Baseball is both beautiful and mechanical; a spectacle of aesthetics and the product of blunt business and analytics. On any given day during the season we have a chance to see, say, a storied veteran fulfill the archetypal hero role shortly after we watch the sun set behind that particular city’s spectacular riverfront coliseum. On any given day after, we might see that same player designated for assignment or traded away for virtually nothing in a salary dump.
One pillar of this duality that has been a focal point of the modern baseball era is scouting. Scouts, historically, have been subjective purveyors of beauty. They watch the game and what a player does on the field either appeals to their individual tastes or it doesn’t. A prospect’s swing might be referred to as a work of art. A shortstop could be called a defensive maestro. But there has always been an attempt by the scout to translate their subjective opinions into something that at least crudely resembles data—hence, the 20-80 scale. The phrase “diamond in the rough”, after all, invokes both beauty and value. We can think about this as a subjective-objective dichotomy, and in the modern game there has been increased emphasis on the objective end of most things.
As the importance of the objective expands rapidly with the advancement of technology and the availability of novel forms of statistical information, the gap between an organization’s nerve centre and its traditional elements, like scouts, grows. The people upstairs and the people on the road don’t speak the same language anymore, and the corresponding translation issues are obvious. Organizations need people who can speak both languages—people who appreciate the art of evaluation and the human experience of those tasks (perhaps even the beauty of them), but also understand the statistical side of the modern game. These people need to be able to stitch the information from two different realms together and distill it upwards in a package that the brain trust can effectively digest. This is a task that requires aptitude in both languages and a heavy dose of creativity.
It’s hard to imagine someone more perfectly suited for the role than Carson Cistulli, who the Blue Jays officially hired a couple of weeks ago into a role in their scouting department. The now ex-Fangraphs writer is literally a poet, holding a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and boasting a book of poems you can buy on Amazon (the title, Some Common Weaknesses Illustrated, Cistulli might want to consider re-using for his more negative internal reports). As you will be well aware, Cistulli has written extensively on Fangraphs and has been the curator of the Fringe Five column, wherein he identified and presented the cases for intriguing prospects that no outlet saw fit to rank on traditional prospect lists. The case for each prospect was always laid out both statistically and descriptively. Cistulli’s aptitude for this type of identification is clear from the results: you don’t need to look any further than MVP recipient Mookie Betts and candidate Jose Ramirez, both appearing on Cistulli’s Fringe Five before being officially “ranked” in other places. More generally, Cistulli’s own aggregate analysis of the endeavor showed that Fringe Five prospects tend to ultimately produce in MLB at a level similar to the players ranked around 20th on the traditional top 100 lists.
If you want another example of an organization trying to bridge this type of information gap, but in a different direction, see Tampa Bay naming 28 year old Princeton mathematics graduate, and the team’s former Director of Analytics, Jonathan “J-Money” Erlichman (a Toronto native and former Blue Jays intern) to their coaching staff as a Process and Analytics coach. Tampa Bay has clearly created this role and placed a precocious and, presumably, forward thinking youngster into it with a mind to decreasing the information gap between baseball’s most modern front office and that increasingly distant world of actual on-the-field baseball. J-Money is probably tasked with selling the players and coaches on new-fangled statistics-based strategies and communicating those strategies in an effective way, or in other words, translating the statistical to the language of baseball. In a similar but opposite manner Cistulli, like he did in the Fringe Five, will likely have the task of consolidating the language of baseball (scouting reports) with the language of math, and translating that product into something digestible to the decision makers above him.
If anyone can find the rhyme and rhythm between modern baseball data and traditional scouting-based information, and then express and communicate that result effectively, it’s a guy like Carson Cistulli. We are decades past Moneyball 1.0, where nerds could scoff at and ignore scouts and create winning MLB teams by just consulting their spreadsheets. Every team can run the numbers these days. To find the inefficiencies that lead to advantages, organizations need robust, multi-faceted processes and the creative and adaptive individuals to make those processes work. Cistulli is the type of person who can probably thrive in a modern organization. The fact that Toronto was the team to appreciate and appropriate him should give Blue Jays fans a lot of confidence in how the front office is being managed.
Thanks for reading Carson Cistulli Hiring Shows Creativity, Modernity by Blue Jays by Nick Hill. If you have any questions or comments relating to this article, we encourage you to leave them below. For all general inquiries, we can be reached at the following:
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