Blue Jays Sign Tom Tango

The Toronto Blue Jays have signed analyst Tom Tango as an adviser to the team. Tango previously worked for the Seattle Mariners, as well as some National Hockey League teams. Tango needs no introduction to followers of sabermetrics. He is co-author of The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball. and also owns the The Book Blog - an Internet think tank for sabermetrics.

A programmer/analyst by trade, Tango has been applying his skills to baseball for the past several years while maintaining his full time job outside of baseball. Tango is not only expert at math and programming but has a great understanding of how it fits into the big picture of baseball. Wayne Winston, author of Mathletics, sums up it nicely:

"There's nobody better than (Tango) in the world...He's a genius. He knows everything about baseball. I think he'll help (the Jays) a lot to make better decisions."

Tango is the inventor of wOBA, FIP and many of the other new statistics being used today. He has also made big contributions to others in their baseball research and analysis. He seems to have a hand in everything sabermetric on the Internet. Personally, he helped me a lot in the writing of my book Beyond Batting Average.

Last year, the Mariners improved by 24 games largely by improving their defense. I'm not sure how much Tango had to do with that (he won't take credit for it) but I'm sure he had a lot of input. Now, he'll take his talents to the Blue Jays organization.