The Indians earned a reputation for investing heavily in analytics in the years following "Moneyball" under Mark Shapiro's leadership, and they have shown no signs of deviating from that course. Shapiro is now the team president, and his protégé, current GM Chris Antonetti, commands a staff with a diverse and deep set of skills.
The Indians grabbed one of the best in the business when they made Keith Woolner their director of baseball analytics in 2007. Woolner has technical degrees from MIT and Stanford, and his prior experience includes time with both a database company (Oracle) and a statistical software company (SAS) in addition to his work as an influential author at Baseball Prospectus.
Unlike some clubs, wherein statistical analysts give something akin to expert witness testimony, the Indians have integrated analytics into everything they do, so that both technical and non-technical staff members are up to speed on the metrics the team uses.
The Indians have dedicated IT support for their mature baseball information system, which frees their analysts to focus on long-term statistical modeling projects. Assisting Woolner with this work are Sky Andrecheck and Max Marchi, both of whom have graduate degrees in statistics. Marchi literally wrote the book on
analyzing baseball data in the increasingly popular programming language called R.
