WASHINGTON — His job was to make life easier for the best baseball players in the world. For seven seasons, starting at age 16, Sam Mondry-Cohen worked in the visitors’ clubhouse in San Francisco, shining cleats, hauling equipment, filling coffee orders. At game time he would be the bat boy, in full uniform, as he was for the Washington Nationals the night Barry Bonds broke the career home run record in 2007.
None of the players passing through asked Mondry-Cohen about the book of statistics he read during rare moments of downtime. But he thought he had found a kindred spirit in Carlos Delgado, the curious first baseman for the Mets who kept a notebook with observations of pitchers’ tendencies.
Perhaps, Mondry-Cohen thought, Delgado would like to dig deeper. He brought Delgado over to the clubhouse computer, mainly used for filling ticket orders, and showed him an array of advanced data on the pitcher he would face that night.
Delgado was unmoved. “Too much information,” he said, dismissively. He had his process for understanding the game, and a screen full of numbers was not part of it.
This did not sway Mondry-Cohen, now 32, from believing those numbers could help. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania and devoted his career to the implementation of data in baseball, joining the Nationals as an intern in 2009 and soon becoming the team’s first full-time analyst. He created the Nationals’ research and development department — which includes eight people, three with Ph.D.s — and was promoted this year to assistant general manager. At every step, he has balanced data with his field-level experience.
“Being a bat boy, having all those players run through that dugout with him, I think it added not only to his appreciation of the game but also his foundation,” Mike Rizzo, the Nationals general manager, said during a workout before the World Series. “You can be up there in a room crunching numbers, but to be in that clubhouse and see how guys handle failure and success, that’s an important part in the development of a baseball person.”
Rizzo, 58, is a former minor league infielder who scouted for years before taking over the Nationals. He proudly employs three former general managers and five former managers as advisers, including Jack McKeon, 88, who has worked as both. Rizzo’s 89-year-old father, Phil, is another longtime scout and adviser.
Most teams have eliminated the position of advance scout — relying solely on video analysis — but not the Nationals. They had three people tracking the Houston Astros in the American League playoffs, and six at some games in the A.L.C.S.
Yet even the Nationals have found a way to blend traditional scouting with a sophisticated approach to the numbers. The scouts write reports in the team’s proprietary database, called The Pentagon, where they can find statistics, video and input from the coaching staff.
“Just understanding what it all means is a breakthrough,” Rizzo said. “There’s good information there, really good information, and I think it helps not only in advancing for a team but also in developing players. We need it, we want it, we embrace it and we don’t make a decision without it.”
For Mondry-Cohen and his staff, the job is to challenge conventional wisdom while respecting how it came to be.
“The long-held beliefs in baseball, for the most part, are long-held beliefs for good reason,” he said. “What we try to do is question these orthodoxies to see if there’s a better way to do some of these things that have been taken for granted.
“When we’re researching a topic or coming up with a new metric, I like to bounce it off the scouts to see if it agrees with what they think. If it does, then I have a lot more confidence. If it doesn’t — if a statistical concept goes against the prior beliefs — I need a higher burden of proof to believe it.”
The scouts work with the analysts to sharpen their perspective on the game. Mike DeBartolo, an assistant general manager for baseball operations who started as an intern and analyst, said the scouts encourage him to join them on road trips and to write his own reports.
The context is invaluable, he said, and helps him understand the organization’s ethos. In an era when most general managers are painstakingly deliberate, waiting and waiting for a bargain or a lopsided trade, Rizzo has the conviction to act quickly.
“Mike is a very decisive guy, and as these teams get smarter and smarter, the decisions get harder and harder,” DeBartolo said. “It can be easy to equivocate, and I’ve learned from Mike that instinct plays an important role.”
Last year, in a notoriously slow-moving off-season for the rest of the industry, the Nationals acquired two catchers — Kurt Suzuki and Yan Gomes — and a top starter, Patrick Corbin, before the start of the winter meetings in early December. They persuaded Corbin by adding a sixth year to their offer, a sweetener Corbin’s other suitors resisted.
The Nationals also knew that Corbin had benefited from the advanced game-planning of his previous team, the Arizona Diamondbacks, and made sure to include their analysts as part of their presentation. Corbin said he appreciated the Nationals’ approach to data, empowering the players to consume it on their terms.
“They never really push it; it’s as much information as I want, or as little,” Corbin said. “They know my strengths, and I know what I want to do out there, so I just went to them with a couple of things that I wanted before the season, and they were fine with giving me that. The input now, it’s not do-or-die, but they have things that can help — and if anything can help, I’m willing to listen.”
Max Scherzer is one of the team’s most ardent students of data, though he would rather not talk about it. “A poker player never shows his cards,” Scherzer said. The team’s other ace, Stephen Strasburg, said he uses the numbers to reinforce his gut.
“It’s kind of like: ‘This is what I’m feeling, here are the numbers, all right, that makes sense, that’s why I’m feeling that,’” Strasburg said. “It helps you just trust your instincts a little bit more.”
Mondry-Cohen calls it a bottom-up strategy, rather than top-down, a lesson he learned from those years in the clubhouse. The data matters only if the players are open to consuming it in their way.
“He understands that the game is about the players and always will be,” said Dave Roberts, the Los Angeles Dodgers manager, who developed a friendship with Mondry-Cohen as a visiting player in the 2000s. “To seek out Rizzo and find his niche by equipping the players better, he’s got the tools to really succeed in this game.”
The Nationals have succeeded more than ever this season, with a roster that stuck together after a woeful start to reach its statistical projection for the regular season, and then thrive in October.
It did not happen just because the numbers said it would. In baseball, Mondry-Cohen knows, nothing does.
“The statistical projections would say that there’s a wide range of how a guy can perform, and maybe that’s due to randomness or luck, but it may be due to other things like comfort or effort level,” he said. “I’m not sure how important it is if the players have fun and go out and lose. But if being comfortable then lends itself to playing better — or playing more selflessly or being more invested — then that does have tangible results.”