for modern baseball. I also think guys like nsacpi and thewupk have similarly good minds for the game.
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Yes, an excellent idea. They should hire message board sociopaths to staff important roles. That most certainly would improve overall team discipline, leadership, professionalism, chemistry and cohesion. In other words, characteristics usually required to build a championship calibre team. Oh, wait...those factors can't be tracked on Excel!
 
BeanieAntics said:
I'm not sure how he would be as a people person lol. But honestly if we are just going off advanced analysis of the game, Enscheff could probably do a decent job in some sort of role. I know how absurd that sounds, that someone off a message board could do something that people commit their entire lives too. But as abrasive as some on here find him, you can't deny the fact that he does have a really good mind for modern baseball. I also think guys like nsacpi and thewupk have similarly good minds for the game.
Click to expand...

nsacpi thought the Braves would win 85 games this year. He's one of my favorite posters, but no one in their right mind thought that was realistic.

Enscheff didn't know about our board's PM system.

thewupk is terrible at Spanish.

All of those are terrible choices.
 
Something exciting happened this past summer. A close relative was hired as an intern for a major league team and got to work with their analytics team. He apparently made a good impression and has been told he has a good chance to be hired full-time next year.

Anyhow, he told me that the mostly young people in the analytics team are given a surprising amount of responsibility. The guy he worked with most closely has only been there a couple years and has a group of teams (4) that he is responsible for compiling information on and analyzing all of their prospects in case there is a trade with one of those teams. One of his assigned teams was the Braves. I was happy to share my thoughts on the Braves system with my close relative. I felt somewhat conflicted and sleazy about this. But fortunately there were no transactions this past summer between the Braves and this team.

My observation from this admittedly limited view of the inner workings of a major league team is that the board members around here who take the trouble to follow our minor league system closely could definitely contribute information that a non-Braves team would find of value. I'm less sure of whether anyone posting here can contribute something new in terms of analysis of major league talent, but this is just a reflection of the fact that my relative did not see much of the analysis on that side of the business.
 
Tapate50 said:
Clean house. Hart, JS, etc... all gots to go.
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The problem (not really the right term) with that is that if you do "clean house", whomever's left when the dust settles - likely McGuirk - has to give complete control and authority to the new "Honcho" to finish the teardown and the authority to immediately trade Freeman and Ender for the right offers. If you're going to go that route (not arguing you shouldn't) DMGM becomes the guy you want even more. Bringing him in likely allows you to retain the vast majority of scouting and player development personnel you're interested in keeping even if the "Good Ol' Boys" are shown the door because many of them still have somewhat loose ties to Dayton. There are quite a few of people at those lower levels you don't want to lose.
 
nsacpi said:
Something exciting happened this past summer. A close relative was hired as an intern for a major league team and got to work with their analytics team. He apparently made a good impression and has been told he has a good chance to be hired full-time next year.

Anyhow, he told me that the mostly young people in the analytics team are given a surprising amount of responsibility. The guy he worked with most closely has only been there a couple years and has a group of teams (4) that he is responsible for compiling information on and analyzing all of their prospects in case there is a trade with one of those teams. One of his assigned teams was the Braves. I was happy to share my thoughts on the Braves system with my close relative. I felt somewhat conflicted and sleazy about this. But fortunately there were no transactions this past summer between the Braves and this team.

My observation from this admittedly limited view of the inner workings of a major league team is that the board members around here who take the trouble to follow our minor league system closely could definitely contribute information that a non-Braves team would find of value. I'm less sure of whether anyone posting here can contribute something new in terms of analysis of major league talent, but this is just a reflection of the fact that my relative did not see much of the analysis on that side of the business.
Click to expand...

I've looked into several openings in MLB analytic departments. What I found was that

1. They are not very advanced in terms of technology used (the Astros were breached because an ex-employee knew a password)
2. They don't pay their guys anywhere near competitive wages... they rely on how "cool" it is to work for an MLB team.

I have zero doubt I could write a database -> logic layer -> GUI system from the ground up that would completely trounce anything most MLB teams currently have. I also have zero doubt I could write algorithms to parse and analyze raw data from Statcast or any other source. I would probably need a bigger math brain on staff to do the initial work before it could be automated though.

The issue we have in the public sphere is that we don't have access to this raw Statcast data, or other data controlled by MLB teams (like rest and injury data). Couple that with the fact that writing the code to do this takes time that isn't compensated for, and it's not something many folks with that skillset are going to sit down and do.

Hell, it took me almost half a day to write the code required to parse .csv data exported from BaseballSavant and Fangraphs, store it into c# classes, and write the algorithms to calculate things like correlations and aging curves. I've added some stuff as curiosity struck, so I'd estimate ~10 hours to come up with something as rudimentary as this (the output still needs to be pasted into Excel to create charts):

0rbNHsH.jpg


At a $200 per hour consulting fee, that's $2,000 in work just to make message board posts for fun.
 
nsacpi said:
I'm less sure of whether anyone posting here can contribute something new in terms of analysis of major league talent,
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Good thing to say. Meanwhile, The Twins think they're the greatest minds of the 21st century. Somebody else thinks this place is a think tank.

:YDS:
 
It makes me laugh when folks think that people not currently working in sports orgs, can't.

I work at a massive technology company and am near certain that I work with smarter people than the Atlanta Braves employ.

The fact is, there's more money to be made elsewhere
 
sturg33 said:
It makes me laugh when folks think that people not currently working in sports orgs, can't.

I work at a massive technology company and am near certain that I work with smarter people than the Atlanta Braves employ.

The fact is, there's more money to be made elsewhere
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Ding ding ding.

No experienced software guy with a family is going to work 60 hours a week for $50k per year haha.

Most won't work 40 a week for less than $100k.
 
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