Royals assistant GM to take part in panel discussion about analytics in baseball

Daniel Mack has been a part of the Royals front office since 2013, and he’s had a front-row seat to how language has changed in Major League Baseball.

Mack is the Royals’ Assistant General Manager for Research and Development, and he was hired before Statcast allowed fans and teams to break down all aspects of the game.

“You hear people (these days) ask more specific questions like, ‘What’s the catch probability?’ or ‘How many parks would that have been a home run in?’ Lots of kind of fun questions that can get asked about and Statcast has a much better chance at answering for us now,” Mack said.

“It’s become part of the vocabulary and that’s how you know it’s kind of gotten to that point in the culture of the front office. When you are using terms like hard hit or chase and swing miss to mean data-driven mechanisms, it’s kind of just replaced the ‘Well, that sounded like a hard hit ball.’ Ubiquitous terms that you couldn’t go back in a time machine 20 years ago, and ask someone in the dugout like hey, ‘What do you think the exit velocity was on that hit?’”

Mack will be sharing his thoughts on analytics on June 15 at Kansas City’s Linda Hall Library as part of a panel discussion. It will be moderated by MLB Network host Brian Kenny and include Baseball-Reference.com CEO Sean Foreman and Shakeia Taylor, baseball historian and deputy senior content editor for the Chicago Tribune.

The name of the event is “Beyond the Box Score: Baseball in the Analytics Era.” It is free.

Mack has seen big changes in his time with the Royals and it goes beyond the major leagues.

“The quality of data has increased pretty substantially,” Mack said. “And it was already starting in an uptick, right? There were a lot of the pitch-by-pitch systems that were in major-league parks. But now it’s like all the player positioning, it’s biomechanical data.

“And now you start to see a lot of those systems working their way through the minors. Eventually, those work their way to colleges, summer showcase type stuff. So it’s just more things about more players who play at more levels.”

Mack said he’s looking forward to next week’s panel discussion.

“I think it’s fun to be able to show people what interests me about this sport,” he said. “And I think there’s a lot of people who have nascent interest. They just need to know that they can really dig in if that’s what they find fun about the sport.”