Yankees Application Form

ookami7m · Sep 30, 2023

It is striking how many of the "would you rather" questions are blatant appeals to recentcy bias.

LogansDad · Sep 30, 2023

I'm going to guess: B. He didn't get the job after posting an internal form for the entire internet to see.

jon abbey · Sep 30, 2023

Wow, that’s a lot. I’ll say that whatever the set of answers they’re using to make player utilization decisions the last few years are, those should probably be reexamined as to how correct they actually are.

Personally I’d have a set of questions for them, maybe starting with ‘Why would you fully lean into team defense in 2022, ending with the best defensive team in MLB by far and 99 wins, and then inexplicably back off that approach in 2023?’

Who watches the Watchmen?

Marciano490 · Sep 30, 2023

How tough are these questions for people who’d be applying to that job? I don’t know most of the answers, but they all seem doable for some folks here.

Lose Remerswaal · Sep 30, 2023

I see a few questions that keep being answered “Stanton”

EvilEmpire · Sep 30, 2023

I doubt those questions are difficult at all for anyone the Yankees would consider hiring. I suppose it could be useful as an initial screening tool to reduce the candidate pool a bit.

simplicio · Sep 30, 2023

Given no other information, which of the following pitchers would you most want to be on your team next year?
Pitcher A: 60 IP, 90 K, 10 BB, 3.00 ERA, 0 SV, 5 BS
Pitcher B: 60 IP, 60 K, 30 BB, 2.50 ERA, 20 SV, 0 BS
Pitcher C: 60 IP, 90 K, 40 BB, 2.75 ERA, 50 SV, 5 BS
Pitcher D: 60 IP, 90 K, 10 BB, 2.00 ERA, 50 SV, 0 BS, has a beard though

Sad Sam Jones · Sep 30, 2023

I'm still hung up on the first question... is a .000 ba and 1.000 obp even possible? I don't want to work for an organization that doesn't know the difference between --- and .000.

axx · Sep 30, 2023

LogansDad said:
I'm going to guess: B. He didn't get the job after posting an internal form for the entire internet to see.

Reddit post claims it was a year ago. Can't make up my mind whether it's legit or not.

John Marzano Olympic Hero · Sep 30, 2023

Sad Sam Jones said:
I'm still hung up on the first question... is a .000 ba and 1.000 obp even possible? I don't want to work for an organization that doesn't know the difference between --- and .000.

He could walk or get HBP or get on by an error or a passed ball or catcher’s interference.

It’s weird question I agree though based on really small samples.

kieckeredinthehead · Sep 30, 2023

I see a lot of questions that don't actually have a single right answer but were written by somebody who thinks they do. That difference is indicative of a number of ongoing front office failures across the league.

It's also really telling that half of these include the phrase "given no other information," when every single decision a GM or manager will make will have lots of other information that could substantially explain the differences (e.g., expecting a first baseman's offense will revert to the mean instead of realizing he has a concussion).

AB in DC · Sep 30, 2023

No one is going to mention the opt-out question?

Max Power · Sep 30, 2023

AB in DC said:
No one is going to mention the opt-out question?

That's the one that obviously has a correct answer and is agreed upon by all here.

Sad Sam Jones · Sep 30, 2023

John Marzano Olympic Hero said:
He could walk or get HBP or get on by an error or a passed ball or catcher’s interference.

It’s weird question I agree though based on really small samples.

A walk or hbp is a plate appearance, not an at-bat, so batting average remains ---, not .000. A batter doesn't get credit for reaching base on an error or passed ball (or wild pitch) on strike three and would have a .000 obp. I'm not certain about the different cases of interference, but I don't think any if them work out that way.

VORP Speed · Sep 30, 2023

Sad Sam Jones said:
I'm still hung up on the first question... is a .000 ba and 1.000 obp even possible? I don't want to work for an organization that doesn't know the difference between --- and .000.

Eddie Gaedel is not walking thru that door to save the Yankees next year

Marciano490 · Sep 30, 2023

Disappointed not to see, “how many baseballs could fit in the Yankees team plane?”

edoug · Sep 30, 2023

VORP Speed said:
Eddie Gaedel is not walking thru that door to save the Yankees next year

Brilliant.

Kenesaw Martin Landau · Sep 30, 2023

Marciano490 said:
Disappointed not to see, “how many baseballs could fit in the Yankees team plane?”

The important question is, what is the force (please express in Newtons), experienced by each ball when taking off from runway 6 at LaGuardia?

Kenesaw Martin Landau · Sep 30, 2023

These are mostly shibboleths, but I suppose that is part of employment screening

snowmanny · Sep 30, 2023

The only thing with the recency bias questions is that there probably is a point at which you wonder about mechanics being off, or an injury. But for these purposes I'd answer ignoring recent results.

