February 05, 2009
Valuing Leadership
Paul DePodesta comments on the Cliff Floyd signing, and I'm surprised by how much Paul seems to value leadership:
In an ideal world, we wanted to find a guy who could provide three primary skills: 1) the ability to do damage against RHP as either a pinch hitter, DH or occasional starter, 2) the ability to play somewhere other than 1B if need be, and 3) the ability to act as a leader for our younger players. We found a match in Cliff.
So what's Cliff VORL (value over replacement leader)?
It's Mentor Rating (MR)! Check out DePodesta's post on Henry Blanco.
Just because he says it doesn't mean he believes it. (which is acceptable duplicitousness, in my book)
I think sabermetric oriented people underrate leadership ability on baseball teams. That probably has to do with the fact that many traditional baseball people overrated leadership for so long.
But if you look at the sabermetric oriented GMs, you will see that they all talk about players' leadership as part of their decision making. For instance, Theo Epstein pointed to Varitek's leadership in signing him. Billy Bean said that Giambi's leadership ability was a big reason for making that signing this off-season. I suspect that the need for mentors, role models, and club house leaders becomes more apparent to sabermetric analysts when they work for, and are around, teams and clubhouses.
