This was my third time in attendance, and Hahn’s talk was a cut above those of the past GM presenters. While he obviously wasn’t going to veer into the territory of trade secrets, he was more willing to relate anecdotes that give some flavor of how he approaches his job than the other GMs I’ve seen speak have been. A dump of my notes from the 45 minute talk:

• Hahn said that the first offer they were willing to accept for Jose Quintana didn’t come from the Cubs, but once they had one he quickly moved to see if Theo Epstein was interested in making the deal. He mentioned having forgotten the typical start time for Sunday Cubs games and texting to offer some starting pitching … right after Jon Lester had given up 10 runs. Epstein didn’t take it too personally, it seems.
• He expressed a lot of skepticism about teams that are willing to put a single number valuation on a player (whether veteran or prospect), saying he thinks there’s too much uncertainty and too many different player profiles for him to take such ratings particularly seriously. He said it’s frustrating to hear in trade talks that “this player is worth $100 million and my prospect is worth $120 million, so there’s no way we’re doing this deal.”
• He praised the quality of public scouting, and said the greater attention paid to prospects has made his job harder, as both fans and ownership are more attached to their prospects and accordingly skeptical of dealing them. That’s something I hadn’t heard before, and has a ring of truth to it, but I’m mostly relaying it because I like the mental image of Jerry Reinsdorf hitting refresh every thirty seconds to see how many Sox made the BP Midseason Top 50.
• He told a very funny story about dealing with A.J. Preller that David Laurila wrote up at FanGraphs.
• Hahn mentioned multiple times using scouts as a data source, i.e. evaluating players in part not just by how much the scouts like them but which scouts and how they’ve done with similar players in the past. This isn’t a novel idea by any means, but given the amount of skepticism that’s been directed toward White Sox scouts both pro and amateur over the past few years it’s good to see them be introspective. (It’s also a classic example of an analytical project probably every team has done that’s impossible to do with public data.)
• With respect to Statcast, Hahn mentioned that they’re still working out what’s useful from the reams of data, but mentioned he thought their analytical advantages were with respect to “foot speed and defense.” I’m not sure what he’s alluding to with respect to speed (though their current major league roster has a lot more than past iterations), but the point about defense does align with the White Sox going from 21st to 15th to fifth in shifts over the last three years, per Fangraphs.
• Hahn referred to the White Sox as a “mid-upper-small market team.” I don’t know what he meant by that.
• As made the rounds on Twitter and in some beat writer reports, Hahn casually but pointedly suggested Reynaldo Lopez would be starting Friday against the Royals. He said he’d done everything they asked, but they thought it was unfair to have him make his major league debut against either the Red Sox (on the road) or the Astros. That’s a good point, but then again he didn’t have to pay good money on Saturday night to see James Shields give up 4 runs in 6 innings and still lower his ERA.
• It’s nothing new, but Hahn emphasized Don Cooper and Herm Schneider’s importance to the organization repeatedly, saying they keep pitchers healthy and effective, dictate development strategy for the entire organization, and serve as a lure for pitchers who realize they could use some help. He jokingly said it helped cancel out the advantages that a team like the Padres gets from a warm climate and a pitcher’s park.
• Hahn explained the Sox reputation as a team opposed to leaks by saying he thinks it makes it harder to make deals and that he hates what leaked trade discussions do to a player.

Other White Sox-related notes from the weekend:

• Ben Cherington called Hahn “one of the smartest and best guys in baseball.”
• Julia Prusaczyk, an MLBAM intern, presented on modeling sacrifice flies using Statcast data, including a table showing Avisail Garcia as being the seventh hardest throwing outfielder in the big leagues.
• Tyler Clippard showed up on a couple leaderboards, being the eighth most distinctive right-handed pitcher in 2016 per the metric Glenn Healey presented based on research he’s done with Shiyuan Zhao and Dan Brooks (which was presented on the mothership a few weeks ago). He is also the sixth worst high leverage reliever in the bigs this year, per Paul Mammino’s talk.
• Mammino also had Ronald Belisario’s 2014 season as the second worst high leverage season of the last 10 years, which only goes to show how silly it was for Chief Keef to use him as an example of getting hitters out (link has NSFW language).
• As I mentioned above, Benetti was the MC, and I’d be remiss not to mention that he did a fantastic job. As on broadcasts, he knows when to be funny and when to be serious, and made thoughtful comments all weekend without getting in anyone’s way. He also was clearly paying close attention to the talks with an eye on including the results or ways of thinking in broadcasts when opportunities arise. A couple other folks came up to me and mentioned how fortunate White Sox fans are to get him for most of the team’s games. He also teased a few games with a three man booth next year, which I’m sure will be an interesting viewing experience.

Lead Photo Credit: Geoff Burke-USA TODAY Sports

In the interest of full disclosure: Baseball Prospectus is a prominent sponsor of Saberseminar; Saberseminar is co-organized by Dan Brooks, a member of the BP stats team; several of the talks were given by people currently or formerly employed by Baseball Prospectus; and I presented research at a past iteration of the conference.

