David Laurila posts his Sunday Notes column at FanGraphs with a look at how the Tigers are ramping up their analytics department. I’m surprised it took the Tigers this long. One important aspect of this is building a bridge, as GM Al Avila notes:

“There are obviously some things that your average instructor, or pitching coach… those guys aren’t analysts,” said the GM. “Those guys don’t work with numbers. They work with human beings, so it’s more of, ‘Hey, here is what the numbers are telling us about this pitcher.’ [Wergiles] can be deciphering that to the coaches, so that they can make those adjustments with the pitchers.”

FanGraphs.com

The lag in analytics likely goes back to Dave Dombrowski’s time as GM. Dombrowski strikes me as a Pat Gillick type of talent evaluator. The two were extremely good at evaluating talent without a ton of numbers. If you look at how they build teams, one would assume they were crunching numbers as well as anybody, but they were able to do this in their head, rather than on a computer. Very few people have that kind of talent, so when they leave a club, it’s not easy for the next person to come in and continue the trend.