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The Phillies, finally, say they'll be embracing sabermetrics

(Getty Images)
(Getty Images)

A change is coming to the Philadelphia Phillies, who are in last place, ready for a fire sale and without a long-term manager after Ryne Sandberg up and quit Friday because he was tired of losing.

Andy MacPhail was announced Monday as the team's president-to-be and he says he's brining a culture change with him when he takes the reigns. MacPhail — a former GM of the Minnesota Twins and president of the Chicago Cubs and Baltimore Orioles — will take over at team president after the season. He's joining the club immediately as a special assistant to team president Pat Gillick and will take the post when Gillick re-retires once the 2015 season takes mercy on the Phillies and ends.

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In the meantime, MacPhail will get an up-close look at the dysfunction that's turned the Phillies from champions to punchline in five-plus years. He told reporters that he hasn't made any decisions yet about personnel — i.e. whether GM Ruben Amaro Jr. is going to keep his job —but MacPhail did make it immediately obvious that the Phillies would be coming out of the dark ages and embracing sabermetrics.

Here are a few snippets from MacPhail's introductory press conference, via Corey Seidman of CSN Philly:

"I can assure you, as you probably already know, sabermetrics is something of intense interest to ownership," MacPhail said. "When it comes to that sort of thing, I believe you look at everything, absolutely everything. Why would you exclude any information? You're gonna try to do every piece of homework you can to push the odds of being successful in your favor — every stat, every formula.

"I am hardly the guy that is a sabermetric genius, so you go out and hire people. You have the young kids come in an explain to you why it's important and then you make the judgment how much weight you're going to put on it. And the more experience you have with it, the more sense you have of which formulas really are predictors of performance and which ones aren't."

(Getty Images)
(Getty Images)

And further:

"I think it's absolutely essential that you marry [sabermetrics] with the best human intelligence you can," MacPhail said. "Bodies change, weaknesses get exposed and then they get exploited. People make adjustments. Maybe they can hit a curveball that they couldn't a year ago. You need to look at every single facet when you're making player evaluations. No stone goes unturned."

Announcing that you're finally embracing sabermetrics seems a bit silly in 2015 — a time in which baseball intel is deemed so important that one team is being investigated by F.B.I. for hacking another's private database. It's like announcing you just got an iPhone or just signed up for high-speed Internet. But the Phillies had long approached baseball analytics the way Fred Flintstone approached driving a car. They finished dead last in an ESPN study earlier this year about which teams in the four major pro sports use analytics best.

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Sabermetrics aren't the end-all for baseball scouting, but anybody who doesn't see them as a valuable piece of the pie probably shouldn't be running a baseball team. That brings us to Amaro, who should have started updating his résumé as soon as he heard the S-word. He's on record as being against all that fancy math stuff. Take this quote from 2012:

"I believe you can break down and analyze statistics any way you really want, but when it comes to scouting heart and head, you can't do it with sabermetrics," the general manager said. "In our current situation, I feel like talent and production is very important, but I want a player who has a championship-caliber outlook on how to go about his business."

Ah, yes, The Will to Win. You can't put numbers on those things.

While the Phillies were stuck in neutral for years, baseball seems to be getting smarter by the month. Take the Tampa Bay Rays, who are installing state-of-the-art cameras to capture biomechanical data on their pitchers that they hope they will prevent injuries.

The culture change is coming in Philly and that's good news. But it came a long time ago in other MLB front offices. So Andy MacPhail and his team — whoever he keeps around — have some catching up to do.

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Mike Oz is the editor of Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at mikeozstew@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!