–Glenn Healey presented some research regarding expected runs based on quality of contact–i.e. launch angle and exit speed–they were largely summaries of two articles he published at the Hardball Times earlier this year. He showed results relying on data from the 2014 season, and two White Sox showed up as players who outperformed expectations given their quality of contact: Adam Eaton and Jose Abreu. Given that most players who outperform expectations are either fast, lucky, or both, Abreu’s presence on that list was a bit alarming, As was discussed at some length at the time, a lot of his home runs barely cleared the wall, which is reflected in Healey’s numbers. Chris Sale also clocked in as the fourth-best pitcher in terms of contact allowed, though this skill is generally much less persistent than the analogous trait for hitters.

–One of the nice things about Saberseminar is that they give time for a half dozen or so talks from students or otherwise non-established researchers, and White Sox popped up in a few of those talks. The most prominent appearance occurred in Jenna Weinstein, Nick Dulchin, and Tyler Graham’s research, which involved using game theory to model which pitches hitters should look for at the plate. They used Sale as one of their examples, and concluded–using last year’s data–that it made sense for a hitter to sit changeup about 90 percent of the time; their model suggested similar tactics toward basically every pitcher that throws an offspeed pitch. Given the brevity of the presentation and the corresponding lack of explanation of some pivotal aspects of their model, I’m taking those numbers with a pound of salt, but it was interesting to see in light of the recurring discussions this year regarding Sale’s decreased use of his changeup.

–Relatedly, Harry Pavlidis and Jonathan Judge of the BP stats team presented some research they’ve been doing on game calling. No White Sox showed up on their lists of worst or best game callers in 2015, but part of their research involved assessing what kinds of pitches a catcher calls for, and last year Tyler Flowers had a greater tendency toward calling non-fastballs than any other catcher in the league. Food for thought from a work-in-progress model, if hard to translate into actionable insight.

–The student talk that closed the conference, given by a recent grad named Jeb Clarke, sought to identify managers whose teams performed worse than the quality of their players would suggest. The methodology was rather sketchy and focused on very broad effects, and I think most White Sox fans would agree that not having Robin Ventura in the bottom fifth of manager quality over the last five years is a sign that the model needs substantial improvement. Terry Collins was rated the worst manager in baseball, though, so that’s a small win for the model.

–Ben Jedlovec of Baseball Info Solutions presented some new data they’ve begun collecting recently on check swings, broken bats, and bunts pulled back. The cover photo of his talk was a picture of Gordon Beckham doing both of the former two on the same pitch in 2012, but nobody from the White Sox showed up on any of his leaderboards for those two stats. For bunts pulled back, which Baseball Info Solutions has only computed for this year, Melky Cabrera is seventh in the majors by count with 31. By rate, he’s second, having pulled back 86 percent of the time he’s shown bunt. (Angel Pagan is at 90 percent, but in substantially fewer attempts.) As with the Flowers game calling statistic, it’s not clearly meaningful but it’s still somewhat interesting.

–Scott Powers, a doctoral candidate in statistics at Stanford, gave one of the stronger student presentations, using a regression model to estimate hitters’ and pitchers’ distributions of vertical launch angle and exit speed after controlling for other factors. Todd Frazier has the highest estimated variation in his launch angle of any hitter in the league, barely edging out Kevin Plawecki, Maikel Franco, and Kevin Kiermaier. Given that popups have launch angles very different from most other batted balls, I suspect that’s the main driving factor there, as Frazier is within 0.1 percent of the major-league lead in pop-up rate and Plawecki’s, Franco’s, and Kiermaier’s rates are all solidly above-average in that area as well. He was one of the few speakers to post his slides, which can be found here.

–A number of teams had baseball operationss representatives at the conference, including at least the Tigers, Indians, Cubs, Red Sox, Brewers, and Phillies, plus presumably other teams whose analysts were either incognito or simply went unrecognized. Anyone from the White Sox fell into the latter category, befitting the near-total opacity of their baseball ops department.

–There was a live taping of Effectively Wild that had a cameo from the alphabetically superlative David Aardsma, a longtime former MLB reliever who spent one year on the South side. He has a very deadpan sense of humor in conversation.

–Each year there are a number of speakers from the Red Sox front office, which is unsurprising, since the conference is in Boston and raises money for the Jimmy Fund. They mostly talk about the Red Sox, and they don’t typically divulge much (for obvious reasons), but two things they said merit mentioning here. The first came from Dave Dombrowski, who started his career in the White Sox front office; as he was going through the positions he’d held throughout his career, he got (deserved) laughs simply for mentioning that Hawk Harrelson had once been the White Sox GM. Not the finest hour for this franchise.

–The other came from Tom Tippett, Senior Baseball Analyst for the Red Sox, who talked about some of his memories of the 2011 Red Sox. He mentioned a nugget I’d forgotten, which was that the Red Sox were discussing acquiring Bruce Chen to pitch a one-game playoff if they’d made it that far, as he was a decent pitcher who’d cleared waivers and whose deal was about to be up. Of course, the only reason Chen looked decent was that he ran up a 1.89 ERA in 5 starts against the White Sox, as opposed to his 4.20 ERA against other opponents. It’s nice to know some things never seem to change.

Lead Image Credit: Denny Medley // USA Today Sports Images