As the White Sox continue to narrow down their manager search, further action appears to be happening elsewhere behind the scenes.
Matt Spiegel of 670 The Score revealed the team’s analytics department, made up of roughly 10 people, is one that has started to see change over the last six weeks. The co-host of Spiegel & Holmes said during Tuesday’s show that the group has been rebranded as “research and development” and will be working closely with other departments to bring consistency across the board.
“It is the ‘research and development’ department, and members of that team have been reassigned to work closely with other departments. So, you’ve got specific memebers of the ‘R&D’ department now working with scouting, working with acquisition, and working with player development, creating the kind of genuine synergy that the organization did not have.
“And this is some of the basics of how an organization needs to run, but now it’s in place where they’re allowed to talk to each other. There’s some new leadership at some of these departments, and they’re all not just allowed to talk to each other, forced and pushed to talk to each other.”
White Sox GM Chris Getz told the media last month that the analytics department was due for a large overhaul, though it’s been unclear what this would entail. It’s certainly not unexpected following The Athletic’s report of the team’s history of disarray in analytics that has kept them behind industry standards for some time.
In her article and during an appearance of Foul Territory, Britt Ghiroli said there was never any agreement among White Sox staffers on how to use analytics. This resulted in people from various departments using different sets of data for years. There was even a “huge internal strife” in 2019 among the analytics team over whether to use spin rate versus adjusted spin rate. Overall, the unwillingness to properly utilize data has made evaluating, drafting, and developing players unnecessarily difficult, leading to the critical need for a major change.
While more specifics will likely be shared as further changes come, it at least sounds like the White Sox are focused on implementing an improved analytics system among other organizational changes.
“Whoever the new manager is, there will be liaisons in place, so the manager can work with the research
and development department, and you’re not then just kind of hoping your new manager is a numbers guy, that kind of thing.
“So look, it’s a big and messy double decker bus with the accordion in the middle. It’s double lanes and double decker, this White Sox bus, but it is making a turn. And that in itself is is a positive, I think.
To listen to the full segment from the Spiegel & Holmes show, click here.
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