Yelling At Clouds · Sep 30, 2023

kieckeredinthehead said:
I see a lot of questions that don't actually have a single right answer but were written by somebody who thinks they do. That difference is indicative of a number of ongoing front office failures across the league.

It's also really telling that half of these include the phrase "given no other information," when every single decision a GM or manager will make will have lots of other information that could substantially explain the differences (e.g., expecting a first baseman's offense will revert to the mean instead of realizing he has a concussion).

Right, it obviously defeats the purpose of the exercise, but my answer to a lot of the questions was “it depends”

LogansDad · Sep 30, 2023

Kenesaw Martin Landau said:
These are mostly shibboleths, but I suppose that is part of employment screening

Today I learned a new word. Thanks, @Kenesaw Martin Landau !

santadevil · Sep 30, 2023

Sad Sam Jones said:
A walk or hbp is a plate appearance, not an at-bat, so batting average remains ---, not .000. A batter doesn't get credit for reaching base on an error or passed ball (or wild pitch) on strike three and would have a .000 obp. I'm not certain about the different cases of interference, but I don't think any if them work out that way.

Just give them a walk and a ROE, I believe it should work out

The way I read most of those questions, is more like essay form. Show us you can answer and how you came up with your conclusions
Making sure people have reasoning behind why they would pick one over the other

kieckeredinthehead · Sep 30, 2023

santadevil said:
Just give them a walk and a ROE, I believe it should work out

The way I read most of those questions, is more like essay form. Show us you can answer and how you came up with your conclusions
Making sure people have reasoning behind why they would pick one over the other

If they reached on an error, their OBP would not be 1.000.

If you click through to the original form, you'll see that the answers were radio buttons with no text boxes. It was used to filter applicants for entry level positions.

InstaFace · Sep 30, 2023

AB in DC said:
No one is going to mention the opt-out question?

The inclusion of that is precisely how I know our leg is getting pulled.

slamminsammya · Sep 30, 2023

kieckeredinthehead said:
I see a lot of questions that don't actually have a single right answer but were written by somebody who thinks they do. That difference is indicative of a number of ongoing front office failures across the league.

It's also really telling that half of these include the phrase "given no other information," when every single decision a GM or manager will make will have lots of other information that could substantially explain the differences (e.g., expecting a first baseman's offense will revert to the mean instead of realizing he has a concussion).

Its a statistics quiz disguised as a baseball quiz, thinking of it that way these do have "correct" answers.

Devizier · Oct 1, 2023

EvilEmpire said:
I doubt those questions are difficult at all for anyone the Yankees would consider hiring. I suppose it could be useful as an initial screening tool to reduce the candidate pool a bit.

These questions are practically useless.

I think you're going to get a lot more mileage from looking at how applicants evaluate scouting data.

Hank Scorpio · Oct 2, 2023

I have issues with some of these questions...

Murderer's Crow said:
Team A and Team B both currently have a 2-WAR third basemen and have the option of signing a 5-WAR third baseman to a one-year, $15M contract for next season. Team A is currently projected to win 70 games next season, while Team B is currently projected to win 88 games next season. Given no other information, which team would benefit more from signing the 5-WAR third baseman?
Team A
Team B
Both teams would benefit equally

Depends what they mean by benefit. I think with WAR there's some diminishing returns. If you could put the 9 best hitters of all time on a team with the 5 best pitchers of all time, that team still doesn't win 162 games, even if they "should" on paper. Excess waste on WAR, and some guys are going to get shelled here and there - legendary aces or not. I don't think that a 70 win or 88 win team would benefit more than the other on the field in a seriously tangible way by signing this 3B - but I will say that the addition could push the 88 win team to a division title, but the 70 win team? It might drop them from the #5 draft choice down to #8 or something. So what are they looking for here?

A 23-year-old prospect has a 1.50 ERA in 5 MLB starts this year. Given no other information, which of the following do you think will be closest to his MLB performance as a starter next year?
1.00 ERA
1.50 ERA
2.00 ERA
2.50 ERA
2.75 ERA
3.00 ERA

The hell? I guess 3.00, because pitchers under 3.00 really don't exist much? What a dumb question.

There's too much here to keep going. What weird questions...

kieckeredinthehead · Oct 2, 2023

slamminsammya said:
Its a statistics quiz disguised as a baseball quiz, thinking of it that way these do have "correct" answers.

Except, they don't.

Given no other information, which of the following players would you start tomorrow in a must-win game? (Assume each has 500 PAs so far this season)
Player A: .850 OPS, 2 hits in last 35 plate appearances
Player B: .800 OPS, 13 hits in last 35 plate appearances

This, as mentioned upthread, appears to be testing the respondent's recency bias. So, gut reaction, I guess(?) you're supposed to ignore the slump and pick Player A due to the small sample. But if you were to treat this as an intro stats quiz, then you'd run a binomial test for the 2/35 and 13/35 against the "true" batting average of Player A and Player B to test whether the sample is large enough to detect a trend. First problem, we can't do that because we're only given plate appearances and OPS rather than at bats and batting average, so we don't know how many hits we should've expected in those 35 PAs. The units are all wrong.

