Don’t miss this one; a fairly detailed and fascinating interview with Chris Long, who is officially the Senior Quantitative Analyst for the San Diego Padres. Basically, the guy who utilizes, and attempts to come up with new ways to look at, statistics for the team.

I like this interview because even though it verges on some heady material, the writer, who does the Pads blog Friar Forecast, has a familiar, easy-to-read style.

FF: Are you involved in integrating what I’ll call scouting data (pitch speeds, mechanics, body size, time running from home to first, etc) and more traditional numbers (hits, home runs, runs allowed, etc)? Or do you work more with the traditional numbers and use the scouting-based data separately?

Chris Long: If you aren’t looking at *all* the information you have, and trying to extract the absolute maximum amount of value from that information, you aren’t doing a good job. Hopefully that answers your question.

FF: I imagine one of the main goals of statistical analysis in an mlb front office is to project a player’s future performance. If so, can you tell us a little about how you analyze a player’s past performance to gain insight about what you expect out of his future?

Chris Long: I can’t go into specifics, but again, you need to integrate *all* the information you have about a player. Not just what he’s done, but where and how. Did something change? Was it luck? A simple projection system that’ll outperform almost every human (on average) is fairly easy to build. Building a system that outperforms those systems is harder, but consequently more interesting.

The interview is split into two parts. The first is good, but the second really shines. Here’s another quote, talking about the effects of PETCO, and then why Khalil Greene struggles to hit at home.

FF: The Padres play like 90+ games in two of the most extreme parks in baseball (Petco, of course, and Coors). Do you enjoy that added challenge or would you rather they just played in a cookie cutter ball park? Can you use Petco to your advantage?

Chris Long: I like the variety, and I’m sure most fans do, also. This is one thing that really separates baseball from other sports. Football fields, basketball courts and hockey rinks are all basically the same, but baseball stadiums each have their own unique personality.

FF: Khalil Greene has really struggled hitting at home in his career. Do you think there’s something in the way he puts the ball in play that causes that or is it just randomness (or something else)?

Chris Long: He has a 270 BABIP at home, and a 306 BABIP away. PETCO’s BABIP last year was 280, the rest of the NL averaged 306; in 2006 these were 280 and 303. So he’s a little unlucky there, but not much. He strikes out a lot, doesn’t walk at a high rate, but hits for power. That’s really the worst combination for PETCO. Pitchers throw more strikes, because the outcome of a BIP is likely to be less damaging. So while Khalil has been a little unlucky, it’s really the interaction of his hitting approach, the ballpark, and how pitchers pitch in PETCO.