In a piece for The Journal News, as opposed to the blog, PeteAbe took a look into the Yanks’ world of pro scouting. Instead of taking the time to sum up what these guys do, allow me to quote:

The pro scouts watch players in the major leagues down to the lowest levels of the minors. Their job is to gather information to allow Cashman to make the best-educated decisions about trades, waiver claims and other personnel moves.

When Cashman gained full control over the team’s baseball operations in 2005, one of his first ideas was to better organize how the Yankees went about obtaining and organizing that information. He promoted Billy Eppler, a young team executive based in Tampa, to run the department.

“You see how much work is done on the amateur scouting side, where they have cross-checking, they have meetings, they have regional meetings. They spend so much time and effort for that one day. Why can’t we do it like that on the pro side?” Cashman said.

Run by ex-scout Billy Eppler, the department has a group of twelve scouts spread all over the country, and they even handle Japan. It’s a thankless job, because if Derek Jeter goes 3-for-4 with two doubles he’s the one that gets the credit, but there’s nary a mention of the scout who informed the team that Matt Garza tends to tip his breaking ball by fanning out his glove. I recommend you give it a read, but I also want to take this opportunity to talk about the Rays’ pro scouting department.

Tampa, you see, is going to eschew human advance scouts in favor of statistical analysis and video. The whole idea is to provide the field staff with the most in-depth info possible, while drawing off a much larger sample.

“When an advance scout goes in there, he’s seeing it for three, four days,” [manager Joe Maddon] said. “The data we’re going to accumulate goes over a longer period of time, which would indicate it’s more correct and not as much one man’s subjective opinion. We feel as though this may be the next level of advance scouting.”

Now, it’s important to note that they’re not getting rid of human advance scouts entirely, they’re just going to use them in a more localized way. A spreadsheet won’t tell you that Jason Bay has been in a bit of a funk lately and can be gotten out with off speed junk away because he’s stepping in the bucket, and so that’s where the human scout comes in. He can provide updated info on the “feel” of a team as well as recent tendencies, but the stats and video can be used for everything else. And, of course, you still need human scouts to watch the minors because those stats are unreliable, especially the farther away you get from the bigs.

Frankly, I think what the Rays are doing is brilliant. They’re using their resources more efficiently and taking advantage of state of the art information. It’s a copycat league, so it’s only a matter of time before we see more and more teams doing this. What do you guys think?

In city after city, baseball fans like to claim that their town is home to the most loyal, the most rabid fan base. New Yorkers will fight Bostonians and Philadelphians to the death while Chicogoans just sit back in watch. In Los Angeles, the fans leave in the 7th to beat the traffic, and in Atlanta, well, no one really cares.

While we could all debate the subjectively loyalties of fans until we are collectively blue in the face, a RAB reader took it upon himself to model fan loyalty. Jim Lane has spent the last few weeks refining a model of fan loyalty. The raw data is available here in spreadsheet form. I’m going to drill down a bit on it tonight.

Lane decided to assess fan allegiance by using a payroll figures, average ticket prices, win percentage and 2008 attendance. He started off by computing what he calls team appeal. It’s the average of the percentage of payroll of the MLB whole, the average ticket prices also expressed as a relative percentage to the MLB total and the club’s winning percentage. He then compared his team appeal figure to attendance capacity to come up with the final fan allegiance number.

As you might guess, the Red Sox with their high win total, high payroll and small park were the top team on Lane’s list. Their fan allegiance figure was 31.12, nearly triple the second-place Cubs. Having a ticket demand that far exceeds supply will do that.

The Yankees and Mets, meanwhile, came in at six and seven respectively. They both had fairly high attendance figures and tickets were, all things considered, somewhat reasonable. Combine that with high payrolls and three years of regular season success, and you’ll get a formula for fandom.

There are of course a few lessons we can glean from the spreadsheet. The teams on the bottom — Kansas City, Florida, Tampa Bay — suffer from one problem or another. Either the teams weren’t very good or they can’t draw fans. All three of those teams are finding that low ticket prices don’t exactly spur attendance.

The Braves, at number 23, are one of the outliers. The ownership is willing to spend some money, the ticket prices aren’t very high and the team’s winning percentage is decent. Fans, however, aren’t going to the games.

So what conclusions can we draw from this? Well, it certainly doesn’t solve that good old fan loyalty question, but we can look at a few patterns. Popular teams that put a winning product on the field are going to draw, and mediocre teams that keep ticket prices low are going to draw. But at some point, fans just won’t show up. They don’t come to Miami; they don’t go to Atlanta. Why is a question we can debate for a long time. Some of it is geographic; some of it is apathy.

Anyway, feel free to chew on this spreadsheet for a few hours as the lazy days of Spring Training tick away. Jim broke the years down so you can see his raw data. Perhaps you’ll find a conclusion in the numbers. After all, if the Indians are doing it, so can we.