I’m excited to be presenting at the third annual SABR Analytics Conference in Phoenix next month.  The conference takes place March 7-9 and I’ll be giving a Research Presentation entitled “Making Intangibles Tangible.”  SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) has obviously grown in importance and exposure since Sabermetrics have become such a vital part of measuring player performance in baseball.  I’m honored to be included in this collection of minds and ideas and I’m looking forward to contributing my own opinions and philosophies on how the people who measure performance might start incorporating mental factors into their formulas.  Here’s the abstract from my presentation:

Geoff Miller: Making Intangibles Tangible

Ask coaches and staff from all 30 Major League Baseball teams to define the role of psychology in their organizations and you might get 30 different answers. The lack of agreement on terms, identification, and development of intangibles contributes to the difficulty in measuring the impact of mental skills training. Making Intangibles Tangible is meant to provide starting points for finding new ways to combine intangible factors with analytics methods.

Geoff Miller, Mental Skills Coach for the Atlanta Braves and author of Intangibles: Big-League Stories and Strategies for Winning the Mental Game – in Baseball and in Life, discusses the organizational role he plays at the big league level, in scouting, and player development, as well as qualitative and quantitative practices for measuring psychological variables. This presentation includes case studies that demonstrate root causes of behavior as well as the importance of understanding the people who produce performance when considering future measures.

SABR Analytics Conference speakers include:

Stan Kasten, CEO and President of the LA Dodgers

Bill James, who started the Sabermetrics movement by publishing The Baseball Abstract in 1977

Jon Daniels, GM Texas Rangers

Rick Hahn, GM Chicago White Sox

Jed Hoyer, GM Chicago Cubs

Jerry DiPoto, GM LA Angels

Vince Gennaro, President of SABR

For more information on SABR and the SABR Analytics Conference, please visit www.sabr.org/analytics

Geoff Miller’s book, Intangibles: Big-League Stories and Strategies for Winning the Mental Game — in Baseball and in Life, was released in August, 2012. For more information and free sample chapters, please visit:

For more information, please contact Geoff Miller at miller@thewinningmind.com.