Nevertheless, under the assumption that each plate appearance is an independent event and the 35 plate appearances didn't include a walk or sacrifice hit, Player A is currently batting significantly worse (p<0.05) than their season average, unless they have a batting average lower than .190. Player B is not batting significantly better (p>0.05) than their season average, unless they have a batting average lower than .226. Second problem - with this approach, it is therefore impossible to know without any other information which batter is currently a better bet to start in a must-win game, because Player A is not as good as they have been over the course of the season, but we don't know if they are currently worse than Player B. Third problem: we could instead use a chi-square or Fisher's exact test to compare only the recent results (ignoring the season totals), i.e. compare 2/35 vs. 13/35, but those aren't significantly different either.

Or you could take a Bayesian approach. You can't use an informative prior because, again, we don't know what either player's season batting average is. But within any range of reasonable batting averages for the two players, the 95% credibility intervals overlap for their current batting averages. Player B is probably the better hitter right now, but there's not enough information to say.

Fourth problem: a good statistician would recognize that each plate appearance is not an independent event, because a batter typically has 3-5 plate appearances per game, in the same ballpark, with the same weather, against the same defense, often against the same pitcher. There's obviously not enough information given to know how many different games these plate appearances required, and therefore impossible to compare the two player's current batting skill.

Like Hank Scorpio, I don't want to keep going. Even if this were an intro stats quiz, it would be a shitty one, written by somebody who thinks they know a lot more about statistics than they actually do. I'm leaning toward this being a fake. At least, for the sake of the Yankees, I hope it is.

voidfunkt · Oct 2, 2023

I see a lot of questions that don't actually have a single right answer but were written by somebody who thinks they do. That difference is indicative of a number of ongoing front office failures across the league.

It's also really telling that half of these include the phrase "given no other information," when every single decision a GM or manager will make will have lots of other information that could substantially explain the differences (e.g., expecting a first baseman's offense will revert to the mean instead of realizing he has a concussion).

These are questions for an entry-level baseball ops minion. I'm guessing there's a mix of

1. The answer to this question actually doesn't matter it's just there to overwhelm and hide the questions they do care about.
2. The answer to this question actually does matter.
3. The answer to this question might get used in a second round of interviews to probe a candidates understanding of things or thought process.

I'm sure the Yankees hiring pool is massive and they need to weed out a lot of math/stats majors coming out of NY colleges every year.

slamminsammya · Oct 2, 2023

kieckeredinthehead said:
Except, they don't.

This, as mentioned upthread, appears to be testing the respondent's recency bias. So, gut reaction, I guess(?) you're supposed to ignore the slump and pick Player A due to the small sample. But if you were to treat this as an intro stats quiz, then you'd run a binomial test for the 2/35 and 13/35 against the "true" batting average of Player A and Player B to test whether the sample is large enough to detect a trend. First problem, we can't do that because we're only given plate appearances and OPS rather than at bats and batting average, so we don't know how many hits we should've expected in those 35 PAs. The units are all wrong.

Nevertheless, under the assumption that each plate appearance is an independent event and the 35 plate appearances didn't include a walk or sacrifice hit, Player A is currently batting significantly worse (p<0.05) than their season average, unless they have a batting average lower than .190. Player B is not batting significantly better (p>0.05) than their season average, unless they have a batting average lower than .226. Second problem - with this approach, it is therefore impossible to know without any other information which batter is currently a better bet to start in a must-win game, because Player A is not as good as they have been over the course of the season, but we don't know if they are currently worse than Player B. Third problem: we could instead use a chi-square or Fisher's exact test to compare only the recent results (ignoring the season totals), i.e. compare 2/35 vs. 13/35, but those aren't significantly different either.

Or you could take a Bayesian approach. You can't use an informative prior because, again, we don't know what either player's season batting average is. But within any range of reasonable batting averages for the two players, the 95% credibility intervals overlap for their current batting averages. Player B is probably the better hitter right now, but there's not enough information to say.

Fourth problem: a good statistician would recognize that each plate appearance is not an independent event, because a batter typically has 3-5 plate appearances per game, in the same ballpark, with the same weather, against the same defense, often against the same pitcher. There's obviously not enough information given to know how many different games these plate appearances required, and therefore impossible to compare the two player's current batting skill.

Like Hank Scorpio, I don't want to keep going. Even if this were an intro stats quiz, it would be a shitty one, written by somebody who thinks they know a lot more about statistics than they actually do. I'm leaning toward this being a fake. At least, for the sake of the Yankees, I hope it is.

