Thanks to Statcast, baseball will never be the same

Statistics are everywhere, but nowhere are they more on public display than in Major League Baseball.

In case you missed it, Paul Casella’s 2015 article provides great insight into this wonderful new way to gather performance data.
bh 10/11/2017

 

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By Paul Casella / MLB.com
April 24th, 2015

Have you wondered how fast the ball comes off of Giancarlo Stanton‘s bat? How much ground Andrew McCutchen actually covers in center field? Or just how fast Billy Hamilton really is? Thanks to Statcast, a revolutionary tracking technology, we can finally get definitive answers.

Statcast is already being utilized by Major League front offices, while fans have had the chance to see its groundbreaking abilities in breakdowns of last year’s All-Star Game and postseason, as well as on a few highlight clips this season. The technology will continue to be incorporated into every MLB Network Showcase game, and used to analyze player performance both on the Network and MLB.com.

Here’s a quick primer on what exactly Statcast can do and what it will mean for Major League Baseball:

MLB Tonight: Statcast demo

Harold Reynolds and the MLB Tonight panel discuss how Statcast works to provide in-depth analysis for the future of baseball

What is Statcast?

Statcast, a state-of-the-art tracking technology, is capable of gathering and displaying previously immeasurable aspects of the game.

Click to read the entire article on MLB.com: Statcast primer: Baseball will never be the same | MLB.com

Representing data is the best way possible is art and science.

This is an interesting post by machine learning enthusiast Sachin Johglekar. Here’s a quote from the article.

Non-Mathematical Feature Engineering techniques for Data Science – Sachin Joglekar’s blog

Why do I say art/science? Because good Feature Engineering involves an elegant blend of domain knowledge, intuition, and basic mathematical abilities. Heck, the most effective data representation ‘hacks’ barely involve any mathematical computation at all! (As I will explain in a short while).

What do I mean by ‘best’? In essence, the way you present your data to your algorithm should denote the pertinent structures/properties of the underlying information in the most effective way possible. When you do feature engineering, you are essentially converting your data attributes into data features.

The article goes on to discuss ways that we present data. It’s thought provoking and definitely worth your time.

bh 2016-09-12

The best job in America has a median salary of over $116,000

This is great article from Samantha Cooney  at Mashable.com on 20 January 2016. Data analysis has never been more popular and this post gives an overview of what jobs are hot!

bh 2016/03/22

The best job in America comes with a handsome six figure salary — and has plenty of job openings.

The job: Data scientist.

It came out on top of job search site Glassdoor’s its annual list of the Best Jobs in America, which was released late on Tuesday night. The survey ranked the careers by a job score between 1 and 5 (with 5 being the best) based on earning potential, career opportunities, and the number of job openings in that field.

Link to the entire article is below:

http://mashable.com/2016/01/20/the-best-jobs-in-america-2016/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-link#C5tNoAlHlkqf

If You Want People to Hear You, Stop Talking Like a Statistician

This is a great post by Eston Martz via the Minitab blog. I love this quote:

… unless we’re speaking to a room full of other statisticians, we should stop talking like statisticians.

http://blog.minitab.com/blog/understanding-statistics/talking-the-statistical-talk-with-those-who-don%E2%80%99t-walk-the-statistical-walk

Atlanta Braves 2014 Preview: Aging Trajectories

While this post does not fall into what I would traditionally call ‘lean’ thinking, it does point out great ways to use statistics to interpret the world. Plus, Jay went to UGA for grad school… and as a former Bulldog myself, I felt duty bound to “Like” and “Reblog” this great post about the baseball team I’ve been following since 1966.

Living In The Sprawl

The home run rate (home runs divided by at bats) of the top 12 home run hitters in Braves history.

Being a consumer of sabermetric analysis, a member of a fantasybaseballkeeper league, and a die hard Braves fan, the age of players is extremely important. You want youth with enough production that it makes sense to take the 23-year-old over the 30-year-old veteran.

When the Braves signed five of their young stars this off season to long-term deals, the team got their best players at below-market value for their most productive years, the mid-20s. They didn’t attempt to re-sign free agent Brian McCann, probably the second best offensive catcher the last five years (and the captain of the Baseball Police), who is 30. These moves show their fans and baseball that the front office actually knows what they’re doing and recognizes that you can’t build a…

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