Playing catch-up

Paré 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 fulltimer before the 2010 season. In late 2013, Paré left for Toronto, where he was No. 2 under the 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 that average is 3-4 staffers, as Paré estimated, or closer to a half-dozen, as two other industry insiders said. Some teams, such as the small-market 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 Paré.

“Baseball as a whole has moved so quickly in this direction, that from the Marlins’ standpoint just by standing still for a while they fell way behind,” said Dave Cameron, managing editor of FanGraphs, a baseball analytics website. “When they hired [Paré], there were a lot of people in baseball who thought it was a good hire. Super smart guy. Definitely not a token hire. Jason can work for probably any team in baseball. He would be welcome in any analytics department. He’s a good start.”

Michael Lord, among the team’s interns last summer, started this month as Paré’s first full-time analyst. The department will also have three interns this season, and Paré has leaned heavily on Mike Copeland, a freelance data architect dubbed “The Wizard” by last year’s interns.

“He kind of does everything,” Paré said of the Toronto-based Copeland, who started doing work for the Marlins in May. “He’s been a huge part of the things that we’ve done on the data back end, whether that’s building our data warehouse, building out visualizations/information systems.”

Other teams that were late to the analytics game — the Los Angeles Angels, the Detroit Tigers, the Philadelphia Phillies — have thrown more people and money at the problem than the Marlins have, Cameron said. Two full-timers puts Miami “at the very bottom of the scale in baseball,” so there is still more work to do.

And so it will continue this season and beyond, but from now on with a much sturdier foundation — the technological and data infrastructure — from which Paré and his people can build. Among the team’s assets is The Fish Bag, an internal home base of sorts for all of the Marlins’ analytical work, including an increasing amount of data visualization tools: charts and graphs and whatnot to help the less analytically inclined digest all the numbers.

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

“I don’t want to say it’s going to be a breeze, because I think we still have a lot of work to do and a lot of projects that we’re excited about doing,” Paré said. “But I’ll go a little bit less crazy. I might actually get to watch some baseball this spring training.”