(Putting this response in what I feel is a more appropriate thread)
Nate, since I sort of tune out in the off-season and am unaware, has there been something written on the "10,000 feet" view of the "purge"? Seems like there was a lot of movement beyond folks taking their skills to other organizations.
I really think you just chalk it up to a multitude of reasons: chance to be the GM for the team you rooted for growing up and near where you're from (Elias), guys bottlenecked in the organization (Fast, Sig), other teams desperate to hire your guys hoping some of the magic rubs off (Elias, Fast and many others), taking a higher level job with another organization (Dave Hudgens, Doug White, Jeff Albert, Josh Bonifay, Chris Holt, Dillon Lawson), going in a different direction with your life (Ryan Hallahan), phasing out some player development jobs likely the result of even
further usage of technology (elimination of nine coaching jobs in the minors which resulted in some folks not returning), perhaps not retaining people who are unable to keep up with the pace of change in the organization (I'll let you fill in the blank there).
For those unfamiliar with some of the above names and other items,
you haven't been reading this thread/soliloquy.
And just for the helluvit (and at the risk of being redundant, cabrera'd or just beating the hell out of things), I would also reference again the McKinsey interview Luhnow did
here and
here. Some quotes I saw where I kinda/sorta gleaned information from or just found interesting:
We decided that in the minor leagues, we would hire an extra coach at each level. The requirements for that coach were that he had to be able to hit a fungo, throw batting practice, and program in SQL. It’s a hard universe to find where those intersect, but we were able to find enough of them—players that had played in college that maybe played one year in the minors that had a technical background and could understand analytics.
...until the point where we realized that we no longer needed that, because our hitting coaches and our pitching coaches and our managers are now fully technology enabled. They can do the translation. And they’re actually real baseball people who have had careers in coaching and playing.
You’ve got 150 people working in baseball operations, 200 players in a system, some of them have no high-school education. Some don’t speak English. You’re dealing with a very difficult population to implement new things that are not normal to them. The program of sending the people out and eventually changing over a large part of our hitting and pitching coaches and managers, quite frankly, to be a bit more open-minded, progressive group is when our implementation started to take root.
Big data combined with artificial intelligence is the next big wave in baseball, and I think we’re just starting to scratch the surface. But we’re making a big investment in this area.
You have to be first. You have to create an advantage for yourself. If you’re not looking at what’s coming down the road—and technology and data are so important— somebody else is going to.
...Yuli Gurriel, a guy we found in our international scouting out of Cuba who took a lower-dollar offer to be with the Astros and could’ve gone to another team.