M's get their own "numbers guy"

When Mat Olkin was in high school in the 1980s, he was a fan of the Milwaukee Brewers and a devotee of a revolutionary baseball thinker named Bill James, whose newfangled "Baseball Abstracts" were fostering an entirely new way of looking at the game.

In a fit of inspiration one day, young Mat ripped a sheet of paper out of his notebook and penned a long letter to James — in pencil — in which he compared Rob Deer to another strikeout-plagued Brewers slugger, Gorman Thomas.

Olkin presented a case that was compelling enough for James to put in his 1987 "Abstract" — and gently rip apart in an extended essay.

"Page 266," says Olkin now (and after referring to my own dog-eared collection of "Abstracts," I can confirm he's dead-on). "If you have certain fantasies at certain points in life, at 17 it was a dream come true to be rebutted by Bill James for a page and a half."

James eventually became Olkin's mentor and friend — and now they are major-league rivals, of a sort. Olkin has joined the Mariners' baseball-operations staff to serve the same player-acquisition consultant role to GM Bill Bavasi for which James was hired after the 2002 season, with great initial fanfare, by the Boston Red Sox.

Simply put, he's their "numbers guy," a position that an increasing number of teams are embracing.

Olkin, 35, welcomed Boston's 2004 championship for his father, a lifelong Red Sox fan, but also because he knew it would give even more credence to so-called "sabermetricians" — the name given to the growing science of statistical analysis that emanated from the Society for American Baseball Research.

"I was rooting for Boston because I knew it would make it easier for people like me to get in the game," said Olkin, who recently quit his job as a copy editor at USA Today's "Baseball Weekly" and is relocating to Connecticut. He stays connected to the Mariners through e-mail and telephones.

With the runaway success of "Moneyball," which highlighted the Oakland Athletics' reliance on statistical analysis to find and exploit inefficiencies in the marketplace, baseball is currently locked in a "scouts vs. stats" debate. Bavasi is smart enough to realize that the best organizations embrace both.

"My brother, Peter, calls it 'Quant vs. Squat,' " Bavasi said. "They are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they're necessary to each other. You have to take it (statistical study) seriously. You have to use it."

Bavasi comes by that belief honestly. His father, Buzzie Bavasi, was an executive in the Dodgers' organization when Branch Rickey hired Alan Roth to crunch numbers — in 1947.

When Bill got his first GM job with the Angels in 1994, he quickly hired the consulting services of Craig Wright, a noted sabermetrician who worked with the Texas Rangers in the 1980s.

When Bavasi joined the Mariners, he tried to coax Wright out of retirement, to no avail. But Wright recommended a bright young thinker of his acquaintance, which led Olkin to receive a phone call from Bavasi that Olkin ranks with the appearance in James' "Abstract" in epochal life events.

"When I got that call from Bill, if he told me he wanted me to sell peanuts in the upper deck, I would probably have done that," he said.

What Bavasi wanted, quite simply, was for Olkin to give him a new point of view on baseball decisions. Olkin brings impeccable sabermetric credentials, having worked at STATS Inc., contributed to numerous baseball publications, most notably, STATS Baseball Scoreboard and Baseball Prospectus, and produced his own book, "Baseball Examiner," for several years.

He is baseball-obsessive enough to have gotten a law degree from Pace University in White Plains, N.Y., for the sole purpose of furthering his goal of becoming a baseball GM. That hasn't worked out, but now he's in a position to influence the Mariners' GM.

"He thinks outside the box, and that's what you're looking for," Bavasi said. "Group think is good, and I believe in that, but when you all have similar backgrounds, at some point it's like me banging my head against the wall. It's like, 'I need some other thought here.' That's where this comes up."

Bavasi said he used Olkin's reports this winter as a tool in ranking free-agent targets. Olkin also gives his input on trade proposals, helping to nix at least one deal because his research revealed a negative trend involving the player in question. "Our results here (this winter) — he had something to do with it," Bavasi said.

Olkin, in particular, was a proponent of Adrian Beltre — not that it took much of a sell job. He offered up some analysis of how Safeco Field might affect Beltre, and some age-related projections.

"I pointed out every strength I could with the hope that if Bill needed to be pushed over the line, that might do it," Olkin said.

Olkin still has a place in his heart for the Brewers. He got a sage piece of advice from James, who remains a fan of his hometown team, the Kansas City Royals, even while drawing a Red Sox paycheck.

"The way Bill explained it, your heart and head can be in different places at the same time," Olkin said.

The Mariners now have access to Olkin's head, and with most teams in baseball finally seeing the sabermetric light, that's not just a good thing. It's essential.

Larry Stone: 206-464-3146 or lstone@seattletimes.com