Evaluating Front Offices and Farm Systems: Part 2

Monday, November 2, 2015

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Last week I tried to assemble a conceptual framework for evaluating general managers and front offices by applying a couple of economic principles to player acquisitions and departures. This week we will add a few more performance measures by looking at team draft and farm system efficiency. The overall goal is to create a dashboard of indicators that can help us understand how well a team’s front office is performing their duties in addition to the typical winning percentage and eye test measures.

Read more at Banished to the Pen.


Evaluating Front Offices and Farm Systems: Part 1

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The following is a conceptual framework for what I hope becomes a model to help us baseball lovers better evaluate certain aspects of baseball organizations such as general managers effectiveness and farm system efficiency.

 This will be done in multiple posts to retain the attention of readers. My approach is driven by the simple model of the firm and the many economic principles that go along with that method. The economic fundamentals used in my research have been slightly adapted to fit the constraints of baseball. For example, instead of dollars, the WAR stat might be used to calculate a value. Also, certain economic equations break down when using them in a pure baseball sense, so alterations and in some cases new equations were needed to comply with these baseball controls. I will do my best to explain these adaptations as I go along. I must admit this was challenging and I still feel there are several areas in which my thought process might be flawed. Hopefully, with enough time and tentation I will be able to come to some meaningful conclusions. 

Read more at Banished to the Pen

See the full visualization dashboard at Underground Analytics