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Excerpted from The Game Today: A Game in Transition, the final chapter of High and Inside, My Life in the Front Offices of Baseball © 2008 Lou Gorman by permission of McFarland & Company (www.mcfarlandpub.com), Inc. Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. One final major issue that has also influenced the modern day philosophy of baseball operation, which is espoused by the new breed of young (extremely young) general managers and baseball operation personnel, is that of a major reliance on statistics, or sabermetrics, in their baseball decisions as they create and develop a major league ball club. Many of the new theories that they have introduced in player procurement and in player evaluation, both at the professional level and the amateur level, have to a degree been revolutionary, and the utilization of the computer and statistical performances dictates a great deal of their ultimate decisions regarding players for draft or trade. In many instances they place a greater emphasis on the overall statistical compilation of a player's performance vis-à-vis the eyeball-to-eyeball judgment of an experienced professional baseball scout. The judgment of a skillful and successful professional scout became simply more of an adjunct to the final evaluation of a player's physical skills, or "tools," by a scout as opposed to the statistical numbers that would come out of a computer.  Red Sox 2002 Hall of Fame inductees Earl Wilson, Lou Gorman, Jim Lonborg, John Harrington, Fred Lynn, Rick Burleson, Dave "Boo" Ferriss and Stanley Hughson, representing his father Tex. Michael Lewis, a gifted writer, in his book Moneyball, writing about Billy Beane, the Oakland A's colorful and "new breed" general manager, writes, "Bill had his own ideas about where to find future major league baseball players inside Paul's [Paul DePodesta] computer. He flirted with the absurd and inane idea of firing all the scouts and just drafting players straight from Paul's laptop. The Internet now serves up just about every statistic you could want about every college player in the country and Paul knew them all.... The statistics enabled you to find your way past all sorts of sight-based scouting prejudices.... The scouts have a catch phrase for what Billy [Beane] and Paul are up to, 'performance scouting.' Performance scouting in scouting circles is an insult. It directly contradicts the baseball scout's eye. It argues that what's most important about a baseball player, maybe even including his character, can be found primarily in his statistics." The new young general managers and baseball operation executives now in Major League Baseball brought with them a love of statistics and mathematical equations and were weaned on the theories of a number of didactic and academic statistical "gurus." Many of the new breed of executives consider the knowledge and talent of a skilled professional scout of secondary value, at best, in evaluating players' talents. I recall Gordon Edes of The Boston Globe, a very knowledgeable baseball beat writer, stating, "Just hire the young, well-educated executives with Ivy-league type educations and they can learn the necessary baseball skills on the fly." If it is so easy to learn the game on the fly, a lot of us who have spent a lifetime in professional baseball and who are constantly learning and absorbing something new about the skills of this game almost daily must have missed something along the way. The knowledge and skill required to become a successful general manager or baseball executive just simply can't be "learned on the fly." It has to be absorbed, assimilated and mastered over a number of years for a person to truly be successful, and an even greater number of years to proclaim any of the present generation GMs ready for enshrinement. The new and younger baseball front office executives have introduced numerous new and, in some cases, revolutionary theories and techniques in the areas of player evaluation and player procurement. A great deal of their philosophies are based upon statistical analysis, or sabermetrics, as their primary method of drafting, evaluating, trading and signing players in the development of their major league organizations and ball clubs. Additionally, many of them have also been influenced and weaned on the statistical theories of Bill James and his thought provoking book entitled Baseball Abstract, with its indepth and detailed analysis of every conceivable offensive and defensive equation and comparison possible. "On base percentage," and "slugging percentage," plus "total average," etc., became the new doctrine for player analysis.
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