Unless you hang around the interwebs seeking out sabermetric info, are a loyal Baseball Prospectus reader or have glanced at the Indians’ front office list, you might not know the name Keith Woolner. His title: Manager of Baseball Analysis & Research.
The casual fan is more likely to know fellow Baseball Prospectus alum, fivethirtyeight.com writer and veritable pop-culture stat star Nate Silver, than the guy analyzing stats for the Tribe. And that’s fine. There’s no reason for Woolner to be in the public eye. But for Tribe fans, for baseball fans, it might be helpful to know how the Indians’ head stat analyst interacts with the rest of the team.
It’s not really breaking news that the Tribe would employ someone like this. Anyone who has listened to GM Mark Shapiro or Assistant GM Chris Antonetti knows that the front office is inclined to the kind of analysis made mainstream in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball. The Indians have long been an organization that was tied to the sabermetric community (sabermetrics is the statistical and mathematical analysis of baseball records) — among the first not only to embrace the idea but to hire someone like Keith Woolner.
Their connection back in 2007 was fortuitous. Woolner, who had worked in software development and marketing while writing for Baseball Prospectus for 10 years, was at a company that had just faced a round of layoffs. “And so I kind of said, I’ve been doing this baseball thing for quite awhile now, and there’d been a couple of people that had managed to get into the front office of some teams,” says Woolner. “I used those as a way to ask if any teams were looking, and [Indians’ director of baseball operations] Mike Chernoff responded and said he’d like to talk to me.”
As it turned out, the Indians were looking for someone just like Keith. “We had been looking to fortify our effort in analytics, and we were looking at a broad range of avenues to do that,” says Antonetti. “We became aware that Keith was exploring his options, and we believed the ability to bring in someone like Keith, with his expertise, intelligence and background, would enhance our efforts.”
This article appears in Apr 29 – May 5, 2009.
