February 07, 2007
Boras can Talk a Lot
By way of the Turkmenbashi of the Blogosphere, a link to an incredibly long interview with Scott Boras and a note on how it contradicts the reported story of the transfer of Johnny Damon from Boston to New York.
I found it interesting that Boras collects his own baseball data, duplicating the businesses of STATS and BIS.
Q. Can you talk more about resources you have here?
A. Upstairs, we've got about 30, 40 people, their job all year around is information, data. We keep track of every pitch in baseball.
Q. Your proprietary system?
A. All proprietary. It's all our own, we've spent millions of dollars getting our computer system to a level where it's - I'll have to go upstairs and show you.
Q Who's feeding you the video?
A. We get that from DirecTV, local feeds. We have satellites, we pull it all in and then we basically chronicle it for each of our players, digitally, and put it away for players. We have their at-bats, their pitching performances, every game is chronicled.
Seems like it would be cheaper to buy it from a third party.
Posted by David Pinto at
12:00 PM
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It does. I also wonder what exactly he's using it for. He just needs to sell his clients, he doesn't need to analyze them.
I can think of 4 or 5 reasons off the top of my head why Boras would need to analyze players, least of all so he understands how ballclubs will be evaluating his talent. If you understand, say, how Boston evaluates talent, you know that JD Drew can get a lot more than he's making in LA.
As to why he collects his own data, I wonder if he's looking for things that aren't available through STATS, etc.
he doesn't have to use the same exact criteria as the third party companies either. he can cheat a little.
Props to both Tim and Jurgen. Two good reasons for him to compile his own data. I'd also like to add that when you do it yourself there's a sense of doing it right that you can't get when someone else does it for you. You're staff knows what to look for, how to look for it, and if something is strange in those results, you have someone to make accountable.
It's not just knowing how teams analyze his players, he uses the stats to help boost the contracts, by pointing out how good his players are in certain situations.
The data can also be pulled without anyone knowing what data Boras is looking at. Even with 40 people on staff and the cost in computer equipment it is a small, small fraction of what Boras pulls in.
I'd argue that his clients' contracts suggest that it is not cheaper to buy the stats.