The majority of baseball fans would clear and away rank the Oakland A's as the model of innovative thinking in baseball. As profiled in the hugely successful book by Michael Lewis, Moneyball, Oakland's general manager Billy Beane uses a unique combination of statistics, scouting, and logic to do more with less, year in, year out.
Other organizations that get credit for innovative thinking include the Blue Jays and Red Sox -- due in part to Beane disciples running the teams -- and for a time when Beane disciple Paul DePodesta was at the helm, the Los Angeles Dodgers.
If you were to list teams that are not exactly considered to use cutting-edge philosophies, it's likely that the Phillies would be one of the first to come up. But as it turns out, the Phightins may have been forward-thinking in a team resource that is often overlooked: trainers.
Paul Hagen profiled the recently retired trainer of the Phillies, Jeff Cooper, in the Daily News:
He kept records of pitchers' velocity; a sudden dip could signal arm problems. He pinpointed the times in a season when injuries occur in clusters - mid-June and mid-August - so the manager would know when to start resting his regulars.
He spent part of one vacation operating on cadavers to better understand the inner workings of the shoulder. He helped found the Professional Baseball Athletic Trainers Society and served two terms as its president.
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Still, his most enduring legacy will be the scientific approach he helped bring to his profession.
"One of my goals was to lift athletic training up. [...] One of my passions was not just to present athletic training to the front office as a profession but to the commissioner's office. [...] We started PBATS 23 years ago and we had to have our meeting in a back room someplace. The fear by baseball was that we would unionize. And that's why we defined ourselves as an educational society. That's what we're all about, is promoting the education and the health care of athletes and trying to drag that up."
Cooper was proactive, rather than reactive, developing methodologies to attempt to prevent -- or at least minimize -- injuries before they happen.
In this day and age, when organizations spend millions of dollars to develop talent and hundreds of millions of dollars to obtain talent via free agency, it certainly makes sense to have someone protecting those investments. For years, Cooper was that man for the Phils, and hopefully, like Beane, he has some disciples remaining with the team.
What's even more amazing to think is that the Phillies may have been ahead of the A's on this one. While Beane didn't divulge too many details, it was interesting to hear what he had to say on the subject of trainers in a recent interview at Athletics Nation when the subject of oft-injured shortstop Bobby Crosby's dissatisfaction with the A's training staff and medical staff came up: "Injuries are going to happen. The idea that your medical staff is going to prevent them is wrong. They are there to treat them."
Chalk one up for the team that stayed in town.
