The Washington Nationals are hiring 31-year-old Anirudh Kilambi as their general manager, two team sources confirmed Wednesday night. The move gives new president of baseball operations Paul Toboni a second-in-command atop the organization's front office hierarchy. Kilambi arrives from the Philadelphia Phillies, where he spent four years as an assistant general manager overseeing their analytics department. The hiring, first reported by ESPN, fits the Venn diagram the club has targeted this winter - Kilambi is young, comes from a competitive organization and is data-oriented.
So, when Ohtani came up again in the ninth inning, the Blue Jays decided to do something most teams would now consider a relic of the past: They refused to pitch to him. The intentional walk is no longer a significant part of Major League Baseball. Gradually, the quants who solved baseball over the past few decades realized that letting the other team have a baserunner, on purpose, was a bad idea.
There's a classic Simpsons episode in which the sly businessman Mr. Burns recruits real Major League Baseball players to join his company softball team in order to win a bet. But when the championship is on the line, Mr. Burns pulls eight-time National League all-star Darryl Strawberry for a substitute, Homer Simpson. "You're a left-hander, and so is the pitcher. If I send up a right-handed batter, it's called playing the percentages," Mr. Burns says to Strawberry. "It's what smart managers do to win ballgames."
Lots of folks think Win Probability Added (WPA) is a useful statistic. Many coverages, often including our own game wrap polls, like to refer to it. Others think it's just something dreamed up by a FanGraphs intern in 2008 in order to at least have something to put on a resume and has little purpose for anyone who can easily figure out the important moments in a game's flow without it (raises hand, looks around to see if anyone is nodding in agreement).
