Oster: How analytics have thrown a curveball at the MLB playoffs
From Rob Oster at Yahoo! Tech on October 2, 2019:
If legendary baseball players like Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and “Shoeless Joe” Jackson were to somehow mystically emerge from a cornfield in Iowa, à la Field of Dreams, to watch the Major League Baseball playoffs, they would likely be completely bewildered by the current incarnation of the game at which they excelled in bygone days.
We’re not just talking about the emergence of night games and colossal advances in equipment and training methods. An emphasis on data analysis over the past quarter-century has changed the game at its core every bit as much as more familiar traditional technological advances like the use of iPads in dugouts.
Technology has played a huge role in the amount of information that can be gathered and analyzed, as well as the availability of such data, according to the Society for American Baseball Research. Information abounds on such sites as Baseball-Reference.com, MLB.com, and many others — and computers are getting better at analyzing data and spotting patterns every season.
Read the full article here: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/numbers-game-analytics-thrown-curveball-205017098.html
Originally published: October 2, 2019. Last Updated: October 2, 2019.