This quote can be found in Bryan Dolgin's Rangers Magazine:
↵↵↵"We try to be consistent. We have developed some in-house metrics that we believe in," Matt Vinnola, Rangers director of baseball operations, said on a recent edition of Rangers Magazine on ESPN Dallas 103.3 FM. "We’re kind of proud of the way those things measure ... I don’t want to say non-traditional components, but maybe components that are not readily available in a box score."
↵Statistical analysis projects are part of Vinnola's job description.
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When Fangraphs ranked the Rangers' front office only fifth in baseball, part of their reasoning was Texas not being heavy on the analytics, and largely going against the sabermetric grain in their transactions.
↵At the time, there were many -- myself included -- who thought that was both unfair and untrue. I don't think you hire a young Cornell grad and expect him to ignore entire data sets when building his team -- both stat and scout based.
↵So here we have a nice quote indicating the Rangers have both worlds. They have their analysis department and their scouting department. Even better, they're doing the analysis the right way. The reasons some of their moves might go against the sabermetric grain is because they have a lot more information than we as fans do. They shouldn't be firing up Fangraphs or Baseball-Reference and doing exactly what it tells them to do. They should be using their own wealth of information to develop their own models from things we don't have access to.
↵And that appears to be what they're doing. Which is why this is possibly the best run organization in baseball.
↵Notes: hat tip to Adam Morris, and this is not meant to be overly critical of Fangraphs, as I have a deep wealth of respect for them.