Moneyball Child's Play?

http://www.datanami.com/2014/10/24/todays-baseball-analytics-make-moneyball-look-like-childs-play/

You can take the first 135 years of baseball data-the game accounts and what happened during games"and you can put that on a 2GB flash drive," he says.

With the new data that MLB is capturing from high-speed video and Doppler radar, each game is on the cusp of generating 1TB of data. "So we're talking about a 10-million fold increase in data capture," Gennaro says. "We're getting tracking of everything that goes on the field during the entire baseball game."

Instead of focusing on how one batter performs against one pitcher, I looked at how a batter performs against a pitcher's attributes," he said. "I went that extra level deeper and looked at a hitter against all pitchers and analyzed the pitcher attributes that he's successful against or what he struggles against, from velocity to pitch movement to repertoire to release point and pitch sequences. In total we had 14 attributes and looked at them in all possible combinations.

Fascinating, especially about the bulk of the interest currently coming from bettors.

I can see the sports books having a tremendous interest in this technology.

Doppler radar? Pitch tracking?

I've mentioned this before, but Bill James talks a good bit about how the stuff the Red Sox are doing now makes what they did when we was first hired a decade or so ago look silly. If a team isn't continually improving its techniques it will very quickly fall behind. I assume that was one of the primary problems with the circa 2005 Orioles: they were largely operating as though it was 1985, doing things that were absolutely great in 1985. And getting crushed.

When you conceptualize all the data that is currently available then it isn't a surprise that scoring is decreasing. Additional information is always going to aid the defense more then the offense.

When you conceptualize all the data that is currently available then it isn't a surprise that scoring is decreasing. Additional information is always going to aid the defense more then the offense.

Because baseball is the only major North American sport where the offense is the reactive side. The defense controls the ball and makes the choices on what to do with it. The hitter can only try to counter the strategic choices of the defense.