Good interview on scouting vs stats

[MojoJojo]

Salon has an interview with Carlos Gomez today:

http://www.salon.com/sports/daily/feature/2008/07/01/scout/index.html

 

Gomez has done analysis of the mechanics of swings and throwing motions for The Hardball Times. Here is his breakdown of Mark Prior's throwing motion http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/breaking-down-the-broken-down-a-video-analysis-of-mark-prior/. (Yeah, I just went Mark Prior.) He has also historically been a big Moneyball and sabermetrics guy; he's a self-described "mechanics and stats geek".

 

Gomez recently became a scout for the Diamondbacks. In the interview he talks about how his player evaluations have changed now that he is a scout. There's some interesting stuff on how he looks at sabermetrics and stats differently now. It's a good read regardless of your own position in the debate.

 

What we do cannot get black and white with it. Hey, not every swing is pretty, not every arm action is pretty, but they work in different ways. Our job is to identify what will work.

 

Well, more than anything, you try to take all the information possible to shape your opinion of the player. Am I much, much, much, much more of a scout now than I am a sabermetric guy? Yeah, I am. Big time. It's huge. It's why we go watch the players.

 

Stats are nice, and I'm a huge stats geek. I look at the stats, and you expect to see some things, but sometimes what you see just doesn't match up to what the guy's doing out on the field. For the most part, I'll stick to my gut. Not for the most part. I will. If it's a big discord in what I saw vs. what he's done performance-wise, more than 99 percent of the time, I'll stick to what I saw. But yeah, you look at the stats.

[SouthSideRyan]

Gomez used to post on BTF as ChadBradfordwannabe.

 

Pretty cool guy.

[vance_the_cubs_fan]

Great read. Thanks for posting it.