Data Driven Success in Professional Baseball

An interesting article from Data Center Knowledge about the presentation Paul DePodesta gave at the Strata Summit.  Paul DePodesta is known for bringing mathematic and analytical know-how to Billy Beane and the major league professional baseball team Oakland Athletics.  His story was accounted by Michael Lewis in the book "Moneyball" and is being portrayed with the same name on the big screen opening this weekend.

I really liked this quote from Paul in the article.

We didn’t solve baseball. But we reduced the inefficiency of our decision making.

Is that not the sort of things that an analytical professional or an Operations Researcher ultimately tries to do?   Operations Research is not the art of creating anything new.  It is the art of creating existing things better.  All decision making is inefficient to some point.  Even the right decision can be inefficient on some level.  Decisions are full of balancing acts of constraints and feasibility.

Also this proves that no industry or organization is absent of a need for efficient decision making.  Even baseball can us a dose of improved decision analysis.  Whether is scheduling the league or determining the best pitcher for their value.  Sports has definitely come into their own with decision analytics.  I'm eager to watch Paul's career and wonder if analytics is taking it to the next level.

Moneyball coming to the big screen

Recently I found out that the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis will be shown as a motion picture.  The Moneyball trailer can be viewed online.  In case you have never heard of Michael Lewis then you might have heard about the movie "The Blind Side" which he also wrote the accompanying book.  The book Moneyball is about the Oakland Athletics and how they used analytics and mathematcal know-how to turn around a professional baseball franchise.

The story centers around Billy Beane which is played by Brad Pitt in the movie.  Billy Beane is a professional ballplayer turned General Manager.  Billy Beane inherits the top organizational management job for the losing Oakland Athletics.  He is immediately frustrated with the same old losing ways and believes he needs to shake up the system.  He finds out about the curious world of baseball analytics or otherwise know as sabermetrics and hires a curious crew of young mathematically gifted folks.

The story is fascinating even if you are not a fan of baseball.  The use of mathematics to help make business decisions is nothing new.  Yet employing this analytics method to an industry that is deep rooted in old ways and practices is intriguing.  Changing the ways of the "good ole boy" network requires risk, knowledge, and sometimes good fortune.  This can translate to almost any industry or even organization.  I am most definitely looking forward to seeing this movie.

Analytics geeks win NBA championships

The Dallas Mavericks win their franchise first NBA Title.  They won their first championship by beating teams that everyone thought they could not beat.  The Mavericks were able to beat juggernauts like the Los Angeles Lakers, a fast paced Portland Trailblazers team, up-and-coming youngster superstars in the Oklahoma City Thunder and of course the Big Three from the Miami Heat.  As good as the Mavericks were executing on the basketball court they were equally as good executing a between-the-ears approach to basketball.  The Mavericks were able to win the game by studying the numbers of professional basketball.  Some of the champions on the Mavericks team may not be able to hit even 10% of three pointers but they sure know how to analyze a winning combination.

The analytics culture starts with Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.  According to ESPN when Mark Cuban was looking for a coach he studied games and found out that Rick Carlisle used the most efficient lineups most frequently.  Mark Cuban hiring Rick Carlisle to coach the Mavericks was a no-brainer because the numbers do not lie.  As for Rick Carlisle, he is known for being a very cerebral coach and very handy with crunching NBA statistics as well. 

Another known fact about the Dallas Mavericks is that they use an analytics staff to gain a competitive edge.  Most recently they have retained the NBA analytics stat guru Roland Beech of 82games.com.  In the past they had used the services of Wayne Winston, an Operations Research professor, to help analyze their lineups to be more competitive.

Mark Cuban gives a lot of attention to the geeks for Mavericks winning.  From the ESPN article

I give a lot of credit to Coach Carlisle for putting Roland on the bench and interfacing with him, and making sure we understood exactly what was going on. Knowing what lineups work, what the issues were in terms of play calls and training.

That is a lot of brainpower on the bench in every game.  It is good to see the geeks get their due.  Way to go Mavericks and looking forward to seeing what the geeks put on the court next season!

Baseball and Decision Analytics

When its spring time it means that baseball season is getting ready to get started.  On the last day of March is when the 2011 Major League Baseball season gets going.  Baseball is as American as apple pie and almost every baseball enthusiast has something to say about the game.  Analytics professionals are not far behind when it comes to opinions on baseball. 

Baseball is definitely a numbers game.  Mathematicians have been studying baseball for as long as the game itself has been played.  One of the first notable baseball analysts to apply decision analysis was Bill James.  Bill coined the study of baseball analysis as sabermetrics which is taken from the acronym of the Society of American Baseball Research.  More recently baseball decision analysis has found its way to the Major League Baseball teams management offices.  Popular books such as Moneyball by Michael Lewis and The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First by Jonah Keri have shown how major league management turned around poor performaning clubs into championship contenders.  The mathematics behind their decision analysis can be described best by Wayne Winston's book called Mathletics: How Gamblers, Managers, and Sports Enthusiasts Use Mathematics in Baseball, Basketball, and Football.

Baseball decision analysis has grown up since Bill James devised the batting average.  Now baseball decision analysis uses techniques such as replacement value.  The Value Over Replacement determines the value of a player given that player would be replaced by an average or run-of-the-mill at the given player's position.  Value Over Replacement was made popular by Keith Woolner, the author of the Baseball Prospectus 2011.  At first the value, which is usually offensive value, was to determine how many runs a player could produce over an average player.  Now value over replacement methodologies determine how many wins a player can generate for their respective team.  One of the best sites to give WAR analysis, or Wins Over Replacement, is Fangraphs.  Fangraphs has about every major statistic on baseball available for the baseball enthusiast.  In fact they even have heat maps for pitch location.  Ready to manage your own team yet?

Pitch location heat map from Fangraphs.com

Of course all of this decision analysis would not be possible without the numbers.  One of the best places for baseball data is Baseball-Reference.com.  Just about every data point on baseball can be mined from the site and downloaded.  So if you have a craving to create your own baseball metric or analytics strategy there should be nothing stopping you.

This is another post in the INFORMS Online Blog Challenge.  This month is O.R. and Sports.