Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 320: Colin Wyers on Mathematical Modeling for the Astros and the Future of Public-Sector Sabermetrics

Episode Date: November 1, 2013

Ben and Sam talk to Colin Wyers about how he got hired by the Astros, working in baseball, and where sabermetrics is headed.

Hello. Hello. Hello, Ben. Whoa, you sound like you've been taking immunity pills. You don't sound sick at all. The Astros must have a great health plan. Good morning and welcome to episode 320 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus.

I am Ben Lindberg, joined as always by Sam Miller, and joined today by Colin Wires, who has been on the podcast a couple times in the past when he was ill and had terrible, terrible colds that many of you emailed us to complain about. He is fully healthy now and sounds excellent. So we've had him back, not only to celebrate his good health but to pass on some exciting news. Colin has accepted a position as a mathematical modeler for the Houston Astros. And this is, I guess you could say, his last day at Baseball Prospectus, where he has been writing for a few years now and has served as the director of research.

So my understanding is that you wanted to come on the show to ask for our blessing? My understanding was I sent you my last article and you said, hey, will you come on the podcast? I sent you my last article and you said, hey, will you come on the podcast? By the way, a secret to all you listeners out there, he says good morning, but he records this in the dead of night, so don't let him fool you. I think they know.

We've addressed this. It's very appropriate. It's Halloween night still for us, and Ben's keeping his normal sleep schedule because he's a Nosferatu, one of the creatures of the damned uh okay well we do give you our blessing just in case you were too polite to ask but uh we we approve um i was too polite or maybe you were worried about what we'd say uh and uh so colin has a sort of a farewell article up at Baseball Prospectus today, Friday. It is free to everyone, so you can read it if for some reason you are not a Baseball

Prospectus subscriber. It's a long article, kind of a personal article, but also sort of about the state of sabermetrics and the public sector and the private sector. So first things first, I guess, can you, and one thing I like about the Astros is that they have pretty cool job titles, or at least some of you do. Mathematical modeler is, it's maybe not the kind of title that gets you dates, but it's, it's creative at least. And our friend Mike Fast, who preceded you, is just analyst, which comparatively is pretty boring. Mike is a decision sciences analyst. Let's not downplay the coolness in Mike's job title. Okay. Well, just out of curiosity, who came up with the title?

Just out of curiosity, who came up with the title? I believe Sig Megdahl is the one that came up with that. He's the director of decision sciences, which is also a really cool job title. That's one of the better ones in baseball, I would say. So can you – I guess some of it is kind of right there in the name of the job, but can you... Yeah, I build models using math. Okay. So you'll be doing, I guess, somewhat similar work to the work that people have known you for on the internet, right? I mean, you'll be...

Yeah, I mean, they're not hiring me to do something that is well far afield from the sort of stuff that I've been doing up until now. You know, it's sort of, they like the stuff that I've been doing and they want to see me doing some of that for them. So I don't, you know, I don't anticipate, you know, doing anything really, really strange and crazy, but, you know, compared to what i've been doing previously and uh of course you are friends with mike and kevin and you are friends with other people who've written on the internet and then been hired and gone to work for teams uh have they shared anything with you not specific to the astros but but just about sort of the transition to going behind the real paywall? There's a few different things at once. One, as I'm sure some people know,

although I actually am kind of surprised at how many people don't seem to know this. I've been a Cubs fan my whole life. You know, as much as that might have pained me. I've never heard you sound happy about that fact. I don't know that I've ever been happy about that. Or about anything, really. I haven't been much cause to be happy about that. But, you know, it's one of those things where, you know, it's, it's something

you have to let go when you take a job like this, you know, you're not rooting for, you know, someone else's baseball team to win. You want to win those games. Um, and at the same time, we, we, we can all kind of speculate that being a Cubs fan has not brought me a particular amount of happiness. So I suspect it's less a joy that I'm giving up than a terrible burden I was cursed with by familial obligations. But that's a transition to make from being a fan of a particular team to to cheering for a different one and being in them in a very different way than i think you are

