And I’m still giving Peters credit for Belle.

manny ramirez was the second draft pick (mark lewis) i became cognizant of. i remember looking the stats on the back of the below card and thinking “what a no-duh pick”

So you think Omar’s going to the Hall? I dunno. I guess if Phil Rizzuto is there anything is possible. And I love Lofton too, but come on.

Anyway it’s not about Peters vs. Hart. I think both of those guys are outstanding former Cleveland GMs. And I’d take either of ’em over Shapiro.

Like I’ve said before, Shapiro’s a pretty good GM, probably good enough to successfully lead a team like the BoSox or Cards. He just ain’t good enough to get the Indians into, and keep them in, that ring of 3 or 4 elite clubs.

Maybe not this year, but it’s rapidly coming to the point where the Cleveland franchise will need to “go in another direction”.

while claiming that Shapiro only
You are of course being naive, or more accurately, willfully blind. We can’t take you seriously if you give Peters the benefit of the doubt on this, while claiming that Shapiro only gets the job because of his dad.

Where did I say this? All I’m saying is that Shapiro – like Bill Bavasi and Joe Garagiola Jr. – probably used his family influence to gain an opportunity with a major league club. Like I said, Shapiro got on the Tribe payroll shortly after he was selling real estate in Southern California. Peters, Hart, Paul, etal took a different path to their positions.

Come on JB, Peters was retired for godsakes when he gave this interview. And he certainly didn’t need to add Belle to his list of great signings to pad his resume.

But you’re right, it might be an old man aggrandizing his accomplishments. But he doesn’t need the Belle signing to cement his reputation as a great talent evaluator. In the end I’m just reluctant to call an old man a liar.

It would be silly not to see that winning divisional championships, league pennants and World Series takes time. I don’t expect the next Tribe GM to win a WS in his first year on the job. I do however, expect something more than 65 wins after 7-8 years in the saddle.

I don’t think you have convinced anyone else either.

I don’t need to convince anybody. I can’t imagine any baseball professional arguing that Peters was anything other than one of the best GMs of his generation.

Why do you think these men were promoted into their current positions?

Yoke an oppo double? What was Tabler’s EPIC line about “Would you hit it? Hafner tried…”?

Could be. But this is a site dedicated to the Cleveland Indians, after all.

It might behoove you to make these more systemic complaints, rather than decrying the use of jargon in a job description. Analytics actually has a specific meaning to people in this field, who are after all the target audience in this instance. What we may think of as clear language actually might be counterproductive here.

I hardly consider this to be my most ridiculous stance yet. I think you’re being too generous.

Ok, ok. I went a little overboard there. My own collection of ridiculous stances is as good as anyone’s.

All too corporate. And sure, corporations are everywhere. That doesn’t mean I have to like that way of life, or to aspire to it. And that’s been one of the things wrong about the baseball team we all love.

We just have opposite reactions then. I’d say that since these details has little to do with the actual game, why complain about them? That’s what drives me crazy. But to the extent they do have an effect on the game, I think it’s a net positive (now you have me worrying about my choice of words) It’s a systematic careful approach. The seat-of-pants, go-with-the-gut, change-plans-every-year approach that we’ve historically seen in many front offices is low odds. It is.

I think you have a jargon.

I think not having a jargon is your jargon.

Also!

I think I have figured this out. You think fancy words are reserved for fancy boys expressing their exquisite feeling in verse. Not for bad dressers who are good with numbers and run ballclubs.

Also!

I think you just accused Chuck of being a pompous show-off.

And finally!

I think you are conflating comprehension of subject matter with the ability to characterize the subject matter and explain it to an amateur.

I also think you’re conflating not being very good at said characterizing with a whole host of insecurities. I see no basis for this at all. They’re simply not very good at it, at least not on an extemporaneous basis. In fact, I’m not even sure I should concede even that! I think even their supposed clumsiness has not been substantiated much, at least not in this thread.

It also seems likely that they’re more practiced at communicating the specific concepts to ballplayers that they need to communicate on a day-to-day basis, a set of nuanced language that is vastly more important to their work than talking to Paul Hoynes about OPS.

If you order brains and eggs at the Oxford Bar in Missoula, Montana, and it’s 1975, the waitress will turn and yell toward the kitchen, “He needs ’em!”

But in which direction? Are you looking for suits or t-shirts?

I love this, and I think its exactly right that you should be able to explain the basics that way. But that doesn’t mean you talk that way to everyone. The job posting is not meant for Shap’s 5th grade nephew, nor are his interviews with the mainstream meda.

Again, I just don’t think it fits the facts. Here’s the first interview that pops up with Shapiro on Google. I know we have some fancy college degrees here, but is anyone really claiming that Shapiro’s tone is needlessly technical? I think your average newspaper reader can understand his points without too much trouble.

No doubt that many an “expert” has done exactly that. But just because I don’t understand it doesn’t mean that it’s meaningless, or agrandizing. It may be dressed-up nonsense, or it may be precision.

Even if we just accept that as fact, I don’t see how it’s relevant in this situation. It’s a job posting, for crying out loud. You wouldn’t expect a hospital administrator looking to hire a specific type of doctor to place a job posting for “a doctor who makes pictures with cameras and machines so they can figure out what’s wrong with people and fix problems, mostly with blood vessels” when they mean “interventional radiologist.” The fact that the front office doesn’t tailor all communications to a fifth-grade reading comprehension level doesn’t mean that they can’t. It just means that sometimes it would be sloppy and pointless to do that. Frankly, it’s pretty clear from the job descriptions what the club considers to be analytics:

Creating data models, developing processes for extraction, transformation, cleansing, and loading a variety of internal and external data sources

and what they consider to be analysis:

Performing advanced statistical analysis on large volumes of baseball-related data and implementing predictive models to aid in departmental decision making

They’re clearly using the two separate terms to make the distinction between creating and implementing. They may be very similar fields, and the average person probably has no idea what the difference is, but that doesn’t mean their jobs aren’t different and that anyone who uses the terms to mean different things is trying to disguise a lack of insight, couldn’t explain the difference to a child, or is trying to be highfalutin’ and exotic. It just means that they and the people they’re talking to know what the words mean in this context and there was no more clear and succinct way to give the jobs general titles.