Not quite ‘Moneyball’

How else, exactly, do the Marlins use the information and ideas Paré 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.

Reality has long since evolved from the Hollywood-depicted scenes — a nerdy Jonah Hill spitting out numbers at Brad Pitt’s command, much to the dismay and confusion of the crusty old scouts — that help shape public perception.

If building a successful roster is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, analytics is a piece to that puzzle, not a map of it. Any wellfunctioning front office won’t find itself in new school-old school, nerds-versus-scouts battle these days.

Instead, it’s about finding a balance. Paré, for example, credits his reading of “Moneyball” as a Yale freshman with helping set him down this career path, but he also attended MLB’s scout development program in the fall of 2009, thus 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,” Paré 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 home-brewed on my end, say, this is the right answer, and piss off a bunch of people.”