when you're you know cheering for a team on the outside and i've i've actually found that some people who work for teams are almost uh they're wary of hiring someone who is a fan of their team it seems like sort of because they're they're always sort of like suspicious like does he want to work for the team because he's he roots for us and he's like a fan and he wants to get close to the team and have that access or something and i don't know that that's actually many people's motivation if they're serious about working in the industry but there's always kind of that that wariness i've found when it's when it's the team that you grew up rooting for and now you want to work for so maybe it's maybe it's better all else being equal

not to be you know a lifelong fan you know i i hadn't really thought about that before but i can see that, yeah. All else being equal, it is always better to not be a lifelong Asperstein. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. No comment. We're a franchise with a proud tradition. You know, we're not where we want to be necessarily right now, but we're on the path to where we think we're going to get to where we want to be. He says, already flipping into the loyal company man stance.

Yeah, you're already using the we. Seven, in fact, I believe. Seven we's. believe seven wheeze um can you quickly sort of summarize how you came to do what you do because it's sort of an interesting story that i don't know whether people are all that aware of although you go into it briefly in your article today yeah um i was i was in the marines doing media relations um and then i decided that i wanted to try and pursue a path in life that didn't involve quite as much getting shot at with actual bullets as opposed to message board comments yeah you know yeah the actual bullets thing

you know some occasional seersucker missiles and that sort of thing. And, you know, I wanted a lifestyle where dying every day was not, you know, an option necessarily. So I decided to explore other paths. So I was working in local television through an outfit called Independent News Network, where I'm in Davenport, Iowa. And by the time I was leaving there, I'd gotten up to the position of producer where I wrote newscasts. So I wrote newscasts for Columbus, Georgia, and Alexandria, Louisiana. And we shot those newscasts on our set in Iowa. And via satellite, we transmitted those local newscasts down to those stations. And they aired them as their local news.

And at the time, you know, I was also, I started off working at the Hardball Times, doing an article a week there. And I'm sure everyone knows, you know, Nate Silver got his career in politics going, so he left Baseball Perspectives. And I wrote a few articles for the Hardball Times, somewhat critical of things that were going on with Pakoda after Nateathan left among other things and um i ran into christina carl at the winter meetings in indianapolis and i said hey you know i'm not doing these things because i don't like you guys i'm doing these things because i you know i've been reading you guys for years and i want to see you guys doing as well as i think you can and so a while later Kevin Goldstein uh got a hold of me and he said hey you know here's an opportunity for you to put your money where your mouth is

and for us to put our money where our mouth is and say hey you know here's this guy who's been really critical of us we're giving him a chance to fix the things he's complaining about and so I was working I wrote an article a week and I was also doing database support requests for authors and I was doing some work on a defensive metric which is an entirely different story and so we got to the point where I was working part-time and holding down a day job. And we were getting into the off-season, and there was a lot of work that needed to be done

to get the website ready for next year and to have the code up and running for the book and all these other things. And Dave Pease asked me, hey, can you handle this? And I told him, you know, I can't really do these things you're asking me to do and hold down a full-time job at the same time. And he goes, well, then, but you can do these things. Given, you know, a full-time chance to do them, I'm like, yeah, I can do these things.

And, you know, Dave offered me a full-time position with Baseball Prospectus, and I've been here ever since. And that's when you found out that I email you stat requests 10 times a day, and you regretted all of your life choices up to that point. You know, you're supposed to email them, Ben, but you really message them. I also do. Colin, what was your first – My favorite Jim Lindbergh story is I'm getting an instant message from him about – I don't even remember what it was about. And I go, well, give me a minute to look this up. And you go, I have about 10 of those minutes. I'm like, what do you mean?

It's the middle of the day. You're not even up at this time normally and he goes i'm in the makeup chair getting ready to go on the network and they're gonna ask me about this and i'm like are you are you serious you're i am in the makeup chair at the tv studio asking you for stats yeah yes i think i was asking you about reliever usage or strikeout raid or something, and I don't even know why I had my computer with me. Something hard.

