The bright side
While waiting for baseball to start, O’s getting their data and analytics system up to speed
Without day-to-day baseball games to pull its attention from the infrastructure projects that typically populate its offseason, the Orioles front office has used the last month to ensure its data and analytics system will be comparable with its rivals whenever games resume.
Omar, as it has been called for years, is coming along nicely.
“We’re trying to look on the bright side of being able to take advantage of some of this time without games to get up to speed on some big-picture projects that we had anticipated taking longer, or that are usually confined to the offseason, because during the season you have this day-to-day flow of issues that land on your desk,” executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias said on a video conference call Monday. “Among those are building our internal scouting and information and analytics database, which we have really ramped up and is basically up to industry standards at this point already, we believe.”
Whether named for the popular antihero from the Baltimore-based HBO show “The Wire” or as an acronym, as other
teams have done, this database, like the television show character, contains multitudes: scouting reports, video, projections and analytics.
And the shutdown has given the Orioles time to get all of that up to speed too.
Di Zou, who was the only holdover in the analytics department when Elias and assistant GM for analytics Sig Mejdal joined the front office in November 2018, was responsible for the name before the new front office arrived.
He’s now the manager of baseball systems and he is part of a team Mejdal assembled to build an infrastructure that was threadbare 16 months ago.
In a typical baseball season, the analysts and developers might at this point in the calendar be troubleshooting technology platforms and ensuring players and coaches had all the information they needed at their disposal to win games. The start of the minor-league season last week would mean reams of information coming in that needs to be sorted and analyzed.
Without that, the projects are a bit more broad-based, allowing Mejdal and his team extra time to build some of the database features that they were creating in conjunction with the season last year.
“The bottom line is as a new administration and as a team that we felt was playing catchup a little bit in the infrastructure department and the digital infrastructure department,” Elias said, “we’ve been able to, I think, leverage some of this time a lot better than we would have otherwise.”
He said the organization was also putting together a player-development manual online, replete with video and coaching literature while “pulling all of our information from our video platforms into our scouting database.”
“That’s a lot to keep us busy right now, and our most immediate item is now preparing for the draft,” Elias said. “We’ve launched a big set of meetings this week with our scouting department and we had our first one today on that front. We feel like we’re in good shape there.”
Elias said that the Orioles “are as well set up for this as any scouting department” because of the depth of the scouts’ reports from last summer on draft-eligible players, as well as the “dedicated team of analysts in the front office to work on the draft, and those guys do it from video and data even without this situation.”
The draft could be as short as five rounds, and it’s unclear when it will even be held. But Elias is simply glad that it’s happening and that there’s something concrete for the Orioles to plan around as the start of the season remains a fluid and far-off target.
He said he’s “happy and relieved” that the team’s high picks — including No. 2 overall, three picks in the top 40 and four picks in the top 75 — are still being made. The Orioles’ projected bonus pool of $13.87 million is the largest of the 30 teams.
“That’s a huge draft, and if that were to have been taken away from us, that would have been quite a blow,” Elias said. “I’ll take that.
“I think given the circumstances, even a shortened draft is going to be a tall order to prepare for. So we’ll just focus on doing a great job with those high picks.”
The draft is, in Elias’ mind, more of a certainty after Major League Baseball and the players union negotiated a comprehensive agreement about what compensation, service time and a host of other issues would look like in the event of a lost season.
Elias said that his hopes and expectations for a season vary depending on the day.
“We read national news,” he said. “You read an article with some viewpoints, and you don’t know what to think. I know that we’re really trying to play. The players want to play and the league wants to play.
“But we’re also, all of us, very mindful of what the priorities are right now, and that’s public health. So that topic is going to need to be addressed in a satisfactory way before we can conceivably play. But it doesn’t mean you can’t plan and start to think.
“I like the fact that we’re hearing ideas and that the people in the league offices and across sports are working on scenarios for baseball to come back this year because we really want to do it. We want to be a part of returning to feeling normal life. We think that sports will mean a lot to people, especially during this period of time to have something to follow.
“Even though it’s just sports, it’s entertainment. It’s a very important part of our greater society all across the world. I think it’ll mean a lot when it comes back, and we want baseball to be a big part of that.”