Chris Long, Padres’ Senior Quantitative Analyst, was nice enough to answer a bunch more of my questions (part 1 is right here). We started with some followups to the last set and then we got into a bunch of other areas. Hope you enjoy reading his responses as much as I did!

Friar Forecast: You mentioned that you didn’t have any experience in the field when you took the job with the Padres.  Did you read up on sabermetrics in your first few weeks on the job or did you just take your pure statistical knowledge and kind of go at it from scratch?

Chris Long: This is a deeply philosophical question.  It’s a question of whether you want to be good, or if you want to be great. If you’re satisfied with good, you can achieve that by understanding what other people have done.  To be great, you need to be able to develop new approaches, new ideas, new methodologies.  It’s an artistic, creative but very painful process.  This is something you naturally tend towards as a child, when you go from trying to understand how things work to trying to make things do something entirely new and different.  This approach has worked well for me throughout life. Initially with discovering some new things in theoretical mathematics, later with designing algorithms to solve (and win) puzzle contests, and now, hopefully, with baseball. 

You’ll rediscover some known ideas along the way, but you’ll understand them on a far deeper level than you would otherwise.  You do need to consider the approaches that other people have taken for a more complete understanding of the problem and solutions, but it’s better to have at least made a serious attempt to solve the problem yourself beforehand.  To paraphrase the movie Big Trouble in Little China, shake the pillars of heaven.

FF: One of my readers mentioned Paul DePodesta.  He is certainly one of the most famous “statheads” in the game.  Do you work closely with him?  In general, do you do a lot of your projects independently and then consult with others in the organization after, or is everything kind of a group project?

Chris Long: Paul, along with Josh Stein and Jeff Kingston, are the people that I interact with the most in Baseball Operations.  My office, in fact, is between Paul’s and Josh’s.  My technical strengths are on the mathematical, statistical and programming side, so that part of what I do is necessarily independent.  But we’re all constantly discussing new ideas and approaches. What makes Paul special and sets him apart is not his appreciation for statistics, but his appreciation and understanding of the game of baseball.  If you appreciate and understand baseball, you should be naturally driven towards analysis as a way to understand (and appreciate) the game on an even deeper level. He’s smart, he’s competitive, and he wants to win as much as anyone I’ve met in baseball.  He’s shaking the pillars of heaven as hard as anyone.

FF: You mentioned the draft as one of your favorite areas of work.  I imagine it’s much more difficult trying to analyze so many different players facing such a variety of competition in many different environments (not to mention the fact that many of them still have a lot of room to grow as players).  What makes the draft so fun and what are some things you do to analyze these potential major leaguers?

Chris Long: What’s so amazing about the baseball draft, and I’m sure the draft in other sports, is the sheer number of players to consider.  Different ages, sizes, polish, playing environments, growth potentials, levels of competition faced, ability components, injury tendencies, and it goes on. Then there’s the information you get from the scouts.  Which scouts are better?  Are they looking at the right players, in the right way, the right number of times?  What’s the best way to integrate all of the information you have? Overlaying all of this are considerations of finance, utility, need, risk and the poker game of the actual draft.  Draft the right player and he could be worth $50 or even $100 million in value to your club (see Pujols).  Draft the wrong players and you’ll waste millions and negatively impact your club for years.  It’s an extremely difficult, messy, noisy, and thoroughly insane problem to work on.  It’s beautiful.

FF: Do you work on high schoolers at all or just college kids?

Chris Long: While you have less information with high school players, you still need to have an understanding of the value of the information you’re getting from your scouts, and how the relative risks and possible returns between potential choices compare.

FF: Are you involved in integrating what I’ll call scouting data (pitch speeds, mechanics, body size, time running from home to first, etc) and more traditional numbers (hits, home runs, runs allowed, etc)?  Or do you work more with the traditional numbers and use the scouting-based data separately?

Chris Long: If you aren’t looking at *all* the information you have, and trying to extract the absolute maximum amount of value from that information, you aren’t doing a good job.  Hopefully that answers your question.

FF: I imagine one of the main goals of statistical analysis in an mlb front office is to project a player’s future performance. Can you tell us a little about how you analyze a player’s past performance to gain insight about what you expect out of his future?