It wasn't like a easy question. Yeah, sometimes Brian Kenney calls an audible at the last second and you have to get out your computer and instant message Colin. Sam, what were you just asking? Colinin i wanted to know what's the first thing you ever wrote that uh had a byline like what what was what was the

first topic that you ever wrote on that you felt strongly enough to like put your real name over and publish on a real site like in general or for bp for for. I was doing fan posts for a Cubs blog. The SB Nation Cubs blog, Bleed Cubby Blue. I think I wrote a really long post about why I hated Ryan Terrio. Wow. Yeah, I would not write that piece again. As much as I might not like Ryan Terrio as much as a baseball player. not write that piece again as much as I might not like Ryan Terry much as a baseball player and you talk you talk a lot in your in your farewell post about how to get a job you know

how to sort of move up and in the baseball world and if you want to get a baseball job how to do it if you want to be a baseball writer what to do sorts of advice along those lines and and i had a few questions because you know you you made it um and one of them is when you were going along this path that you were taking that ultimately ended up in a front office um or whatever it is that you are are you in a front office yeah yeah where else would he be? I don't know. It seems like a lot of people, like Kevin is in a front office, but he doesn't go into the front office very often, for instance. But, yeah, you're in a front office. Kevin's job is different from mine in that he's out a lot.

that he's out a lot, even if he was based out of Houston, he's in a position where he's traveling a lot to check up on players, to see players. Yeah, and you won't be doing that. So you're in the front office. So at any point in the last 10 years, when you were doing these things you were doing, writing the things you were doing, learning new skills, et cetera, were you thinking, like, this will make me a stronger candidate?

This will make me more useful to a team. Was that like kind of a goal? Did it like sort of drive any of the decisions you made? Or was it just sort of a situation where the things that interested you happened to align with the things that would interest a team and it was sort of an afterthought that it would be here. There's very few things I've done in my career that I think ever meant were targeted towards, hey, baseball teams, I think I'm a good candidate.

It largely grew out of just having questions about baseball that I wanted to answer. But at the same time, there's some things that about baseball that I wanted to answer. But at the same time, you know, there's some things that I did that I think were kind of key towards getting this kind of a position, or getting the kind of position that I had with BP before this. And that's particularly in the ability to write computer programs, or at least SQL queries, which are, you know, technically computer programs, um, as opposed to just having the ability to, uh, you know, do an analysis on data that somebody else goes and fetches for me. And, you know, that's, that's one thing that I see. I see a lot of people trying to do,

certainly. There's a Google group for baseball SQL people to, to learn from each other and share code with each other. I think there's a lot of analysts out there that don't have that skill set and they're not, or they're not, you know, developing it to the full potential. or they're not developing it to its full potential. And I think that's the sort of thing that if you do want to work in baseball stats, it's the kind of skill that's going to help you. And that's kind of why I mentioned that. But I also think it's useful in just having that skill,

because it really improves the kind of questions you can ask and answer. And another thing that you talk about a lot in that article is sort of the brain drain of people flowing, analysts flowing from the Internet into front offices and then no longer being able to write anything. And I am part of the problem, not the solution. Yes. So where does that go from here? Are we getting to a point now where we're just not going to see the same caliber of analysis on the internet that we have for the last couple decades? Because as soon as someone does something smart, that person will be snapped up? Is it going to be that there will just continually be a new generation coming up doing innovative stuff and then eventually they'll be snapped up?

Where does it go from here, do you think? I think I could make a lot of money if I knew the answer to that question. But a lot of it depends on what people decide to go forward from on this. You know, there are certainly opportunities out there for people to make a name for themselves in this community and to do good work. And I think if there are people motivated to take those opportunities and run with them, we're always going to have public saver metrics. There's a reason that teams are hiring guys out of this community.

