A hazard of baseball’s data revolution is the risk of minimizing experience. Former players with a lifetime in the game are often shut out of modern coaching staffs. You might have been teammates with Willie Mays, but unless you know your way around an iPad, good luck getting hired.

“Part of the challenge we face as an industry is there are so many wonderfully experienced coaches, but many of them, because they’ve been in the game so long, have a certain way of doing things and they’re resistant to change,” said Jeff Luhnow, the general manager of the Houston Astros, adding later: “A lot of people are stubborn. They feel invested in what they’ve been preaching, and they won’t change. A lot of gurus are like that.”

Brent Strom of the Astros is not. Strom, 69, is the senior pitching coach in the majors, more than five years older than anyone else in the job. Yet he is a force within baseball’s most progressive, data-driven organization, and his pitchers had the majors’ lowest earned run average, 2.68, before this weekend’s series with the Boston Red Sox.

“He’s one of the few people who’s really been able to keep that old-school mentality and take the best things he learned from that era and bring it to the analytical age,” Astros starter Lance McCullers Jr. said. “When you have a guy that can kind of blend both, you can really rely on his opinions and his advice to make you a better pitcher.”