Big Data Baseball: Math, Miracles, and the End of a 20-Year Losing Streak
256
Big Data Baseball: Math, Miracles, and the End of a 20-Year Losing Streak
256eBook
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Overview
Big Data Baseball provides a behind-the-scenes look at how the Pittsburgh Pirates used big data strategies to end the longest losing streak in North American pro sports history.
New York Times Bestseller
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250063519 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Flatiron Books |
| Publication date: | 05/19/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
TRAVIS SAWCHIK covers the Pirates and Major League Baseball for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Sawchik has won national Associated Press Sports Editor awards for enterprise writing and numerous state-level awards. Sawchik’s work been featured or referenced on ESPN, Grantland.com, and MLB Network. He is the author of Big Data Baseball.
Read an Excerpt
Big Data Baseball
Math, Miracles, and the End of a 20-Year Losing Streak
By Travis Sawchik
Flatiron Books
Copyright © 2015 Travis SawchikAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-06351-9
CHAPTER 1
THE MEETING
He believed in fearing nothing, respecting everything. He said that often. Still, if Clint Hurdle had felt no apprehension the day he waited for a visitor at his home in early October 2012, it would have been unnatural. Outside his home, the gray sky provided a stark contrast to the vibrant orange, yellow, and red of the trees in the rolling hills in western Pennsylvania. A mild depression fell over many coaches and managers when the season ended. Baseball was something you lived and breathed for nearly eight months, from when pitchers and catchers reported to spring training in February and lasting through the early fall. Then, like that, it was gone. His team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, was no longer playing baseball now that the play-offs had started. Twenty years had passed since the Pirates last landed in the postseason. This was the problem clouding Hurdle's thoughts as he waited.
Before he'd accepted the job as manager for the Pittsburgh Pirates, a number of his closest friends had counseled him against taking the position. He recalled the phone calls: It was a dead end, they told him. The Pirates hadn't made the postseason in twenty years; heck, they hadn't had a winning season in that long, the longest such streak of futility in North American professional-sports history. Not since the 1992 National League Championship Series, when Sid Bream beat a throw home from Barry Bonds for the winning run of Game 7, had the Pirates played in the postseason. That day when Sid slid home was the day baseball died in Pittsburgh.
A lot had changed since those last great Pirates teams. Players, coaches, and executives had come and gone. Attendance declined. The only year-to-year consistencies were the losing and the little money being spent on the club. The revenue gap between large- and small-market teams had grown dramatically since the early 1990s, fueled by the explosion and disparity in regional television dollars. It meant the Pirates had no high-priced free agents to bolster their roster. The Pirates' Opening Day payroll in 2010 ranked last in baseball at $35 million, while the average league payroll was $89 million. Their farm system was also hurting due to a series of missed opportunities in the draft, such as in 2002 when the Pirates selected Bryan Bullington as the number one draft pick over future stars like Prince Fielder, Zack Greinke, Scott Kazmir, Nick Swisher, Matt Cain, and Cole Hamels. Bullington was just one of several great draft busts in recent memory.
Hurdle knew the Pirates had clearly fallen in status to the number three sports team in Pittsburgh behind the Steelers in the NFL and the Penguins in the NHL. Both franchises had recently won championships. Meanwhile, the Pirates had not drawn more than 2 million fans to their stadium since 2001.
Hurdle's friends advised him to wait for another job opportunity with a team that wasn't considered among the worst franchises in North American professional sports. But what his friends wouldn't say, although they didn't have to, was that Hurdle had only one more shot to make it as a major league manager. If he lost this job, he was unlikely to get a third chance at managing. He was no longer a young man, having turned fifty-five in July. So why take a chance in Pittsburgh?
He listened to and processed the many reasons he should turn down the job. But still, he couldn't.