And it's because doing this sort of public work shows a lot of different things. It shows the ability to sustain an interest in this and to be motivated to work on this sort of stuff over a period of time. And it shows the ability to get useful conclusions out of baseball data and the ability to do it more than once. So I think there's always going to be a place for people like that in the industry as opposed to just, you finding them straight out of college now i mean there's obvious people straight out of college who are getting these kinds of positions and who are good at this but i think you know if if there are people willing to put in the work and the hours you know and to do this sort of thing they'll always find a place for them it's a question of

you know are people interested in this let's honest. There were people interested in this when you had to mimeograph your own newsletter to get your stuff out. because it's a lot easier to get a computer that can do this kind of analysis. It's a lot easier to find data. It's a lot easier to find people to talk to about what to do with this data. And it's a lot easier to find places to publish your analysis once you've done it. I never, for that reason, I never worry about the brain drain. I always feel like anybody who leaves is, you know, there's a lot of people striving to do this stuff and who are building on other people's work. No offense to Colin, but there will be other great minds who will replace you, and we will still get good research in the public sphere. I keep waiting for one of you guys who leaves to be the last kind of guy I've heard of to get hired

because it feels like we're getting to the point where the baseball knowledge maybe is less important than the sort of other things that you can bring. In fact, the baseball knowledge might be irrelevant. And I don't know if that's true. And I don't know that partly because I don't know what kind of work you're going to be doing. And maybe you don't know it yet. Maybe you will know it. But like, you know, there's this, you know, Bob Volgaris, the NBA, you know, gambler who, you know, makes a billion dollars gambling and he has this quant um you know he has this this model to to predict basketball games and all that and he hired the guy he hired is i'm going to quote here a um a literal math prodigy as a pre-teen he had won national math contests he had been the subject of awestruck articles in major newspapers scored a perfect 800 on the sat when he was in seventh grade he had just quit a high-paying designing algorithms for an East Coast hedge fund with a roster of Nobel-grade quant talent.

And I just feel like that's a different sort of a brain than usually gets found writing on SB Nation. It's a different sort of level of research. on SB Nation, right? It's a different sort of level of research. And so I just wonder if you get the feeling that, you know, we're ever going to reach a point where baseball prospectus is not where these guys get hired from, but rather, you know, like they're all coming from Wall Street or, you know, straight out of like Harvard math programs or MIT math programs? I think those guys can be useful. I think there's a lot of smart people doing that, and I think that a lot of teams would be lucky to have them,

and I think a lot of teams do have them already. But at the same time, and I kind of touch on this in the article, there's two things you can use a model for. One is prediction. The other is explanation. I think if you're entirely focused on the math side of things and the statistics and the tools that you're using, you can do a lot of good work on the predictive side. But that you lose the ability to do a lot of the things on the predictive side, but that you lose the ability to do a lot

of the things on the explanatory side if you don't have that good knowledge of baseball itself. And I think that one, the two go hand in hand in a lot of senses. The better your model is at explaining, the better it is at predicting in a lot of ways. But the other thing is that if you want to convince somebody to make a decision based on the model you've built, you can't just tell them, hey I have this model and it says you should do this. Because they're going to ask you why. And sometimes it's enough to say, well, this model has a certain track record. And they'll go, okay. But sometimes, you know, you're going to have to give a better answer than that. Why does the model say this? What is the model seeing here that makes it believe in

this proposition? And so I think in order to do that kind of thing, you need to understand more than just the model. You need to understand what it is that's being modeled. Is there another thing I wonder about or worry about is the information gap growing. And I guess that you either already have or soon will have access to lots of fun information that you haven't had access to this point. Scouting reports and hit effects and field effects and track man and whatever else is available to you as a mathematical modeler for the Astros. Probably there are things that you have worked on for BP that you maybe kind of got to, you

went as far as you could with them with the information that you had, and maybe you can take them further with better information. So do you think teams are still, you know, I know that they read Baseball Perspectives, they read these other sites, do you think they are learning from them and, you know, getting information that they can apply to their teams? Or do you think they're sort of reading more to look at the way someone thinks and say that, well, if we hired this person and he had access to all this information that we had, he could probably do something useful with it. But right now he's working with, you know, publicly available information and we have better stuff. So he doesn't know what he's talking about, available information and we have better stuff, so he doesn't know

what he's talking about, but the process is good. Do you think that it's one or the other right now? Are teams still learning from internet people or are they just sort of scouting? I think there's advantages to both. I think we have the advantage of resources. They can buy better data. They can buy much better data. They have, you know, data that you simply cannot get on the outside. Stuff like, you know, what are your scouts thinking? What's the medicals look like?

