Mets add Guttridge, Baird to front office

The Mets have made two significant front office hires, bringing in Adam Guttridge as Assistant GM of systematic development and hiring Allard Baird as VP of player development and scouting.

Guttridge is the co-founder of the NEIFI system, a tool for evaluation and projection of prospects using publicly available stats. He’s presented at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and his technology has been used by several major league teams. It’ll be interesting to see what sort of advancements he can make with the stats that baseball doesn’t make public.

Baird was the GM of the Royals from 2000-’06, and has worked for the Red Sox since 2006, both as an Assistant GM and as Director of Professional Scouting. His track record as the head decision-maker isn’t great - the Royals had three 100 loss seasons during his tenure, with a winning percentage of .398 - but the Red Sox also just won the World Series, and he’s played a significant role in that front office for years.

These two hires represent opposite ends of the schools of baseball thought, with Guttridge being very new school and Baird much more of a traditional ‘baseball man.’ Getting multiple different perspectives is a positive, and will hopefully help first-time GM Brodie Van Wagenen make the best choices in his first offseason at the helm.