 Yankees play their home games about an hour away from Fairfield, Connecticut, where Michael Fishman grew up loving math and stratomatic baseball. He has spent over a decade and a half with the Yankees now for whom he is currently a vice president and an assistant general manager. Let's hear from Michael with Jack and Meredith. Thanks Bob Michael. You're clearly no stranger to this set. We've had you just about every year and I know coming to winter meetings there is an awful lot of preparation that goes into it. So what's your process in evaluating the free agent market and what you guys might potentially do in the off season? Yeah, it's a long process. It starts long in advance. We're really working on it while we're still playing during the season and during the post season. We have a large team in the office as well as our scouts. We're doing a in-depth look at each of the free agents and they go through a process of ranking each player by position and then as well put together overall board. Then we'll have our free agent meetings with our scouts and our analysts, whole front office staff together and discuss go through one by one each player. Certain players we're going to focus on more as they fit our roster better and spend more time on them and then and then just continue to kind of get involved. Other departments as well get the player development look at each player to send some players to them to look at in terms of what we can improve with players and beyond what the players are right now, what they what they can be as well as really just getting input from all different areas to really get the sense of what everybody is as we kind of have the evaluation lined up heading into here to make kind of decisions the rest of the offseason. When those evaluations are happening, Michael, what are some of the bullet points that stand out the most for you that make you get up from your desk and say I got to go tell Brian Cashman or Matt Ferry or whomever this right now? Yes and some some of the things are a player who may have had a down year and there are there indicators that it was unlucky or that he can be better with things we think we can improve with a player on why he can be a better player moving forward than he was the past year and maybe there's an opportunity to to get a player that can be better than he was and and really help us moving forward. Over the years who do you think has been your best fine? One that maybe nobody else was keyed in on and you saw a little something and took it to Cashman and the rest of the group and wound up working out very well for you guys. Yeah I mean there I think one of the more talked about examples was Nick Swisher back in the day of he when we got him it was coming off of a of a down year and the underlying I saw that he was actually the more like who he was in the past when he had been a successful player and and so kind of went from there had the discussions about what he what he what he could be and what he what he really was beyond what some of the underlying somewhat the surface numbers were the year before. Every team uses analytics but I've had this conversation with David Kohn where if you replace the word analytics with information I think everyone would embrace it but there is a certain segment of fan and observer that sometimes want to attach negativity to analytics. How would you describe to those folks why analytics are important to a successfully run organization? Yeah it's really just using information in the best way trying to trying to get trying to be the most predictive of what's going to happen and it's and it's really how to how to use information to affect decisions and and really why wouldn't you want to do that? Maybe it can be a bad word at times but really it's about trying to get them get them get the most information to the decision makers and and really in a predictive sense of what can what what this information is telling you about the future. I think several years ago when we spoke to you the department was not very big but I know it has grown by leaps and bounds since then so exactly what does the department look like now take us inside because I know a lot of Yankees fans would love to know how it all goes down. Yeah within the analytics department David Grabner is now the director of quantitative analysis and he's got a large team of analysts working underneath him that in a mix we have a group that are that are focused on the research of of using all the data we have to try and come up with statistical models to that are predictive of again player performance and various other factors and various other things and we also have analysts within each of the sub departments within baseball operations that are focused on their specific areas whether say an amateur scouting analyst or a player development analyst a performance sign on the analyst analyst who were just focused on those specific areas. Meredith you have to forgive me for my final question I'm going down a little bit of a rabbit hole here. We've talked about Stratomatic the board game and how much you and I both enjoyed that game so I have to ask you the 2022 Aaron Judge Stratomatic baseball card how excited would you be able to take those two dice and roll them because you know with that judge card there's going to be a pretty positive result. Yeah you know you have good odds rolling with that one I'm looking forward to seeing what that one looks like I expect to see a lot a lot of homeruns a lot of on base on that on that card but yeah it would definitely be one one I'd want to have my Stratomatic team. All right we're gonna have to have a game I want to take the Aaron Judge card though Meredith. I want to know if there's any insight on Aaron Judge you got anything for us Michael. All right I just focused on the Stratomatic game right now. I had a feeling you were going to say that thank you so much for the time.