Pare has helped narrow stats gap

MIAMI — One morning last winter, in the coaches' conference room in the bowels of Marlins Park, the Miami Marlins’ decisionmakers crowded around a table with a problem and a potential solution.

The issue was they wanted to start up an analytics department, a task with a fair degree of urgency given that most of the rest of baseball had already done so. The potential solution was the man at one end of the table, Jason Pare, whom they were interested in hiring to run it.

Pare had been an analyst with the Toronto Blue Jays. He had also been on vacation in Brazil for nearly two weeks. When the Marlins called the Blue Jays for permission to speak to Pare about the opening, per baseball norms, the parties realized Pare would have a layover in Miami on his way back to Canada. Did he want to come by the ballpark for a chat?

Wearing jeans, sneakers and a polo — and armed only with an outline of ideas he mocked up on the desktop in a hotel lobby the night before — Pare impressed on short notice. He interviewed with a who'swho collection of club execs: president of baseball operations Michael Hill, vice president/assistant general manager Mike Berger, vice president of pitching development Jim Benedict, vice president of player personnel Jeff McAvoy and assistant GM Brian Chattin, among others.

“I was a little self-conscious about being in vacation mode,” Pare said. “But I think it ended up going OK.”

That was a year ago. Pare, now 31, got the gig as the Marlins' senior director of analytics. The months since have been marked by the beginning of the fulfillment of Hill's promise to Pare during that first meeting: This is something we want to invest in. We want to make this a big part of what we're doing. That's why you're here.

The Marlins have given Pare the freedom and resources to expand, and the department's growing size matches its voice within the larger baseball-operations picture.

“It's evolved to be an important voice very quickly,” Pare said. “It's almost more of a voice than I expected to have coming into this.

“[Hill] is very good about giving everybody a seat at the table. That's the expression that he uses. They come to me with a lot questions, and I'm encouraged to give my opinion proactively as well.”

One illustration of Pare's influence was the decision to move Christian Yelich, a Gold Glove left fielder, to center field in 2017.

When an injured Marcell Ozuna missed a few games last summer, manager Don Mattingly slid Yelich from left to center, where he had played plenty as a pro. The coaching staff liked what it saw. When Ozuna returned, he did so in left.

Yelich the center fielder passed the eye test from the bench, and the advanced statistics Pare interpreted backed up what Mattingly concluded.

“That is the type of decision we tend to make with a combined perspective,” Pare said, declining to specify which numbers said what. “[The coaches] want this information. They want to combine it [with scouting reports and other sources] and use it in the best way possible. And they've been tremendously openminded and supportive.”

Mattingly, for his part, has spoken highly of Pare often. Teams over the past decade-plus have tended to shift toward analytics after wholesale front-office changes, a transition the Marlins haven't really endured. The manager's hiring last offseason coincided with the club's emphasis on analytics that resulted in Pare joining the organization.

“We are just getting up to speed, I think, with the analytics within our organization,” Mattingly said last month. “It's grown with Jason Pare. He gives us another dimension of trying to put the right people in the right spots and make sure metrically we are paying attention. We do want to be able to evaluate our guys, and that's part of it.”

How else, exactly, do the Marlins use the information and ideas Pare develops? That's more difficult to deduce.

Modern analytics and metrics in baseball are often shrouded in mystery, with the Marlins and other teams wary of revealing too much (or anything at all) regarding how they privately use their proprietary research. Nobody is completely sure what anybody else is working on, but everybody thinks what they have could give them an advantage. And every potential advantage matters in a sport where the difference between success and failure can be razor thin.

What we do know is that it's not quite like what you remember from “Moneyball,” the 2011 drama about the 2002 Oakland A's based on author Michael Lewis' book by the same name. The reality of the Hollywood-depicted scenes that help shape public perception — a nerdy Jonah Hill spitting out numbers at Brad Pitt's command, much to the dismay and confusion of the crusty old scouts — has long since evolved from that.

If building a successful roster is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, analytics is a piece to that puzzle — not a map to it. Any well functioning front office won't find itself in new school/old school nerdsversus-scouts battle these days.

Instead, it's about finding a balance. Pare, for example, credits his reading of “Moneyball” as a Yale freshman with helping send him down this career path, but he also attended MLB's scout-development program in the fall of 2009, blending more traditional front-office skills with his new-age ones.

“People who are outside of this [analytics] realm here still see the value in what we're doing as a department,” Pare said of the Marlins. “I would rather do something that includes the scouts, includes their information, includes their perspective and adds my spin on it than do something that's completely homebrewed on my end and say, ‘This is the right answer,' and piss off a bunch of people.”

Pare has been here before, helping build a nascent analytics department for a major-league team, albeit never in a managerial role like he is in now. He interned with the Cleveland Indians late last decade before becoming a full-timer prior to the 2010 season. In late 2013, Pare left for Toronto, where he was No. 2 under department head Joe Sheehan.

The Marlins are moving faster than those teams did when they built up. The club is getting closer to a league-average department size-wise whether the average is 3-4 staffers, as Pare estimated, or closer to a half-dozen as two other industry insiders said. Some teams, such as the smallmarket Tampa Bay Rays, have departments with staffs that number in the teens.

Miami is still playing catch-up, having never employed anyone dedicated to this field before Pare.

Last spring Pare effectively started from scratch, on the job for only two weeks before pitchers and catchers reported to Jupiter. This spring everything should be smoother.