Tom Tippett to leave Sox at end of October

soxhop411

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MikeSilvermanBB
Tippett: May stay in baseball & work for other team but "I'm also interested in other sports and opportunities outside the sports world."
10/18/16, 2:52 PM

jcmccaffrey
Red Sox senior baseball analyst Tom Tippett has chosen to explore other opportunities, according to the club. He'll work w/ them through Oct
10/18/16, 2:54 PM
 

Drocca

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It would not surprise me if there was more money to be made, as well as more rewarding in the sense that you own the work product and not the club, in media than in his current role.
 

saintnick912

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I don't know if Tom reads here, but if he does let me say thank you for the great insight at every Saber Seminar that I was able to attend, and thanks for humoring my nerdy tech questions outside of your sessions. Such a great down to earth guy. Best of luck wherever you end up.
 

Rough Carrigan

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I don't know if Tom reads here, but if he does let me say thank you for the great insight at every Saber Seminar that I was able to attend, and thanks for humoring my nerdy tech questions outside of your sessions. Such a great down to earth guy. Best of luck wherever you end up.
I'll second this. I went to one or two of those seminars and he was terrific. Best of luck to him.
 

JGray38

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Yeah, he's one of the highlights of Saber Seminar, and just so damn nice, too. I wouldn't be surprised if he found something to talk about next year, regardless of his role in baseball. I was helping Chuck pack up at the end of the last one, and he walked over and said "This is a true highlight of my year, every year, and I always look forward to this weekend."

Best wishes to him, I'm sure he will be great at whatever comes next.
 

JimD

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Not to throw shade on Tippett - we don't know how much he was being listened to - but it is amazing that the Red Sox have employed guys like him and Bill James (and Theo and his many disciples, for that matter) and have still made so many dumb and/or bad moves in the HWL era.
 

lexrageorge

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Not to throw shade on Tippett - we don't know how much he was being listened to - but it is amazing that the Red Sox have employed guys like him and Bill James (and Theo and his many disciples, for that matter) and have still made so many dumb and/or bad moves in the HWL era.
I am going to hazard some guesses as to the reasons behind some of these bad moves:

- Player projections still have very large error bars. And while it may be possible to project the probability of an injury for a player at a given age, there is a huge amount of randomness to injuries that no computer system will ever be able to resolve until Skynet is released.

- There is likely still a lot of room for analytics to improve in other areas. I'm thinking defensive statistics, catcher framing as just 2 examples.

- I've seen cases where very smart people look at the numbers and become enamored of their own theories to their detriment. Even theories backed by statistical analysis do not always work in the messy real world. I'm thinking "closer by committee", 4/70, etc.

- Sometimes people good with statistics are confused with being "smart". I recall one infamous poster discussing how great Kyle Weiland will be based on his best 3 innings out of 24 in 2011.

- Some "bad moves" are probably only bad in retrospect, but made perfect sense at the time. And some of the "bad moves" are not even "bad"; signing JD Drew, for example. Not even sure signing John Lackey can be called a bad move anymore. I'm quite sure you will get lots of disagreement on this forum if you called the trade-and-extend of Adrian Gonzalez a good or bad move.

- There are a limited number of talented players available for a team to acquire each season, and the market demand for those players can be quite high. And there are external pressures on a team like Boston to field at least a decent team each year. So even the "smartest" teams are forced to sometime step outside their comfort zone and roll the dice on acquiring a player for which there may be risks. And the Sox by definition are able to take more risks than say, the Pirates, so the likelihood increases of such a team making a bad move.

- And organizational behavior definitely came into play. We've had the Lucchino vs. Theo power struggle, the hiring of Bobby Valentine, and the pressure to win in more exciting ways. A person in Theo's position (or Dombrowski's now) has to answer to a number of stakeholders (Henry/Werner, the limited partners, etc). We just witnessed CEO Sam Kennedy somewhat walk back Dave Dombrowski's endorsement of Farrell ("ownership's decision"). Conflict is inevitable when you have a bunch of hypercompetitive type-A people each with different motivations, biases, etc. Managing that conflict into good strategic decisions is difficult, at least until Skynet is released.
 

JGray38

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Not to throw shade on Tippett - we don't know how much he was being listened to - but it is amazing that the Red Sox have employed guys like him and Bill James (and Theo and his many disciples, for that matter) and have still made so many dumb and/or bad moves in the HWL era.
They also won 3 titles in his time here, so some things went well. I think there are times when you nail the projections and analytic work, the front office makes the right moves based on that work with the backing of ownership, and you've really got something. 2013 for example, when every move they made helped the team win and was cost effective, too. If any one of these pieces are out of sync- the data guys being right but not listened to as you mention, or maybe they are flat-out wrong, or ownership overrules Ops on who to hire/sign, your odds of success start to slide downward, and when all of these go wrong at once (Valentine, Crawford, etc) it's hopeless.