Saturday, August 5, 2017

A non-player transaction

The Twins announced a front office move Friday:





The Derek Falvey-Thad Levine regime has treaded relatively lightly on the front office it inherited from former gemeral manager Terry Ryan. Goin was Ryan's top analytics guy, and "Falvine" has been expanding that portion of baseball operations.

I don't know if Goin's departure was a firing, a resignation, a mutual agreement that this isn't working. A few weeks ago my Monday print column was a review of Keith Law's explanation of the current status of sabermetrics, "Smart Baseball," and noted that Law, who was at one point the analytics department of the Toronto Blue Jays, says flatly that he would now be unqualified for that same job.

Goins was once the analytics department of the Twins. It would not be greatly surprising if Falvine want more from that department than Goins is capable of providing. That's not meant as condemnation of Goins; it's an acknowledgement of the demand for increasingly sophisticated analysis and data presentation. It's a different job than it was when Ryan hired Goins, with more being required of it.

It remains to be seen if this is followed by more departures of prominent front office personnel.

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