Red Sox Owner John Henry yesterday "revealed a major shift in organizational philosophy" when he said that the team "was de-emphasizing its reliance on analytics in making major decisions," according to Nick Cafardo of the BOSTON GLOBE. Henry said, “I spent at least two months sort of looking under the hood, and came to the conclusion that we needed to make changes. One of the things that we’ve done -- and I’m fully accountable for this -- is we have perhaps overly relied on numbers, and there were a whole host of things." He added, "Over the years, we’ve had success relying on numbers, but that has never been the whole story, as we’ve said over and over again. But perhaps it was too much of the story" (BOSTON GLOBE, 2/25). In Boston, Dan Shaughnessy writes Henry's remarks were a "refreshing bit of candor from the man in charge." Henry acknowledged that his team had "lost its way in a sea of analytics and needs to get back to some old-school thinking in regards to talent evaluation and performance expectations." He said the Red Sox had become "overly reliant" on the numbers. He added, "I was shocked how bad we were last year." But the "big bomb of the day" was Henry’s disclosure that he is "backing away from the club’s longstanding emphasis on numbers." This is a "consequence of three last-place finishes in four years, poor decisions made by" former GM Ben Cherington, and the team’s hiring of President of Baseball Operations Dave Dombrowski late last summer. Henry said, "I was shocked at how bad we were last year. To me, it was shocking" (BOSTON GLOBE, 2/25). Henry: “A lot of our advantage was purely financial. We were never as far toward analytics as people thought we were" (PROVIDENCE JOURNAL, 2/25).
EYES WIDE OPEN: In Boston, Steve Buckley writes the "baseball nerds who get kept locked away in the basement at Fenway Park had to be spitting up their Mountain Dew when they heard the news" from Henry. Buckley: "John Henry is down on analytics?" He did not become a billionaire "by using the eeny-meeny-miney-mo approach to managing hedge funds. Rest assured that Eau de Analytics will continue to be his go-to hardball cologne." But what Henry is saying, and he "happens to be right about this, is that it doesn’t hurt to look at things from a variety of perspectives" (BOSTON HERALD, 2/25). Also in Boston, Jason Mastrodonato writes Henry "can get away with saying just about anything he wants." So if he "wants to rip into the Red Sox a little bit, he will." Perhaps "most revealing about Henry’s demeanor was his willingness to admit that so much of what the Red Sox had been doing in the front office was wrong" (BOSTON HERALD, 2/25).