Chris Long: I can’t go into specifics, but again, you need to integrate *all* the information you have about a player.  Not just what he’s done, but where and how.  Did something change? Was it luck?  A simple projection system that’ll outperform almost every human (on average) is fairly easy to build. Building a system that outperforms those systems is harder, but consequently more interesting.

FF: The Padres play like 90+ games in two of the most extreme parks in baseball (Petco, of course, and Coors).  Do you enjoy that added challenge or would you rather they just played in a cookie cutter ball park?  Can you use Petco to your advantage?

Chris Long: I like the variety, and I’m sure most fans do, also.  This is one thing that really separates baseball from other sports. Football fields, basketball courts and hockey rinks are all basically the same, but baseball stadiums each have their own unique personality.

FF: Khalil Greene has really struggled hitting at home in his career.  Do you think there’s something in the way he puts the ball in play that causes that or is it just randomness (or something else)?

Chris Long: He has a 270 BABIP at home, and a 306 BABIP away.  PETCO’s BABIP last year was 280, the rest of the NL averaged 306; in 2006 these were 280 and 303.  So he’s a little unlucky there, but not much.  He strikes out a lot, doesn’t walk at a high rate, but hits for power.  That’s really the worst combination for PETCO.  Pitchers throw more strikes, because the outcome of a BIP is likely to be less damaging. So while Khalil has been a little unlucky, it’s really the interaction of his hitting approach, the ballpark, and how pitchers pitch in PETCO.

FF: The Padres were 189 for 209 throwing out base stealers last year.  How do you divide that between the pitchers, the catchers, and the base runners?

Chris Long: For catchers it’s primarily the catch and release time, combined with the amount of time it took the ball to travel from the start of the pitcher’s motion to the arrival of the ball.  For pitchers it’s primarily determined by the total throw time, and runners get the remaining piece.  Chris Young will always give up a lot of stolen bases because of his size, but these aren’t very costly because of how well he pitches. It’s an area we looked at in the off-season, and we understand how it affects us.  You should see some improvement this year.

FF: Many people are still skeptical of advanced fielding statistics, although they are seemingly much improved.  Any thoughts on fielding analysis that you can share with us?

Chris Long: At the major-league level, the current best fielding analytics are much better than humans at determining fielding ability and value.  It’s not even close.  The great thing about something like this is that if you understand what your method is doing, you’ll have a better understanding of what to look for when watching that player in the field.

FF: On that note, have you developed proprietary metrics for hitting, base running, pitching, fielding, etc.?  Do you also rely on other stats already published on the internet or elsewhere?

Chris Long: It shouldn’t be a surprise that we’ve worked on all those areas.  It’s always useful to see what other people have done.  If they get answers that differ significantly from your own, you need to understand why, and if it indicates a significant flaw in one or both of the methodologies.

FF: Many analysts on the internet have made great use of the pitchf/x data provided by mlb. Can you share anything along those lines that you and the Padres might be utilizing?

Chris Long: It’s an area that’s been looked at, but it’s relatively new, and system isn’t installed in every park, and there are still some issues with calibration.  But it’s exciting.

FF: What do you think is the future of sabermetrics/statistical analysis in baseball?  What are you looking forward to working on over the next 3 or 4 years?

Chris Long: More sophistication, better understanding, greater integration, wider acceptance.  Then the robots kill all humans, but hopefully they’ll still play baseball.  There are some absolutely amazing possibilities in the near future, certainly analytically, but also in other areas.  That’s completely void of informational content, but the best I can do.

FF: How about this Padres club going into 2008?

Chris Long: We’ll definitely be competitive in the NL West this year for the division title.  The players we’ve drafted are really starting to show some promise, and should start doing some damage at the major-league level; I’m particularly looking forward to Chase Headley getting some playing time.  Kevin Kouzmanoff and Scott Hairston are two players who could really break out this year, too.  And what’s not to love about our rotation and bullpen?

FF: I have kept you long enough and you’ve been gracious enough to put up with me. Any final thoughts you want to share with fans of the Padres and/or sabermetrics?

Chris Long: San Diego should be proud of this team, not just the players, but everyone who works for the Padres.  Our goal is to be the smartest organization in baseball, and with Kevin Towers and Sandy Alderson at the helm, we’re well on our way.  We’re shaking those pillars, and we can’t be ignored.

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Thanks again to Chris for being so gracious with his time and so in-depth with his answers. I wish him the best of luck in the coming season.