Ruben Amaro Jr. claims he used analytics, but never promoted it
As general manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, Ruben Amaro Jr. enjoyed early success while overseeing and adding to a championship roster that was built by previous GM and longtime mentor Pat Gillick. Amaro officially took over the job the day after Philadelphia’s World Series championship parade in 2008, and under his watch, the Phillies would win division championships in each of his first three seasons.
Under any circumstances, that’s a good run. But once that run abruptly ended following the 2011 season, Amaro was never able to right the ship. Many attributed that to the reputation he built as an “old school” baseball guy who didn’t strongly believe in or utilize analytics or advanced stats. It was believed he had more trust in his own eyes and his scouts eyes than the numbers, and those eyes failed to clearly see his team’s aging core was quickly declining.
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Really, that’s just a gentle way of suggesting the game had passed Amaro by, but the now former GM and current Boston Red Sox first-base coach argued that point in a recent interview with Fangraphs.
Actually, Amaro flat out refuted it, stating that analytics were a bigger part of his evaluations than he led on because he felt being coy gave them a “competitive advantage.”
“You can’t ever deny the numbers. That’s true for every GM and every baseball person, regardless of whether you’re ‘old school’ or ‘new school.’ When a scout walks in, the first thing he does is pick up a stat sheet and look at what the player does and what he’s been doing. The numbers don’t lie.
“I’ve always believed in analytics. I just didn’t make it all public (in Philadelphia). I thought it was more of a competitive advantage for me to keep our thought-process about analytics closer to the vest. We didn’t boast about what we were doing — we didn’t discuss it openly — because I didn’t think it was anybody’s business but our own as to how we evaluated.
“We got a little more aggressive, as far as building our analytics department, probably three-or-so years ago. It did maybe become a little more public then. But that doesn’t mean we weren’t utilizing analytics to some degree earlier than that.”
If we’re to believe Amaro, then his game plan all along must have been to project ignorance while secretly staying one step ahead of his competition. Perhaps he even hoped to bait them into a false sense of security during business dealings.
Interesting plan, but it obviously never worked, because Amaro never actually proved to be one step ahead of anybody during his tenure. He wasn’t one step ahead when the first signs of decline became evident in 2012. He wasn’t one step ahead when the team bottomed out in 2013, losing 89 games. And he wasn’t one step ahead when he finally acknowledged the need to rebuild in 2014, following a second straight 89-loss season.
To be honest, the Phillies always appeared to be more stubborn than progressive under Amaro, but maybe that’s just because their analytics told stories different from everyone else’s. Then again, maybe this is just Amaro’s way of rewriting history to better reflect his approach knowing that the results will be etched in stone and Internet databases forever.
[Elsewhere: Phillies reporter almost hit by liner during on-field interview]
The latter is more likely, at least based on these comments made by Amaro’s former special assistant Charley Kerfeld in 2010.
“And since I’ve been here, we don’t have an in-house stats guy and I kind of feel we never will. We’re not a statistics-driven organization by any means.” He added, “I’m not against statistics. Everybody has their own way of doing things. But the Phillies believe in what our scouts see and what our eyes tell us and what our people tell us.”
Maybe Kerfeld was just playing his part in the charade. Maybe Amaro really did change his tune around 2012. Maybe Amaro’s retelling of history just isn’t true. And maybe there’s a degree of truth of all the above. Only a handful of people know for sure, but Amaro’s most recent comments aren’t likely to change too many conclusions that were already drawn.
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Mark Townsend is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Townie813
