Wicked mistake: Owner admits Red Sox 'overly relied on numbers'

FT. MYERS, Fla. – Nobody in baseball understands the value of analytics like John Henry, a billionaire because of his fluency in numbers. Henry innately gets human fallibility, made a whole career of it, and leveraged it into a fortune trading commodities and profiting off the genius of his algorithm. Henry owns the Boston Red Sox because of one simple equation: quantitative > qualitative.

To hear Henry on Wednesday afternoon, then, felt like listening to someone who had undergone a soul transplant. He doffed his Panama hat, sat for his annual spring training address and proceeded to denounce the very thing that had fueled the three championships Boston won under his stewardship: statistical analysis.

The Red Sox, Henry said, “have perhaps overly relied on numbers,” and anyone waiting for him to yell “Psyche!” or say that it was Wacky Wednesday and he was just joshing was greeted to an even greater distancing later. This was like Picasso giving up paint, the Wright brothers lauding the virtue of bus travel, the city of Boston renouncing Dunkin’ Donuts in favor of Starbucks.

“Baseball is a complex, dynamic living thing that has to really be nurtured on a day-to-day basis 12 months out of the year,” Henry said. “I think we were relying too heavily on analytics.”

Because nobody outside of the Boston organization knows how much the Red Sox used their analytics, and how it compares to their use today, it’s impossible to say whether this is a sea change of the highest order. For Henry to go public with it, though – to admit that after peering “under the hood” of the Red Sox organization last summer, he found himself questioning their methods – unquestionably reinforced a perception that has permeated baseball since August.

Dave Dombrowski, the Red Sox’s new president of baseball operations, has a stranglehold on the direction of the franchise unlike any previously given by Henry. If he isn’t an avowed opponent of sabermetrics, Dombrowski places himself squarely on the scouting side of the divide through his actions and deeds. He never hesitates to lavish spectacular sums of money on players, whereas some of the more numbers-inclined teams – the Red Sox of the past included – balked at bigger deals for aging free agents. Dombrowski doesn’t hoard prospects; he develops them and uses them as chips to stock his major league roster. When Dombrowski left Detroit last season, one of the stated missions of new general manager Al Avila was to beef up the Tigers’ analytics department.

Handing over the reins to Dombrowski set the franchise on a course in diametric opposition to its dealings when former GM Theo Epstein left in 2012. The Red Sox moved all-in on analytics, expanding the role of Bill James, the godfather of sabermetrics, and allowing the word of its computerized database, nicknamed Carmine, to act as the word of God. When the Red Sox offered free agent-to-be Jon Lester a four-year, $70 million deal before the 2014 season – a sum so laughable his teammates expressed their extreme displeasure publicly – they did so because Carmine suggested a four-year, $68 million deal was proper. Ever munificent, the Red Sox added a couple million to sweeten the offer.

Lester wound up with a $155 million deal from the Chicago Cubs, where Epstein had gone to build what’s now the World Series favorite. The Lester deal reinforced the irrationality of markets that Henry tried to avoid until this offseason when he spent $217 million on David Price. Henry said Wednesday that much of Boston’s advantage in recent years had stemmed from money, not sabermetrics, an argument that seems to suffer from a good bit of recency bias.

The Red Sox’s divorce from Epstein and the scouting-and-sabermetrics balance he built reflects particularly poorly on the franchise that is flip-flopping with all of the expertise of a politician. Consecutive last-place finishes and three in four years – with a World Series championship sandwiched among the failure – can inspire rash decision-making anywhere, especially with a team like Boston that spends around $200 million annually on salaries.

At the same time, Henry’s explicit condemnation of sabermetrics’ place in the Red Sox’s fall cuts so hard against his instincts that it reeks of overcorrection and not just simple due diligence. “Over the years, we have had great success relying upon numbers,” Henry said. “That has never been the whole story, as we said over and over again, but perhaps it was a little too much of the story. Too much of a reliance on past performance and trying to project future performance. That obviously hasn’t worked in three out of the last four years.”

One of the great tenets of analytical thinking is process over outcome. Baseball, of course, is an outcome-based business, and not only do the Red Sox players suffer when mired in last place but their business – from butts in seats to TV ratings to sponsorships – likewise bears the brunt. It’s not like Henry handed the Red Sox over to some schlemiel in Dombrowski. He is one of the most successful GMs in baseball, and his win-now rhetoric led to a half-decade of success with the Tigers.

Linking any success the Red Sox find under the new regime solely to his maneuvering, however, would be specious at best considering the team Dombrowski inherited. With Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts, the Red Sox have two of the finest young, up-the-middle players in all of baseball. Their farm system, led by second baseman Yoan Moncada, center fielder Andrew Benintendi, third baseman Rafael Devers and 17-year-old right-hander Anderson Espinoza, might be the best in baseball – and that’s after Dombrowski gave up top prospects Manuel Margot and Javier Guerra in a deal for closer Craig Kimbrel.

Epstein’s championship teams built themselves on a combination of homegrown talent and savvy pickups inspired by what numbers told them – that Ortiz guy: pure sabermetric play – and it’s a shtick that continues to work with the Cubs. Maybe Henry wants Dombrowski to bring the Red Sox back into that mindset, where the symbiosis of scouting and sabermetrics makes that complex, dynamic living thing purr like a Bimmer.

“Sabermetrics is always going to be a tool that is in the game to stay,” Red Sox manager John Farrell said. “What the right balance is, that’s probably dependent upon the person making the decisions and how much they’re willing to rely on that versus the traditional approach to scouting or the traditional approach to evaluation. I can’t say it was abandoned, by any means. It certainly was not abandoned. But that’s where art meets science.”

The art of scouting is vital, no doubt, and it informs the decisions of all the best teams, even the Cubs. If indeed the Red Sox were being run like Henry’s commodity business, it’s the sort of imbalance that needed fixing. Sources in the Red Sox organization didn’t see it that way, though, not by any means. “It’s not like we’re all sitting around a computer and plowing through spreadsheets,” one official said with a chuckle.

The urge to diversify one’s knowledge base, to get away from what he or she knows, is strong indeed, and perhaps that’s at work here. Nothing fosters doubt like losing, and even if the Red Sox’s last two years can be attributed to plenty beyond sabermetrics, it’s an easy scapegoat and one Dombrowski is happy to remedy.

Everyone in baseball now relies on analytics. Doing them better than the others – something well within the reach of the Red Sox, thanks to their financial advantage – is the key. Even as others in the financial industry glommed onto analytics as a vital component of trading, Henry tweaked his methodologies to stay ahead of the rest. On Wednesday, reflecting on his statement at his spring-training summit in 2015 that the state of the Red Sox never had been better, Henry seemed to forget the lesson that put him in this position in the first place.

“If there’s one thing that I’ve learned,” Henry said, “it’s that human beings are notoriously bad at predicting futures.”

Down that road goes his baseball team, emphasizing the human element, paring back on the analytics, another 180 for a franchise doing a lot of do-si-do of late. The reimagining of the Red Sox is underway. This is Dave Dombrowski’s team, complex and dynamic and, starting now, guided by the same human beings John Henry never could trust.