Hurdle had spent the 2010 season as the Texas Rangers' hitting coach. He knew that he wanted to manage, not be an assistant. Like most baseball coaches, Hurdle preferred to wield the ultimate power of a coach: filling out a lineup card. He enjoyed leading. He liked having his hands on different aspects of a club, not being a specialist in one area. Perhaps more than anything else, he thought that rehabbing the baseball club in Pittsburgh could be a special story. He enjoyed a challenge.
After much deliberation, Hurdle decided he wanted the job. He felt it was the right fit, but he had to convince his wife, Karla, that it was the right move for them. They loved living in Denver, where Hurdle previously managed the Colorado Rockies so Hurdle had to convince her that Pittsburgh was not just some cold, undesirable industrial city. He could sell her on the city's renaissance. Pittsburgh had made perhaps the most successful transition of all the Rust Belt cities. After the steel mills closed and so many in the city struggled, a healthy medical industry began to develop along with a burgeoning tech niche. As the coal mines running under the city and its suburban hills quieted, a thriving natural gas industry developed. Home prices had not collapsed and the local economy had not crashed, as in so many cities across the country in the late 2000s.
However, Pittsburgh's baseball club remained in dire need of revitalization. A new stadium, PNC Park, opened in 2001, not far from where the Pittsburgh Alleghenies had begun playing professional baseball in the city in the nineteenth century. But in contrast to the sparkling new facility, the organization itself had fallen destitute on the field. Could its baseball club enjoy a rebirth like the city? Hurdle believed that it could. He convinced Karla that he was confident he could make things work in Pittsburgh.
On November 14, 2010, Hurdle was officially hired by the Pirates. He often spoke of full "buy in" to ideas or practices and to show commitment to the city and the team he became a full-time resident. Hurdle bought a spacious colonial, brick residence, resting on a large plot in the suburban hills of Hampton Township, fifteen miles north of the stadium.
Two years later, he waited in that same home; his confidence in rebuilding the Pirates had been encroached upon by time and doubt. He had just one year left on his contract, and his first two seasons with the team had been losing ones. He had been a major league manager for ten years, first with the Colorado Rockies, and nine of those seasons were losing ones. During games he appeared to go through an entire carton of bubble gum, his mouth constantly chewing like a factory's stamping press, seemingly as a way to reduce stress. This off-season's anxiety however wasn't fixated on just the outcome of one game. Beginning late in the last season, it was difficult for anyone to avoid hearing the public's call for a restart, for a change in the Pirates' leadership. Hurdle could well be on the move again, which would be difficult on his family. The kids, Maddie, ten, and Christian, seven, were settled and comfortable now. Had he made the right decision in coming to Pittsburgh? In truth, it didn't matter now. He vowed to never look back and second-guess himself. He had been through adversity before. He was here now and he had to fix it.
Hurdle's first two seasons as Pirates manager had not gone well. The club had enjoyed surprising winning records through the first half of both the 2011 and 2012 seasons, raising hopes and expectations, then performed horribly in second halves, ending with consecutive-losing-seasons nineteen and twenty. Pittsburghers referred to the second halves of 2011 and 2012 as Epic Collapse I and Epic Collapse II. Hurdle knew he could not afford an Epic Collapse III.
A former major league player, Hurdle was an imposing figure at six feet three and over two hundred pounds. With hands like catcher's mitts and spiked, silver-gray hair, with his presence and size, he commanded most rooms that he entered; but as he waited in his home, underneath that tough exterior he also had to feel powerless when thinking about the realities of his ball club.
Finally, a car made its way down his street, passing the wooded subdivision's spacious lots and approaching his driveway. He knew what was coming, and it was what many of us fear most: the future and change.
* * *
Approaching the front door was Neal Huntington. Hurdle dwarfed the five-foot-eight, square-shouldered Pirates general manager, whose blond hair and youthful countenance belied his forty-three years. Huntington, guarded and measured in his speech, was a calculating man. Unlike Hurdle, Huntington had come from outside the game, never having a professional at bat.
