When the Phillies hired new GM Matt Klentak, the talk was all about how the Phillies would now embrace the wave of sabermetrics stats that you can look at until your all so sick of numbers that you’ll wonder why you’ve been looking at them in the first place.
There was an article in the media that the Phils would now have a secret weapon called PHIL that was the repository of all info regarding a player’s ability to play this game of baseball (custom made for the Phillies baseball team). As told by Matt Klentak, “Basically it’s a place to house all of our information and synthesize it and try to manage it and pool it and bring all together.”
Oh happy days, wow, you have a collection of numbers that tell you how great or poor a player is and then everything is magically ok. That’s what I get from that kind of talk. It’s amazing how much people actually buy into this nonsense. It must be the latest generation that really have thrown all of their allegiance to this sort of crap. And, it’s not cheap, all this talk about numbers actually costs a lot of money.
Maybe Klentak and his new number crunching guru, Andy Galdi, who was previously employed by Google, (that’s supposed to be impressing by the way) and that kind of resume don’t come cheap. In this article from the The Morning Call, it is explained why the team picked up Peter Bourgos. Something about his great numbers on Fangraphs, any armchair stats guy could have told you that.
Maybe these new gurus can explain why the team hasn’t sold out Opening Day at the stadium yet. In numbers form of course. Can they come up with a new way to sell more hot dogs or beers using these magical sabermetric numbers? Maybe they’ll raise the price of parking again to pay for all of this grand numbers extravaganza.
