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As Falvey’s Cleveland Indians trounced the Chicago Cubs in the first game of the 2016 World Series, the Star Tribune’s Lavelle Neal broke the news that Levine has “emerged as a candidate” to fill the GM position. Shortly thereafter, Dallas Morning News’ Rangers beat writer Evan Grant tweeted, confirming the Star Tribune report that Levine is expected to join the Twins.
Levine is an interesting balance to Falvey’s background from Cleveland’s analytical-oriented front office.
Since coming into baseball with the Colorado Rockies, the 44-year-old Levine has spent 11 seasons with the Texas Rangers in the Assistant General Manager’s position, overseeing the statistical analysis among other things for the team. The Rangers, however, are far from front-runners in baseball’s analytics game: According to an informal 2015 ESPN report, the Rangers fell towards the bottom of the league as an organization that eschews statistical analysis (although ahead of the Twins) and opted for more of the standard scouting practice.
Meanwhile, in a 2014 Reddit chat, Levine addressed some of those concerns.
“As a "younger" front office, we used to be younger than we are now, we were considered an analytical group, when in practice, we were much more scouting focused in our decision making,” Levine said. “In the past five years, we have made significant investments in analytics both in people and systems.”
It’s hard to completely judge an organization’s analytical strengths or how much they have grown but, as it stands today, the Rangers have three people listed on their front office who appear dedicated to analytics, including Todd Slavinsky, a University of Minnesota-Morris graduate, as the Director of Baseball Analytics. The Twins, too, have three staffers from their analytics department listed on their front office page, an area they were hoping to grow with the addition of Falvey.
In a 2011 Washington Post profile on Levine, Levine said that he believed the biggest advantage a team could have is hiring the best talent evaluators. He noted that there were approximately 30-to-50 of these baseball oracles floating around the game and that he was focused on hiring several of them to give his team the upper hand. “The Rangers complement the recommendations from their scouts with statistical analysis, not the other way around,” wrote the Post’s Adam Kilgore.
In that same Reddit chat, Levine submitted an interesting nugget regarding the methods of the Rangers front office. He said that the team monitors Twitter and occasionally finds inspirations for potential trades.
“[A]t the trade deadline, we are all on Twitter, because you may be surprised how many trade discussions are inspired or refined by tweets.”
Levine also said that the front office staff would use all of the publicly available sites such as Fangraphs.com, Baseball-Reference and others to obtain information. This is by no means a bad thing, however you have to believe that while teams like the Rangers are finding that type of info, organizations like the Cubs, Astros and Dodgers are creating their own research firms in-house.
That said, the Rangers methods have been successful and Levine has been instrumental in some of the talent acquisition that has created the strong American League West dynasty. After all, Texas has made it to the postseason in four of the last six years as well as the World Series twice. In his tenure, the Rangers were able to acquire Mike Napoli, Cliff Lee, Josh Hamilton Carlos Lee, Elvis Andrus, Neftali Feliz, Matt Harrison and Jarrod Saltalamacchia for various pieces of talent.
“Trades tend to be unique one trade to the next,” Levine commented. “Baseball is all about talent evaluation. Everyone understands the concept of scouting two shortstops. But our jobs also require us to scout each GM. So depending on which GM you are negotiating with, the discussion will go differently.”
Overall, Levine’s background seems balanced in both the new school and old school mentalities. One of Levine’s purported strengths while with the Rangers was being able to quickly diagnose the team’s in-season weaknesses and respond swiftly. For years the Twins seemed to fail at identifying roster weaknesses, reacting too late or in the wrong way to these issues. If Levine is able to transport that skill from one organization to another, that should be a huge benefit.
It is no small task rebuilding the Twins, but Thad Levine has been in that position before with the Texas Rangers and has two World Series visits to show for it.
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