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Big Data Baseball

Math, Miracles, and the End of a 20-Year Losing Streak

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
The New York Times bestseller: "A useful, entertaining look back at how the Pirates turned a small market, longtime loser into a playoff team." —Baseball America
After twenty consecutive losing seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates, team morale was low, the club's payroll ranked near the bottom of the sport, game attendance was down, and the city was becoming increasingly disenchanted with its team. Big Data Baseball is the story of how the 2013 Pirates, mired in the longest losing streak in North American pro sports history, adopted drastic big-data strategies to end the drought, make the playoffs, and turn around the franchise's fortunes.
Big Data Baseball is Moneyball for a new generation. Award-winning journalist Travis Sawchik takes you behind the scenes to expertly weave together the stories of the key figures who changed the way the Pirates played the game, revealing how a culture of collaboration and creativity flourished as whiz-kid analysts worked alongside graybeard coaches to revolutionize the sport and uncover groundbreaking insights for how to win more games without spending a dime.
From pitch framing to on-field shifts, this entertaining and enlightening underdog story closely examines baseball's burgeoning big data movement and demonstrates how the millions of data points which aren't immediately visible to players and spectators, are the bit of magic that led the Pirates to finish the 2013 season in second place and brought an end to a twenty-year losing streak.
"A particular kind of nerd heaven and if you're even vaguely interested in advanced analytics, you should already be halfway through the second chapter by now." —MLB.com
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 13, 2015
      The Pittsburgh Pirates are among a handful of Major League Baseball teams to wholly embrace emerging big-data analytics in order to build rosters and win games. This enlightening book by Sawchik, the Pirates beat writer for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, explains how the team helped redefine the game by hiring information technologists to track and interpret millions of data points on everything from pitch speed to batted balls during the 2013–14 season. Data-tracking systems such as PITCHf/x and TrackMan—tools that measure the entire flight of a baseball—allowed the Pirates’ staff of young analysts (most of whom had no professional baseball experience) to become integral to the team’s first winning season in two decades. Old-school manager Clinto Hurdle and his aging coaching staff learned to trust the data more than their guts, and convinced skeptical players to employ an unconventional infield shift—something few teams did on a regular basis despite vast analytical evidence supporting it. Taking cues from Michael Lewis’s Moneyball and Jonah Keri’s The Extra 2% (books that explore how other small-market, low-payroll MLB teams use metrics), Sawchik wonderfully dissects statistics and the game itself in a style that will score with a broad range of readers.

    • Kirkus

      April 15, 2015
      Pittsburgh Tribune-Review writer Sawchik debuts with a celebration of the Pirates' recent return to glory with the help of some computer all-stars. As the author notes in his subtitle, the Pirates had been pathetic for more than two decades. But their resurrection began, he writes, when manager Clint Hurdle, who was in danger of losing his job in 2013 after two disappointing seasons, decided to embrace "big data"-the vast amounts of information becoming available about everything from the positioning of infielders to the grips that pitchers use on their fastballs. Sawchik employs several techniques throughout, giving the back stories of the various principals in the drama, clearly explaining the technological advances in the game (Money Ball and beyond), recording the strategies and successes that management employed and enjoyed. We hear about Hurdle, pitcher Francisco Liriano, and catcher Russell Martin. But it's not just the players. Computer whiz Dan Fox, for example, also gets his due. The story advances as the team-more or less willingly-accepts the necessity of listening to what the data are whispering. Shift infielders from their traditional positions, get pitchers who induce grounders from the hitters, find catchers who "frame" pitches for the umpires, measure the specific skills of outfielders-these and other topics fill most of the text, along with a few accounts of specific moments in games and some playoff game summaries. Sawchik, of course, is a "homer," so he rarely describes any mutinous mumblings aboard the Pirate ship. At times, the story reads almost like a John R. Tunis baseball book for boys (The Kid from Tomkinsville, etc.): Tunis' optimism, idealization of character, and overall enthusiasm all are here. Most important is Sawchik's realization, however, that the diamond will never again be so rough-data-gatherers and -analysts are polishing assiduously. Both a comprehensive and a focused look at how computer-recorded data are fundamentally altering America's pastime.

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Library Journal

      June 15, 2015

      This promising debut by Pittsburgh Tribune-Review baseball beat writer Sawchik reveals how the small-market, tiny-budget Pittsburgh Pirates ended a string of 20 straight losing seasons and made an improbable return to the playoffs in 2013 by blending old-and new-school methods of roster building and on-field strategizing. Sawchik mines similar territory to Michael Lewis's best-selling Moneyball, but here there's less personal and intraorganization drama and deeper explorations into how data-based decisions impacted particular games. And whereas the Oakland A's of Moneyball fame primarily relied on number crunching to improve their offense, the Pirates mixed the objective, quantitative findings of their newly hired, forward-thinking group of software engineers and data analysts with traditional scouting and player evaluations to shore up their defense. Manager Clint Hurdle used computerized, granular data analytics to help with free-agent signings, defensive positioning, and pitch selection and location. The author additionally draws on interviews with forward-thinking Hurdle and various Pirates players, coaches, and staff members to provide enthralling backstories of both the data providers and those who used the information during games. VERDICT Casual and hard-core baseball fans alike who enjoyed Moneyball are sure to be entertained and informed by this sort-of sequel.--Douglas King, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from May 1, 2015
      If sabermetrics was most famously used by Billy Beane's Oakland A's to fortify an underfunded offense, the equally impoverished Pittsburgh Pirates used that science in 2013 to end the longest losing streak in pro-sports history20 seasonsby upgrading their defense. The team made three critical discoveries: some catchers are uncanny at earning strike calls (and thus outs . . . and wins) for their pitchers, traditional infield alignments hardly reflect where a ground ball will likely be hit, and the addition of one pitchthe two-seam fastballto an entire staff's arsenal can induce grounders, and thus outs, to a shifted infield. And so they picked up free-agent catcher Russell Martin at a discount, reset the infielders in unorthodox but deadly precise positions, and got pitcher buy-in on the slower but more effective two-seam fastball. How this motley collection of menfrom data geeks to throwback coaches to reluctant playersworked the numbers together to mold a winner makes Sawchik's tale as compelling as Michael Lewis' Moneyball (2003). Which is saying a lot.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

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