GM Candidates Part 3 Farhan Zaidi
By Fred Owens
As the rumor mill turns and guessing continues about the list of Braves GM Candidates it looks like a roundup of the usual suspects. The not yet a GM list however offers some enticing options for a team that needs a leap forward. One of those is Farhan Zaidi.
Small market experience with a winning franchise
Farhan Zaidi is currently AGM and director of baseball operations for the Oakland Athletics
Farhan Zaidi (pronounced FAR-hahn ZY-dee) is assistant general manager/director of baseball operations for the Oakland Athletics. Zaidi’s path to the As was unlike any other that I’m aware of. A Canadian who grew up in the Philippines, Zaidi loved playing the game but as a “fringe hitting” first baseman was never going to be a big league player. He kept up with the game through the box scores in the international press and through a bit of good luck found a bookstore that carried the annual Bill James Baseball Abstract. He told theStar.com:
"“There was a three or four year run in the ’80s when I was able to buy that and absolutely devour it cover to cover before that bookstore either went out of business or stopped carrying that book because I was the only person buying it.”"
Anyone devouring the Bill James books is not only obsessed with baseball but is also quite enamored with numbers, so it isn’t a surprise that he 37 year old is a graduate of MIT and holds a PHD in behavioral economics for Cal Berkley. While working on that degree he read Moneyball and decided that could be his future. So he sent résumés to the A’s, the Jays and the Dodgers hoping that one of the people in the book – Billy Beane, J.P. Ricciardi and Pauyl Depodesta – would view him as a candidate for their staff.
Impressing the boss
No one replied to his résumés and he continued to work on his doctorate but never quit looking for a chance to work for a major league team. In December 2004 he saw a post that said the A’s were looking for an entry level analyst. He applied, got an interview and arrived prepared with a three ring binder full of multi-year projections for everyone on the A’s roster. Beane was impressed and hired him. Beane told Susan Slusser:
"“(AGM()David (FRost) and I looked at each other when he left and said, ‘That’s the guy,’ ” Beane said. “It wasn’t just his analytical skills, it was his incredible personality. It was important to us to find someone to fit into a very fraternal group.”"
After nine years working in statistical analysis the Beane promoted him to AGM this spring. Asked what impresses him most, Beane told Susan Slusser be believed Zaidi would be successful in any position anywhere.
"“He’s absolutely brilliant,” Oakland general manager Billy Beane said. “He has a great qualitative mind, but also a creative mind. The ability to look at things both micro and macro is unique, and Farhan could do whatever he wants to do, not just in this game, but in any sport or any business. I’m more worried about losing him to Apple or Google than I am to another team.”"
Slusser reports that he played a “large role” is signing Yoenis Cespedes and has been instrumental is the A’s us of platoons to maximize their talent. They use it more than most and have been extremely successful in doing so.
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Call to the Pen
In 2013 Fangraphs David Laurila interviewed Zaidi at MIT’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. The interview provides some insight into his beliefs and style.he told Laurila that small market teams have to take risks that teams with deep pockets don’t.
"“If you’re a small or mid-market team, you’re compelled to engage in a high-variance strategy. We don’t want to just run our operation the same way everyone else does, with the same blend of stats and scouting, In some sense, the optimal strategy is to take risks. We make trades that might be perceived as risky. Sometimes they pay off. . .(some) we were wrong about."
He says that small markets have to make decisions differently that big markets and have to take some risk.
"“. . .(if you don’t) you’re just using industry values to put together the second-lowest payroll team in the league, and likely end up being the second-worst team.. You kind of have to take those risks to outperform your payroll. Sometimes it’s going to backfire . . .If I was the Yankees, that wouldn’t be my strategy. All I’d have to do is be as good at scouting and analytics as everyone else, and my payroll gives me the advantage. If you don’t have that advantage, you have to do something else."
He also says even if you know everything sometimes you just blow it but at least you blew it knowing everything.
"“. . . There’s never going to be a time where I read something about a guy we traded and go, ‘Oh my god, we didn’t know that.’ We can be wrong, but we had all the information. We just interpreted it, or judged it, wrong.”"
Like the previous GM candidates I’ve highlighted he understands the need for high quality scouting potential trades or signings.
"“Our assessments are based on both numbers and scouting. . . A lot of times, particularly at the corner outfield spots, you’ll have a guy who doesn’t have a great defensive reputation, but his fielding metrics are above average, or even way above average. You don’t know what to make of that. But when the scouting reports and metrics line up, you really have something."
He says that it’s important to make sure your role players are the best role players you can get for the money.
"“We approach improvement from the bottom-up. We talk a lot about bang for the buck — marginal runs and marginal wins per dollar spent. We’ve found that the best ways to improve our team were to limit the downside. We manage the roster from the bottom.. . A back-up catcher that plays once a week isn’t a guy you’d necessarily see as a focal point of your team, but . . .having an average player there as opposed to a replacement-level player there can make a difference."
When preparing advanced scouting on opponents Zaidi says that the more you know the better you’ll be able to apply it in a game situation.
"“On an opposing hitter report, you might have a player’s batting average against 0-1 fastballs or 0-2 fastballs. Guys would use batting average in very specific, narrow, circumstances to determine whether to throw a pitch in a certain count. Batting average is certainly not the right metric to use in those situations. We also need to understand how to slice the data into . . . statistically significant sample sizes. . . Ultimately, what you want in an advance report isn’t batting average on fastball counts. You want something more along the lines of skill level, like how often a guy makes hard contact on a fastball on an 0-1 count. . ."
With every team scouting every player everywhere Zaidi feels that developing proprietary information is a must for small market teams to have an edge.Every team gets much the same data and crunching it much the same way. He call that running in place. “Everybody is holding up the gun and everybody writes down the reading like everyone is collecting performance data and evaluating it. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes that every team is doing individually, but really, much of that exercise is just running in place.
"“The question of what you’re doing that other teams aren’t is a tough question. You have to give your competitors respect. A lot of things you’ve thought about, they probably have as well. You have to try to go a step beyond and do it better.”"
Pulling it all together
Zaidi told thestar that even after ten years in the game it never ceases to surprise.
"“As predictable as we try to make it, as much as we try to understand it, between all the variables involved, between all the personalities involved, you can only know so much,” he said. “All of these things you can only know to a certain degree, so you can’t get overly dogmatic about everything or think there’s a right answer, because baseball winds up being a game with a lot of grey area. You try to be as good as you can at evaluating players and choosing the right guys and making the right moves when it comes to player transactions or in-game strategy, but the reality is every time you think you have something figured out the game will humble you. That’s an enduring lesson.”"
It also sounds like a man with a consummate understanding that the game is what happens while you’re planning what will happen. Not a bad thing for a future GM to have.
That’s A Wrap
As GM candidates go Zaidi is brilliant, talented and understands how to make the most of limited resources, something the Braves have not done all that well for along time now. He is also a relative newcomer and that in itself goes against him in this search. There are other issues as well.
As much as we’d love to think otherwise his heritage and the fact that he’s one of only three Muslim front office officials in baseball also plays against his selection. Like Kim Ng it might be a long road to the GM chair for him. The team that hires him however has an excellent chance of success.