David Laurila of FanGraphs had the opportunity to pepper Cardinals assistant general manager Michael Girsch with some questions. Girsch provided a great deal of insight into how the team operates in the front office under GM John Mozeliak.
The Cardinals, of course, fell two games shy of winning their second championship in three years as a direct result of having one of baseball’s most modern approaches to player evaluation. They were beaten by the Red Sox, a team that is at the forefront of front office modernization. Observing the success these teams have enjoyed in recent years, more and more teams are embracing analytics, using it side-by-side with scouting information. Only a handful of teams, most notably the Phillies, do not use analytics in some form.
Anyway, as much as I’d like to quote the entire article here, I’ll just quote one part that was of particular interest, then send you off to FanGraphs to read the rest.On the RedBirdDog and Dashboard systems: “[RedBirdDog] is what we call our report-writing system. Scouting reports for amateur and pro, international, minor-league game reports, player-development progress reports — all of that is done through a website we call RedBirdDog. It’s basically a data-entry system for our staff to create reports.
“On the front office side, we have a separate site we call The Dashboard. It’s not for high-level summary data, but rather where we go for information on players. Everything we have about a player is there, from medical history, scouting reports from before and after he was drafted — all of that is in one place. Basically, we use The Dashboard to summarize and review those reports.
“We also have systems on the major-league side for advance scouting purposes. We have an advance-scouting portal that makes data — things like spray charts — available to our major-league staff. We have a group in our clubhouse doing video advance work, using BATS, to help the staff with advance scouting.”Follow @CrashburnAlley
