By now you’ve probably read Joel Sherman’s interview with Michael Fishman, the Yankees’ assistant GM and head of analytics. It’s conducted with the typical Sherman approach — a narrative in search of evidence — but I think there are a few interesting tidbits in Fishman’s answers that lean into the broader conversation we have about advanced analytics.
Before we can get into that though, Sherman, as well as a lot of fans, just don’t understand what the term “analytics” entails — making decisions based on data, any data. Sometimes, analytics is proprietary software projecting that a player with x exit velocity and y-to-y1 launch angle will hit z OPS over a set number of games, so that player should be in the lineup more often than another player.