Wanted: Innovation, Desperately Needed

Math stinks. It’s probably a good thing all in all, but I stink at it, so it therefore stinks. The Minnesota Twins and I might just have that sentiment in common.

1500ESPN’s Phil Mackey wrote a column earlier this week about how the Twins lack innovation, which resulted in Twins’ General Manager Terry Ryan saying he thinks Mackey just wants a job with the Twins, but that’s a different story. The thing is that Mackey is so on it’s sad.

The Twins, as it seems on the surface, do not have a big analytics department. The payroll-wise lowly Tampa Bay Rays have nine people in that category. A team that won’t be able to maintain one of the best pitchers in baseball (David Price) has nine guys that crunch baseball numbers. You have to use numbers and, in a broader sense, every single piece of information you can get your hands on.

It’s like Facebook stalking that the younger generation partakes in. The first moment you have any romantic interest or any interest at all in a person: you go to Facebook, look up their profile and study everything they like/dislike. You use every single piece of information you can get your hands on before you put your neck out on the line with that person. You have to do that in baseball, too.

That doesn’t just go for advanced statistics either. If you keep failing, something has to change. If you stub your toe every night, you move the furniture.

This isn’t a call saying that brining back Ron Gardenhire is the end of the world, but something has to change. Some certain way of doing things, some certain way the Twins’ organization looks at things. It has to be shaken up, even if you don’t want to shake it up.

I hate math, but I still have to deal with it. The Twins have to deal with the changing landscape.