Last summer, an independent-league baseball team in California called the Sonoma Stompers entrusted its season to us, two writers with backgrounds in baseball statistics. We signed players, guided strategy and told the fielders where to stand for the most effective defense. We had no experience running a team, but we did have data, and we promised the owner of the Stompers that we would use it to build a new kind of baseball team.
But we also had a blind spot: There wasn’t much reliable data on our own performance. How do you measure a manager? More daunting: How do managers measure themselves?
Baseball is made for number-crunching. The matchup between pitcher and batter is one-on-one combat with a clear resolution. The metrics are tidy. But our own contributions fell outside the bounds of baseball statistics. At the end of the season, we knew our team’s record but not which wins we had helped to create. We slouched away unsure of how well we had done.
Until a Stompers pitcher named Santos Saldivar got signed by a major-league club.