Organization Wide Philosophy

First off, Happy New Year to everyone. While the naughties failed to provide many Orioles highlights, I am confident that the teens will be much more fruitful for those of us that care about baseball in Baltimore. In case you missed it, I put together my All-Decade Team back in June. I know, I'm ahead of the curve.

In cleaning out my Google Reader today (it's amazing how far behind you get in just two weeks), I came across a very interesting Baseball Prospectus interview with Diamondbacks manager A.J. Hinch. Hinch, a former catcher at Stanford and with the A's, Royals, Tigers and Phillies, was a front-office employee in Arizona when he took over the manager's job midseason in 2009. Thanks to his background, he brings a very unique perspective to the bench, helping make the entire interview well worth the read. I wanted to highlight his closing comments:

One of the things I've learned over the course of being in the front office, and
now as the manager, is that all of the on-field experience, the data research,
the statistical analysis—they're all parts of this pie. They're all pieces of
the pie that can help lead an organization to being a winning organization. What
I want to be is someone who never turns away a piece of that pie if it's going
to help us get better and help us win more games. Hopefully, that's something
that can turn out to be a competitive advantage for us, that we accumulate as
much information as we can and implement it to help us win.

If I were the GM, I'd be looking for a manager that held those same beliefs.
_________________________________