Inside the Royals’ version of a scouts-stats marriage: how KC evaluates baseball talent
Twenty years at this shop and the conversations have been in melancholy locker rooms, champagne-soaked clubhouses, quiet hotel bars and, once, Jose Guillen’s Rolls Royce Phantom because he wanted me to see his $12,000 floor mats.
But this was a first:
Royals general manager Dayton Moore, senior director of pro scouting Gene Watson and assistant GM for research and development Daniel Mack agreed to a Zoom call to demonstrate how they work independently and together to come to decisions on player trades and acquisitions.
I’ve talked to Moore hundreds of times for what must be hundreds of hours over the years, but never like this, and the result was a deeper and clearer understanding of how the Royals operate.
The Royals held tighter and longer to traditional scouting values than most other organizations, and the delay in embracing analytics left a dinosaur reputation that’s both outdated in reality and persistent in image.
“We’ve always felt the numbers validate our judgments as scouts or perhaps lead us to a player that our eyes have undervalued and force us to look a little deeper,” Moore said.
The Zoom call was like pulling back the curtain on what that interaction is like.
Watson and Mack could star in a baseball scouting version of a buddy cop movie. Watson is old-school Texas, a man who wears four-figure cowboy boots under his Wranglers and can tell old scouting stories with anyone in baseball. Mack is freakishly smart and intellectually curious, with a doctorate in computer science from Vanderbilt with work that was literally honored by NASA.
Here’s the way they work separately and together.
Watson runs a 12-man pro scouting department full of former players and coaches and well over a century’s worth of experience. Decisions on players never stop — even now there’s draft prep and advance work — so their conversations are continuous. If an opportunity for a trade or other acquisition is presented, Watson gathers consensus among his scouts and then calls Mack with the same question:
“D, what do you have on this guy?”
Mack has his own department running numbers that he estimates are 75 percent proprietary tools and models and 25 percent publicly available statistics like hard hit rates, chase rates, and isolated power.
Michael Cifuentes, Royals’ director of pro scouting, has a research and development background and communicates directly with both Watson’s and Mack’s departments.
“Gene gets all of our scouts’ opinions, and D-Mack has a great way of listening to their judgments and looking at the hard data and statistics and projecting on players that way,” Moore said. “Gene, in turn, has great respect for D-Mack.”
That’s the general structure, but the details are the most interesting.
Watson sees his department as “the investigative side,” with the goal being to unlock answers about why a player might be underperforming somewhere else. Maybe it’s a rocky culture. Maybe there’s not enough lineup protection. Maybe a pitcher is being used in the wrong way, or extended too long. Maybe it’s something simple, like a ballpark that doesn’t fit a player’s strengths.
Watson brings up Jeremy Guthrie, who was 33 years old and (just being honest here) awful when the Royals traded Jonathan Sanchez for him in 2012. Guthrie’s ERA was 6.35, and by then was generally viewed as a busted first-round pick.
The Royals, though, saw a guy who’d pitched in Colorado’s thin air and Baltimore’s small ballpark. They thought he could thrive in Kauffman Stadium’s spacious dimensions, and in front of the game’s best outfield defense.
His ERA dropped to 3.16 after the trade, and Guthrie was a valuable and reliable piece of the rotation in 2013 and 2014.
“A lot of times we’re looking for the buy-low guy and the numbers don’t add up,” Watson said. “We’ve got to get into why the numbers don’t add up, and why we believe we can fix this player and make him a competitive, championship player for the Kansas City Royals.”
Mack’s part mirrors Watson’s. The specifics of what Mack emphasizes need to couple with the Royals’ priorities. That often means data that speaks to defense and athleticism, especially for outfielders.
Speaking generally and not about specific players, Mack also mentions the need to look at his cold data with varying perspectives. For example, maybe the performance data shows a certain player to be poor defensively but the possibility exists that more knowledge from the scouting side will turn the data.
Baseball’s civil war between scouts and stats is (mostly) over and you can see some examples of the cease fire with Watson and Mack.
Watson’s mind has been changed regarding shifts, for instance. He wants to know hard hit rates and chase rates as he watches hitters, which informs how he watches for spin recognition and balance.
“I (used to be) more of a pure, with-my-eyes, evaluate the swing,” he said.
Mack compares his work around baseball people like Watson to the grueling process of earning his doctorate. Not just the scouting stories, of listening to how certain players were discovered, but in the visual cues looked for in the pursuit of talent.
Mack specifically mentioned three men in baseball operations — amateur scouting director Lonnie Goldberg, director of pitching performance Paul Gibson and assistant director of scouting Danny Ontiveros — with a combined 83 years in professional baseball.
“Listening to them talk about deliveries: good deliveries, good arm actions, you know, physical starters,” Mack said. “And then watching those types of players that get picked and how they develop through minor league systems, and then seeing them pitch in Kauffman Stadium. Sitting behind home plate and watching why those delivers work, why those arm actions are important, and why the physical starter is an important thing to look for.”
This is what it looks like when people from different backgrounds work together. Each side gives. Each side gains.
There is no way to quantify such things — the Royals are believed to have an R&D department in line with league averages — but even as the Royals have stepped deeper into analytics they do retain an emphasis on the unquantifiable.
That means more time spent on culture building, leadership, and behavioral science. The most famous example of feel-over-stats has to be Alcides Escobar leading off for the 2015 World Series champions.
It was a strategy that made no logical sense. Escobar rarely walked and was one of baseball’s least productive hitters. The Royals made sure that guy hit as often as possible.
Even Ned Yost, so old-school that he borders on ancient-school, knew it shouldn’t work. And, for a while, he dropped Escobar to the bottom of the lineup.
But he led off all 31 postseason games the Royals played in 2014 and 2015, including the first game of the 2015 World Series when he hit an inside the park home run.
As you can imagine, Mack’s department had gigabytes of information about why it was an objectively terrible strategy.
“Our job is just to make sure that we get that information as clearly presented as possible,” Mack said. “Being able to hear from the decision makers in that position — why they’re making that decision — gives you at least some peace and then at the end of the day when the game starts we want to win. So if Escobar is going to hit an inside the park home run we’re going to get pretty excited about it, regardless of whether he should have hit that at the top of the lineup or the bottom.”
You can start to see how this works, and how the partnership generated those two years of postseason success.
Moore studies leadership as hard as he studies baseball and believes the keys involve open communication, subversion of ego, and quick resolution of disagreements.
“These old dogs in our organization, they can learn new tricks,” he said of the experience in baseball operations. “So let’s teach them. Let’s help grow them, right? And then the young people that come into the game with more of an analytical bend, if we engage them, they want to hear the stories on the road and being at the ballpark and scouting experiences. They love that aspect of the game.
“They want to hear the stories about how scouts discovered players and what their processes are. They’re very curious intellectually.”