ANAHEIM – Have you seen “Moneyball”?

That’s Jeremy Zoll’s go-to line when people ask what he does for a living. If the inquiring mind has seen the 2011 Brad Pitt film or read the 2003 Michael Lewis book, Zoll says his job is like that: He’s one of the Jonah Hill types.

If they haven’t, “I just give them the quick Cliff Notes and their eyes glaze over pretty quickly.”

Zoll, 24, is the Angels’ coordinator of advance scouting, meaning he condenses hundreds of hours of video and pages of scouting reports on every major-league player and team, conveying concise versions to the men who must then make critical, contiguous decisions based on them.

He’s the youngest full-time member of the younger-than-average baseball operations staff the Angels employ behind General Manager Jerry Dipoto.

He and three other green staffers – average age: 26 – bring a distinctive approach to the job.

Generalized and summarized, their jobs are to bridge the gaps between the information-gatherer, a sabermetrician or scout, and the on-field do-er, a player or coach. The interesting part is the gaps are widening, as sabermetrics have exploded in recent years and more and more becomes known about how to exploit inefficiencies on a ballfield.

“The floodgates have opened in the last six or seven years,” Angels manager Mike Scioscia said last week. “As we’ve organized and analyzed numbers better, it’s helped us, primarily on the defensive front. It’s also helped with some lineup issues or determinations. I think our decisiveness was noticeable last year.”

Indeed it was. At this time last year, the Angels’ baseball operations department sought to revamp the way it communicated with the playing department, halving the size of the reports and simplifying the transmission – all while continuing to delve into more and more complicated data.

“The information needs to be sorted, needs to be filtered, needs to be molded, and given to a player in a way that they understand what might happen on the field,” Scioscia said. “Raw statistics just don’t do that.”

But these young front-office types do. They are, in no particular order, Jonathan Strangio, 26; Nate Horowitz, also 26; Mike LaCassa (known as “House”), 28; and Zoll.

Strangio played baseball at Harvard, graduated in 2010 and now serves as the Angels’ manager of major-league operations. Dipoto calls him “one of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.”

Horowitz is the amateur scouting coordinator, previously interning under Dipoto with the Diamondbacks.

Zoll is a 2012 graduate of Haverford College, oddly a hotbed for baseball-executive talent, where he also played the sport. And LaCassa previously worked with Angels assistant GM Scott Servais for the Texas Rangers.

One of his biggest goals is for Angels minor-leaguers to understand exactly how they’re evaluated. It’s an issue across the game, because the evaluation basis is often much different than prospects expect: Not every statistic matters.

“We view statistics on a sliding scale in importance,” Horowitz said. “When you’re at the major-league level, your performance is your performance. But it becomes less so as you move down. When you’re in college, your performance can be misleading, so you have to make sure you’re looking at the right things.

“More specifically, the things we’re looking for are the things we think translate the best.”

In short, that’s strike-zone control, for both pitchers and hitters. The Angels want hitters who walked more than they struck out in college and pitchers who hardly walked anybody.

In other interests, Strangio studies batted-ball data on 3D radar technology called Trackman, which the Angels are installing at their Double-A affiliate for next season. Zoll examines swing paths religiously, grouping together major-leaguers with similar-looking swings and testing their splits for trends.

To get better a expectation of draft prospects’ pro production, Horowitz is investigating how college statistics translate to the lower levels of pro ball.

He takes every player from college baseball’s top five conferences picked in the draft’s top 10 rounds and follows his statistical progress until he passes High-A.

The goal is to find out, “What’s predictive, and what’s prone to variation?”

Predictive is a word that comes up a lot in the Angels’ front office.

“What we’re really trying to understand is the degree to which things tell us something about the future,” Strangio said. “That’s the game we’re playing here: understanding which metrics might be important to the past but don’t translate to the future.”

Said Horowitz: “What’s happened and why it happened and the value of it happening is extremely important, but it’s a separate question and it requires a different approach. Of the record of the past, what can we use to understand the murky future we’re facing?”

People facing those problems in MLB front offices aren’t usually 26. But it’s not unprecedented. And all four men first proved capable as baseball-operations interns, dabbling throughout a streamlined department.

“We were fortunate both in level of responsibility and in diversity of responsibility, because our structure’s pretty small,” Strangio said.

It’s hard to compare the size of the Angels’ baseball-operations staff to the major-league standard because teams differ about what constitutes baseball operations. But we know this: the Angels list 19 staffers in their front-office directory, the third-smallest of the 28 teams that list theirs – everyone except the Mets and Yankees.

The other four AL West teams have an average of 33.

“Some of that is just the way we like it,” Dipoto said. “We’re trying to be more diverse, building all-around baseball executives.”

And so all four will continue to rapidly add experience until one or more is inevitably plucked and promoted in another organization. Dipoto said all four have GM potential.

“The world’s still their oyster,” the Angels’ GM said. “These guys literally started from the ground floor and worked their way up.”

Quickly.

Contact the writer: pmoura@ocregister.com