How Richard Coleman became a leader in hockey analytics (part 2)
Although I knew more about the NHL and hockey than baseball, I also met with the San Francisco Giants manager Felipe Alou. I started the discussion by saying I will mention a specific ball game where I met you, and you will remember, although it was over 40 years ago. I described a World Series game from 1962 I attended and how I met him and his brother Mateo after the game in the parking lot. He recalled waiting there for a cab for 45 minutes. Without a preface, he quickly switched to another round of that World Series and said he “regretted not getting that bunt down .”I knew he was referring to the 9th inning of game 7, and I said, “I always thought the infielders should have been in the 5th inning when the Yankees scored the lone run of that game”. It was like telepathy; we recalled a game over 40 years ago without mentioning it. It was a game Felipe played in, and I watched on television as an 11-year-old (I played hooky from school that day to watch game 7). Felipe Alou (see photo below) liked my relief pitching strategy but said, “can you imagine what would happen to me, being Latin, if we lost one of those games when we did not use our ace reliever.”(The computer program showed a 2.5% chance a team would lose a 3–0 game in the bottom of the 9th if they were using just an average reliever rather than their top ace).
I also meet with the St Louis Cardinal head scout at a college game at Stanford University, making a similar presentation. We sat in the bleachers in Palo Alto, a very informal setting to make a presentation. Out of the blue, he asked me to evaluate and rank the three players he was scouting based on a 20-minute warm-up! Luckily, I could type them correctly because the one player who made a fielding error was so intense to recover on the next few plays that I rated him accurately as #1. I was thrilled with my baseball work but still did not have any consulting contract; it was more like an internship in professional sports. I still had yet to learn I would eventually do hockey analytics in the NHL and with the Chicago Blackhawks.
