As an agent, you need to sell your player at the price he/she deserves. In-depth statistical performance analysis has been the latest fad in Major League Baseball. Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics has been using it for years, and Paul Depodesta was using it…until he got fired from the Los Angeles Dodgers. I predict that it will also grow substantially in the other 3 big sports and will infiltrate Basketball first. Anyway, in baseball, the term Sabermetrics is used to describe this new statistical following. SABR = Society of American Baseball Research. In the past, arbitration hearings, free-agent signings, etc. have mostly been argued on the basis of basic statistics such as batting average, ERA, quality wins, slugging percentage, etc. But those numbers may become a small part of negotiations with the new bargaining chip that Sabermetrics provides.
The beauty of working in today’s world is that everything is online and available for free…now you can even get Sports Agent info for free! 🙂 If you take a trip to ESPN’s MLB stats website, you can sort a player’s stats on different Sabermetrical terms. A glossary for all of the terms can be found here
It would be foolish to let this kind of information slide by when at the negotiation table. You should use any valuable information that you can get into your hands when trying to get your client the absolute best deal. For instance, with the knowledge that Derrek Lee had the highest RC27 this past year with a 10.02 score (which estimates how many runs per game a team made up of nine Derrek Lee’s would score), it could be argued that he is the best player in the league and deserves a top dollar salary for his numbers. In the baseball world, we no longer have only a few tools to argue with. Instead, Sabermetrics has added new, innovative performance analysis methods for us to show our clients off with.