Stuff that, you know, just is not available to the public. At the same time, even the team that has the people devote sort of work all fear and they all bring their own specialties to the table let's let's take one example not to pick on him too much you know who Alan Nathan is right Alan Nathan is a nuclear physicist, and he is even smarter than that label would make one think. Alan Nathan is as smart as he is kind and nice and generous. And if you ask Alan a question, he will do everything in his power to get you an answer. but there are very few people of Allen's caliber who knows the things Allen's knows about the physics of the moving baseball. And there aren't 30 of them.

So not every team has an Allen Nathan. But the sabermetric community as a whole has an Allen Nathan. And so if you look at the number of people and the diverse interests of the sabermetric community, there's always going to be people who are able to do things that maybe a team out there is doing it. But all 30 teams may not have it yet. So I think you're always going to have teams reading the public work and finding things that they think they can use. I'm not going to stop looking at websites just because I've got a cool new database.

I think, yeah, at the same time, teams do have resources and they do have smart guys and they're going to come up with stuff that the public's't because you know y'all or we all formerly but y'all you publish what you find so i mean it eventually gets to everybody everybody that wants it at least right uh so are you like the like the other astros people from bp will you be maintaining some sort of online presence? I don't really know yet how that's, I'm sure I'm going to be online a lot less. I think you've seen that before. It is nice that, uh, cause a lot of teams hire writers and then they disappear and you never hear from them again. You might see them at a conference now and then, uh, but otherwise they are as if they

never existed. Whereas Mike and Kevin are still sort of on Twitter and leaving the occasional comment on baseball sites here and there and certainly not giving anything away, but just sort of, you know, still out there. So I hope that is the case with you because I, I mean, I'm, I'm sure if you really need to know how I think, uh, the next, uh,

Captain America movie turned out, I'm sure at some point that information is going to trickle out. Um, I, I don't, I don't think the Astros have a, have a, have a compelling baseball need to keep that sort of knowledge under wraps.

Yeah. Well, I, I look forward to, to continuing to, to send you links to things that I know will make you mad because I'm sure that will not change. You know,

Ben, there is a function in Gmail just to block people. I don't think, I don't know where it is. Yeah. And I might continue sending you stat requests just out of habit. You can just ignore them. But it will be sad for me.

It's been a pleasure working with you over the past few years at BP, and you've made both of us look smarter on occasion when we've asked you for information and you've provided it. So, uh, so thank you for, for all of that and all of this stuff that you've written. And it's, it's rare to find someone who has the skills that you have and also can put a sentence together. Uh, so that's been a pleasure for me as an editor also. So, uh happens is that I have a bunch of chicken scratch out and somehow it magically turns into English. I've never let that on before. But since we're ruining the magic here,

we might as well just steal that one out. All right. Well, you're a good fighter, Wires, and I hate to lose you, as General Rican said to Han Solo. So we are... You're going to give me a Star Wars reference? This is too perfect. Yeah, I feel like Star Wars isn't nerdy enough for you, probably, too mainstream.

It's that mainstream sci-fi that all the people like it's not the hipster sci-fi that I'm into Babylon 5 and you know I'm going to let everyone in on a secret there is no hidden Babylon 5 reference in this last now the title is

completely taken from Babylon 5 but it's not hidden it's right there up top there's no yes mister quotes there's no completely taken from Babylon 5, but it's not hidden. It's right there up top. There's no Yes Mr. quotes. There's no... Shoot. I didn't do any pop culture references in the article. Like, you know, well, there is in Babylon 5 references.

Why am I lying? Of course there is. You should all go to baseballperspectives.com, read Colin's article. We wish you the best with the Astros and we're done for the week so thanks for listening send us emails for next week

because we're going to need them to get through days without baseball at podcast at baseballperspectives.com rate and review us and subscribe to us on iTunes it's very easy and quick to do those things and join our Facebook group at facebook.com

slash groups slash effectively wild and we'll be back on Monday and he is with us to talk about some news Colin is oh wait we lost colin that is exactly what the news is yeah that's true uh okay well this is what it's going to be like then, I guess.

We lost you. Hello? We lost you. I have no idea what happened. A metaphor happened. Oh.