Ben Lindbergh of Grantland just published a wonderful, insider’s read on a key method in which the Pirates under general manager Neal Huntington are utilizing sabermetric principles. Not only does the resurgent franchise embrace analytics, it is a pioneer in how information gets communicated to and from the manager and his coaches:

Meet 26-year-old Mike Fitzgerald, an MIT graduate who’s not only fluent in R and SQL but an excellent communicator:

[T]he Pirates have built a unique bridge between backgrounds. Most quants spend much of the season sequestered in the equivalent of what the Astros call their “nerd cave” — an office from which analysts periodically emerge to interact with coaches but rarely to travel with the team. Fitzgerald, meanwhile, makes most road trips: If the Pirates are playing, he’s almost always at the park. I surveyed several analysts from other front offices, and none of them knew — or would admit to knowing — of another employee with Fitzgerald’s statistical expertise who travels close to full-time with a team.
While Fitzgerald offers input on player evaluation and roster construction — prior to last season, he stumped hard for free agent Russell Martin, who now rivals Andrew McCutchen for the title of Most Valuable Pirate — his role has gradually evolved to incorporate more direct, in-season interaction with coaches. In 2012, Fitzgerald’s first season in Pittsburgh, Pirates manager Clint Hurdle requested that Fitzgerald and Fox start sitting in on some meetings before home games with Hurdle, his coaching staff, and the Pirates’ video and in-person advance scouts. All parties felt that they benefited from that trial run. “By the time last season came around,” Fitzgerald recalls, “Clint had reached out to Dan and said, ‘I want to get you guys in on every meeting.’” En route to the Pirates’ 2013 playoff berth, Fitzgerald and/or Fox attended every home meeting in person and called in when the team was away.
Last offseason, Fox and Huntington floated the idea of Fitzgerald becoming a fixture on the road. Some managers might have resented the suggestion, regarding Fitzgerald’s presence as an intrusion into the field staff’s traditional domain. Hurdle, however, was happy to have the help. “If you think you have an idea that he could do better or that we could do better, he’s not territorial,” Fox says.
“The big thing for us was speeding up the feedback loop,” Fitzgerald explains. Even in an ultra-connected world, calls, texts, and emails go unanswered, unreturned, or worse, unmade, eating up time that could be better applied in other ways or depriving both coaches and analysts of important information. …
In theory, any team could copy the Pirates’ communication methods. In practice, those methods require the right personnel. While some analysts with other teams lament the close-mindedness of coaches who ignore the information they provide, Pittsburgh’s old-school staffers accept that their positions require continuing education. “Clint reads everything,” Fitzgerald says. “It’s unbelievable.”
Fitzgerald’s interpersonal skills are an equally important part of the puzzle. “For a guy who is so sharp analytically, he has tremendous feel for situations and what to say and when to say it, and rapport with people,” Fox says. “That’s not easy to find.” Nor do the relationships that Pittsburgh’s brain trust has built develop overnight, even with the right people in place. “It’s taken a long time to be at the place where we’re at now, where the relationships are there, and they trust what we give them and we trust what they’re saying,” Fox adds. “Everything has jelled a little better over time. So maybe the competitive advantage is that it takes time to build it and once it’s there, you need to be able to sustain it.”
Fitzgerald wouldn’t want to do without either one of what he calls the “sabermetric world” or “the old-school coaching world.” “They kind of get played up like they’re two polarizing ideas, but in reality I think they’re a lot closer than that,” he says. “The cool thing for us … is that we’ve found the middle ground in there. From case to case, it’s an ebb and flow in terms of which side it may lean on, but both sides have stretched each other. We now think about things and look at things a lot differently than we did three years ago. I think Clint and those guys would agree that they do the same.”

More here.