In a suburban batting cage, two 10-year-olds brag about their exit velocities as practice starts. Down the street, a 14-year-old in an MRI tube is hoping everything is OK because he just found the right combination of extension and ride on his fastball. Thousands of miles south, a scout watching 16-year-olds play runs through a mental checklist of the biomechanical markers that can form the foundation of the next great Latin star. Back north, a 19-year-old accepts his free sleep and wellness tracking device from his new team, ready to monitor his biometrics.
Data is everywhere. Long gone are the days when teams had to fight and scratch just to get their numbers.
“I was the stats department. But the joke was everything fit on one laptop. It was not comparable to what people are doing today. It was a lot of scraping data,” said The Athletic’s Keith Law of his days in the Toronto Blue Jays’ front office in the early 2000s. “Acquiring data was such a huge part of the job. There was less time for what you really call analysis. … So much of it was getting the data and getting it into a usable form. Data was not very clean.”
Now every team has stats on all sorts of things, from pulses to pull rates. The data won. Every team uses numbers in their decision-making process.
“Is data dead?” asked an executive at baseball’s Winter Meetings. “Everyone’s got it. Is there really a competitive advantage in it anymore?”
Baseball’s stat arm keeps producing advanced statistics that are available to the public, with more sophisticated numbers available to every team. If teams are all looking at the same numbers coming through a centralized pipe, the emphasis turns pretty quickly to what you do with those numbers rather than just acquiring the data to begin with.
The data and analytics industry has seen some consolidation in recent years, too. Zelus Analytics, a sort of freelance analytics department started by former Dodgers research and development head Douglas Fearing, was acquired by Teamworks, a company that provides teams with an operating system. The new combined company has no restrictions on how many teams in baseball it can work with, and more than half of baseball has a relationship with one side of the company or the other. Theoretically, at least, every team in baseball could at some point use the same company to run their data pipelines. Zelus and Teamworks wouldn’t mind, at least.
“We work with all kinds of R&D sizes and maturity. Some see us as a complement to their own internal systems, or as a check, or as a blended projection. … But we also have R&D teams that rely on our products for their day-to-day and their game strategy,” said Esteban Navarro Garaiz, senior technical product manager for Zelus about how their services are used by teams in baseball. “As a company working with multiple teams, we can’t build custom things for each team, that would not be feasible, so a lot of our products are tailored to team needs so that everyone can use them.”
Multiple sources in analytics departments this spring expressed some concern that maybe some of Hawk-Eye’s biomechanical data (specifically around the pelvis area) weren’t as precise as what was offered by Kinatrax, a tracking company that has been doing the work in baseball a little longer. Those teams that were considering switching (or switching back) to Kinatrax needn’t worry any longer. Sony, Hawk-Eye’s parent company, acquired Kinatrax this October, which could ostensibly lead to teams all having access to the same biomechanical data at some point.
Front office execs are now faced with a slightly different task than they were earlier this century. Instead of focusing on acquiring data feeds, they need to invest in making the most of that data. Talk to people in the game now, and you might be surprised about the things they look for when they are hiring. The Winter Meetings are a job fair, and many of the guests on the Rates & Barrels podcast talked about what they looked for when interviewing potential job applicants.
“They’re still human beings. That’s a human being you’re putting a 45 on. Every single thing these players are doing is tracked and cataloged, they’re evaluated on it, it’s stored forever, they can’t hide from it, and not a human being in the world would want to work that way,” said Mariners vice president and assistant general manager Andy McKay of working with young players in player development before talking about what he looks for in hires. “Empathy. My ability to sit in your shoes and see the world from your lens, that’s hard to do. Empathy is a big one.”
“The thing that is maybe the most valuable is the most old-school thing — the coach’s ability to communicate with the player and develop a relationship with the player,” said newly hired Marlins director of pitching Bill Hezel. “The knowledge is becoming more ubiquitous. Every team has tech, so the big separator is your ability to communicate that information to the athlete in a way that is not just digestible, but they can actually take action and leverage that information.”
“When I’m interviewing a guy and he mentions the word loyalty more than once, he’s out. That’s a given,” said Brewers manager Pat Murphy. “If they mention work ethic. It’s a given, it’s a life work. I’m trying to look for something deeper. Be authentic. You go in humble, and understand that someone is going to take a chance on you … that’s it’s not about you. This isn’t about rocket science, it’s about people.”
“I tend to look for high-energy people who are curious and don’t take themselves too seriously, and realize that they’re going to have to work in a team setting in baseball,” said Reds international cross-checker Phillip Stringer. “I’ve found, working with the Royals, the Dodgers and now the Reds, that people that are willing to give of themselves and not necessarily expect you to give them all of the influence and the power to make decisions in the department on day one, and approach their job with humility. That goes a long way. Being flexible and patient can take you a long way.”
“I wanted people who were open, open-minded,” said Law of his time in a front office. “I had to change my mindset too. I came in as a stats guy with no scouting background and pretty quickly realized that there was a whole world that I didn’t understand at all. I can reject it, or I can learn about it. I took my own path a little bit. They took a lot of time to talk to me. They wanted to ask questions, but they would answer my questions.”
Of course, some want to push back on any idea that data is less important these days.
“Data is more important than ever,” said Kyle Boddy of Driveline Baseball, who also advises the Boston Red Sox. “Teams are going to create their own data, develop their own data using computer vision programs to make their own data.”
With the help of @camarcano , we wanted to classify whether a catcher had one knee down or no knees down. Using YOLO for pose point data, we created a 50/50 OKD-NOKD dataset to train a classifier to predict the catcher result. Frame-by-Frame was ~80% accurate for training. pic.twitter.com/zAg4bVs9Qj
— Dylan Drummey (@DrummeyDylan) September 25, 2024
An example of that might be the work of Dylan Drummey, whom the Cubs just hired to do computer vision projects. Or maybe something that Jimmy Buffi of ReBoot was excited about: one-camera marker-less motion capture, which would give teams more biomechanical data on players in far-flung places, players not in front of Kinetrax or Hawk-Eye cameras. There are still ways to uncover new data sources.
“Even if it’s about processes a little more right now, the data going in is still a priority,” said another front office executive.
Every team still needs to participate in the arms race. There may still be some data streams that are left to be uncovered. But the numbers business is heading for a certain maturity. And as teams truly look for a new edge, they might want to look for some of the soft skills like humility and empathy, or think about the processes that turn that data into actions on the field, as much as any specific data coming into the pipe. Increasingly, everyone’s looking at the same numbers.
(Photo of Josiah Gray: Jess Rapfogel / Getty Images)
