Clarifying misperceptions about a Yankee ‘audit’
On Wednesday, Yankees managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner, general manager Brian Cashman, manager Aaron Boone and high-ranking members of the front office will gather in Tampa to discuss the state of the franchise and plan for the future.
Know who won’t be there? Outside consultants. There is no plan, and there never has been a plan, for the Yankees to invite anyone in to audit their organization, according to four people with direct knowledge of the team’s inner workings.
The misperception that a McKinsey-like audit would commence after the season is rooted in Steinbrenner’s comments to longtime Associated Press reporter Mark Didtler on Aug. 31. But a reread of the quotes shows that Steinbrenner never said that would happen.
"We're going to take a very deep dive into everything we're doing," Steinbrenner told Didtler. "We're looking to bring in possibly an outside company to really take a look at the analytics side of what we do. Baseball operations in general. We're going to have some very frank conversions with each other. This year was obviously unacceptable."
Every word of that statement was accurate. The Yankees will take a deep dive into their operations. They will have frank conversations. They consider an 82-80 record to be completely unacceptable.
But somehow, the part about looking at analytics was understood by many in the public as being something other than what Steinbrenner said. It’s not clear exactly how the mistake began, but it has grown into a fictional notion that consultants will be walking around the Yankee offices and investigating how every department operates.
Here is what is actually happening, according to those four sources: The Yankees will be paying to view how an outside firm runs analytics, and then comparing it to the way they operate in that area. It is a self-evaluation, because they are looking at another company, rather than having a company look at them. The front office has been considering this opportunity for several years, and has now received clearance to spend the money.
None of this is to say that the Yankees won’t take a hard look at why their season went south. Some tweaks to the coaching staff appear to be on the way. And the team needs to figure out why so many of their players are so frequently injured -- is this a problem in their evaluations, acquisitions, medical reviews, training methods, or some combination?
As far as analytics, the Yankees are more moderate than some clubs in this area, and stress traditional scouting as well as data. For years they have been working to improve communication and implementation, which is an industry-wide problem. For what it’s worth, Gerrit Cole has gone out of his way this season to praise improvements in how he receives data and game plans from analyst Zac Fieroh.
Not every player is satisfied, as evidenced by Aaron Judge’s advocacy for a hitting coach with experience and feel like Sean Casey. But even Judge requests voluminous information from Fieroh before games. Finding the right balance for analytics is perhaps the primary challenge of contemporary baseball, and the Yankees are hardly immune.
Overall, Steinbrenner is more involved in the club’s operations than he was earlier in his tenure as managing general partner, and he will demand improvements after a year that left him unhappy.
But he never said that consultants were coming in as part of that process, because that was never planned.
