Phillies

Ruben Amaro, the Next Billy Beane!

By Kyle Scott

Published: Oct 1st, 2013 · 9:58 AM EDT

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Move over, power guy, big bat, stopper, bonafide closer, gets on base guy, Gold Glover, great makeup guy— the Phillies are incorporating a new philosophy this offseason, and it might involve a calculator.

Does anyone else feel like Ruben Amaro’s reluctant admittance that the Phillies will try out that whole analytics thing is like when your parents finally stopped using the phone book to look up numbers for takeout:

“We’re going to make some changes,” Amaro said. “I think we’re doing some stuff analytically to change the way we do some evaluations. Look, we are going to continue to be a scouting organization. That said, I think we owe it to ourselves to look at some other ways to evaluate. We’re going to build more analytics into it. Is it going to change dramatically the way we go about our business? No, but we owe it to ourselves to at least explore other avenues. We may bring someone in from the outside, but we have not decided that yet.”

So… should I just go to PizzaDelivery.com or how does this work?

This is a major shift in philosophy for Amaro, whose assistant once classified advanced metrics as something the Phillies “understand” but “not something we find relevant.”

Maybe two horrific seasons and handing out weird contracts – like the ones given Delmon Young, Laynce Nix, Jonathan Papelbon and others – changed the their minds.

Anyway, Amaro’s interest sounds lukewarm, at best. So I wouldn’t expect much more than the Phillies maybe getting an enterprise license for the PCalc app on their iPhones and using it to compute really advanced stuff… such as on-base percentage.

Whatever the case, it will put an end to Ruben muttering things like “the ball will always find you!” at spring training games. Maybe.