This gave me a chuckle. Its like those problems where they give 4 numbers in sequence and you have to guess the fifth. In one sense there is a right answer. In a more correct and pedantic sense, its a ridiculous question because any finite sequence of numbers could be generated by infinitely many functions. But then in another, truthier sense, it really does have a correct answer.

kieckeredinthehead · Oct 2, 2023

slamminsammya said:
This gave me a chuckle. Its like those problems where they give 4 numbers in sequence and you have to guess the fifth. In one sense there is a right answer. In a more correct and pedantic sense, its a ridiculous question because any finite sequence of numbers could be generated by infinitely many functions. But then in another, truthier sense, it really does have a correct answer.

It’s not like that. It’s like hiring an entry level position at Goldman Sachs with questions like “Given no other information, would you rather have $1,800 or an ounce of gold?”

slamminsammya · Oct 2, 2023

kieckeredinthehead said:
It’s not like that. It’s like hiring an entry level position at Goldman Sachs with questions like “Given no other information, would you rather have $1,800 or an ounce of gold?”

oh my bad.

I think in a large majority or cases (like, the empirically observed comparisons like this from history) you'd be pretty safe taking the 850 guy.

cannonball 1729 · Oct 2, 2023

Murderer's Crow said:
Which of the following pitchers would you prefer to have on your team?
Pitcher A: Pitches 4.2 IP and gives up 0 runs every time
Pitcher B Pitches 6.0 IP and gives up 2 runs every time

I'm still trying to figure out what's going on with pitcher A here. If he's thrown 4.2 IP and given up 0 runs every time....why has the manager never let him go five innings? Is the manager actively trying to deny him any wins? Or is the manager pulling him after he loads up the bases with two out in the fifth....in which case the pitcher's line is more a statement about the bullpen handles inherited runners than it is about the pitcher? Or is the pitcher on a strict innings limit...which would make me worry about his health going forward? Or are we just prescient about this player....in which case why aren't we prescient about other players, and why don't we just go use that to construct the best team imaginable instead of piddling around with these faux Sophie's choices about innings limits?

On the other hand, if I had ten Pitcher A's, it would be mathematically impossible for me to lose a game unless that game went into extras. So...that seems important, too.

kieckeredinthehead · Oct 2, 2023

slamminsammya said:
oh my bad.

I think in a large majority or cases (like, the empirically observed comparisons like this from history) you'd be pretty safe taking the 850 guy.

Somebody should come up with a simple test to figure out how likely that is without having to sift through a hundred years of play-by-play data.

Max Power · Oct 2, 2023

Murderer's Crow said:
Either way, the answer is A, right? Because the odds that whoever pitches from 4.2-6 (Pitcher A + Pitcher C) allowing 2 runs every time means that player has to have a 15 ERA....which, this seems obviously unlikely, right?

Except over the course of a season, you need to find 45 extra innings covered by the rest of the staff on that pitcher's day. Having watched the Red Sox for the last two months, the cascading effects of starters not going deep became very clear.

cannonball 1729 · Oct 2, 2023

Murderer's Crow said:
Either way, the answer is A, right? Because the odds that whoever pitches from 4.2-6 (Pitcher A + Pitcher C) allowing 2 runs every time means that player has to have a 15 ERA....which, this seems obviously unlikely, right?

Maybe. But if the pitcher is leaving two or three runners on base every time he's relieved in the fifth, it just takes one hit by the fifth-inning reliever to undo a lot of that advantage. And if the pitcher is on a strict pitch count because of injury history, that seems like a potential problem, too.

AB in DC · Oct 2, 2023

LogansDad said:
Today I learned a new word.

Huh, I would have pegged you as a West Wing fan.

InstaFace · Oct 2, 2023

kieckeredinthehead said:
Like Hank Scorpio, I don't want to keep going. Even if this were an intro stats quiz, it would be a shitty one, written by somebody who thinks they know a lot more about statistics than they actually do. I'm leaning toward this being a fake. At least, for the sake of the Yankees, I hope it is.

Your last sentence doesn't follow from the rest of the paragraph. I hope it's not a fake. Honestly, given Brian Cashman's last decade or so, I hope he wrote the damn thing himself, and then poured himself a drink while telling himself how smart he is!

Yankees Application Form

Dragon Wangler 216

Well-Known Member

Member

Shanghai Warrior

Urological Expert

Experiencing Furry Panic

paying for his sins

Member

Member

Member

has fancy plans, and pants to match

Member

OG Football Writing

thai good. you like shirt?

Member

Member

Urological Expert

Member

New Member

New Member

Member

Post-darwinian

Member

wears depends

Member

The Ultimate One

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Dragon Wangler 216

thai good. you like shirt?

Dragon Wangler 216

Member

OG Football Writing

The Ultimate One