Ruben Amaro says Phillies used analytics but kept it a secret

Ruben Amaro was widely derided during his tenure as GM of the Philadelphia Phillies. Though the team made the World Series in his first year as GM in 2009 and reached the playoffs three years in a row, Amaro stuck with an aging and declining core, leading the Phillies to become one of the worst teams in baseball.

Amaro was mocked for seemingly not having a strong grasp on stats and analytics. One time he appeared not to know the difference between at-bats and plate appearances. He even ripped fans for not understanding the game.

But now, in an interview with Fangraphs, Amaro is saying the Phillies did use analytics, they just mostly kept it a secret for a competitive advantage.

“I’ve always believed in analytics. I just didn’t make it all public (in Philadelphia),” Amaro told Fangraphs. “I thought it was more of a competitive advantage for me to keep our thought-process about analytics closer to the vest. We didn’t boast about what we were doing — we didn’t discuss it openly — because I didn’t think it was anybody’s business but our own as to how we evaluated.

“We got a little more aggressive, as far as building our analytics department, probably three-or-so years ago. It did maybe become a little more public then. But that doesn’t mean we weren’t utilizing analytics to some degree earlier than that.”

Amaro is now a first base coach for the Red Sox and even said that he preferred to rely on the opinion of scouts more than numbers. In addition to seemingly not understanding the value of walks, Amaro in the past has argued that players don’t get worse as they age. He doesn’t seem to be much of a stat guy, and it’s hard to believe him when he says the Phillies were big on analytics but just kept it quiet, that is unless his comments to the media were all part of the cover-up too.

Forearm bash to Hardball Talk