Yankees look to improve delivery of metrics to players

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- On the final day of a 2023 season that ended about four weeks too early for Aaron Judge’s taste, the Yankees’ captain offered blunt critiques of what has been transpiring inside the clubhouse, including the club’s use of analytics.

While Judge lauded the club’s information-gathering as “top-notch,” he noted that improvements must be made in “funneling those down to the players in the right format.” Though players are fed reams of numbers, Judge believed that “maybe we might be looking at the wrong ones.”

Judge’s suggestion, as general manager Brian Cashman revealed last month in Scottsdale, Ariz., was to construct a roster by focusing more heavily on batting average and RBIs. As a result, Yankees assistant general manager Michael Fishman said on Monday that the organization must improve its avenues of communication with players.

“We’ve never done a good enough job. We always could have done better,” Fishman said. “I think there were definitely some things that we could have explained better or educated better.”

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As Day 1 of the Winter Meetings concluded at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center, Fishman suggested that those discussions should have revolved around why the team values certain metrics and which ones tell the story of what has transpired in the past, not necessarily predictive of what may happen in the future.

The Yankees may have more changes in store after their recent partnership with Zelus Analytics, a big-dollar expenditure that permits the team to look under the hood of the firm’s formulas.

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It will take several months and is a one-way street; although it has been described as an audit, Fishman said that Zelus will not examine the Yankees’ operations.

“To me, it’s an outside perspective; unbiased opinions, unbiased approach,” Fishman said. “They may approach things a different way than we do. It’s a chance to get a different look. There’s never an end to the creation. You’re trying to make the most predictive models.”

Having served as the Yankees’ numbers guru since 2005, a slightly post-Moneyball era in which he effectively comprised the team’s entire department, Fishman does not believe that the team’s processes have grown stale.

“I don’t think so, because we have continued to try to adjust and test,” he said. “When we develop a model and we’re having success with it and relying on it, we don’t just say, ‘All right, this is great, let’s keep using it.’

“We continue to test that model and see if there are adjustments that need to be made to it. So even some of the models that we’ve had success with, there have been tweaks over the years to make it a little better.”

Though he declined to provide specifics, Fishman said that he believes there are some cases in the current system where new tweaks are necessary, and others where overhauls must be performed.

That was cemented following the season, when Fishman participated in a spirited three-day conference at the Yankees’ Player Development complex in Tampa, Fla.

“There were times where they were heated, but for the most part, it was a good, strong discussion of issues,” Fishman said. “Not ignoring any disagreements, really talking through disagreements of what we disagree about, and trying to get to higher ground.”

As the Yankees deconstruct what went wrong with their underperforming 82-win club, Fishman and his department have landed in the crosshairs, which he said he understands.

“We have high standards,” Fishman said. “We haven’t met those high standards. We’re just going to continue to do our best to get better.”