TORONTO -- There is going to be no retirement tour, although maybe there should be. The Red Sox' information system former general manager Theo Epstein dubbed "Carmine" is experiencing its final season.
The Red Sox are replacing "Carmine" with a new system they are dubbing "Beacon," ending an 18-year run for the most famous computer program in team history.
"One of the aspects of being early to building an information system is the technology becomes dated," said Zack Scott, who heads up the Red Sox' analytics department. "When we built Carmine we didn't have iPhones. We had Blackberries that were email and text machines. It was a very straight-forward desktop application.
"It wasn't user-friendly. There's a lot of data and information. If you had never used it you wouldn't know where to begin. But we had a bunch of power users so we knew exactly where to go. But now we've had so much turnover in the office. There are very few power users. They will say, 'How can I do this?' And we will say they can do it with Carmine, and they're like, 'Really? Wow.' And I have to show them. It got to the point where we had so many new people in the office who were intimidated by it because there was just a wall of information and they didn't know where to go.
"We hadn't really built something that was sustainable for the organization, the organization being bigger than any one of us."