Huntington had attended an elite school, Amherst (Mass.), though he did not come from the upper class. The son of a New Hampshire dairy farmer, he vividly recalled being in the family barn's stuffy rafters in hundred-degree heat in mid-August, charged with catching hay bales thrown to him by his older brothers. He remembered their laughing as he failed to keep up and was soon overwhelmed and pounded by a peppering of bales. That barn is where he learned the value of hard work.
Huntington had been an excellent student, but his passion was always baseball. He went to college at Amherst because it was the best school that afforded him the opportunity to play the game, albeit at the Division III level. Huntington was never the most talented player, and perhaps because of that he was always thinking about the game's strategy and how to find an edge. From an early age, he was fascinated by the concept of team building. He loved playing the APBA baseball-simulation board game, where he attempted to find flaws he could exploit. APBA baseball came with its own cards that represented every major league player and his skills. Its board featured a diagram of a baseball field with which to advance base runners and show different scenarios—from bases loaded to empty bases—and with its dice you created random numbers. The game was simple. A pitcher's card was matched up with a hitter's card, and a roll of the dice resolved the at bat. The random numbers created by the dice corresponded to an assortment of probability-based outcomes based upon the players' real-life statistical performances. Huntington was always looking for loopholes in the game. He favored speedy base runners when creating his lineups as he learned they could steal bases with ease.
He grew up thinking he would live a simple life; teach somewhere and coach baseball. Instead, Montreal Expos general manager Dan Duquette, an Amherst alum, called Huntington's college coach, Bill Thurston—who had been the head coach since 1966—and asked if he knew anyone who would make a good summer intern. Huntington was recommended. The internship in 1992 led to a full-time position with the Expos. Because of the limited staff and resources in Montreal, many tasks were handed down to Huntington. Some were menial, others were fascinating. In 1994 he served as the Expos' video advance scout. The Expos were one of the first teams to use this method. Most clubs had a scout in the field studying upcoming opponents. The Expos had one of the early, enormous, NASA-sized television satellite dishes installed, which could pluck a limited number of games from the sky. Huntington was tasked with making sure he taped and scouted games from upcoming opponents, as well as the Expos players' performances for when stars such as Moises Alou, Larry Walker, and Marquis Grissom wanted to evaluate their at bats on video after each game. At the time of the baseball strike, on August 11, 1994, the Expos had the best record in the major leagues—despite a paltry payroll of $19 million. The next season, Huntington was promoted to assistant director of player development. He was just one of four full-time employees in the front office along with the general manager, the vice president of baseball operations, and the director of minor league operations.
That experience in Montreal was invaluable. Huntington got to see the smallest-market team succeed in the National League, and he would soon be involved in the infancy of baseball's data revolution in the American League's most challenging environment with the Cleveland Indians.
In the early 1990s, Indians general manager John Hart inherited a team that had reached such a low that it was the subject of the comedy movie Major League. Under Hart, the Indians became a powerhouse club that advanced to the World Series in 1995 and 1997. Hart had risen through the ranks as a minor league manager and scout, a traditional path to the general manager's chair. With Cleveland, he faced more challenges and economic limitations than with any other team in the sport, but Hart pioneered a number of innovations, and perhaps the most lasting included what he dubbed a "pilot program." Under Hart, the Indians hired young, hungry graduates of elite colleges to study the emerging data side of baseball to complement what Hart thought was his strength: traditional, subjective scouting. The program helped Hart learn as much as possible about his opponents when he attended the winter meetings each December, which is baseball's annual convention. The winter meetings are where many trades and signings are executed, new products are showcased, and hundreds of hopeful job seekers are visiting, along with players' agents, media members, and many front office executives. At hotel bars gossip and information are swapped until the early-morning hours. Hart wanted to know the contracts, the service time, performance trends, the quality of his rivals' prospects, and he wanted all this information condensed into one three-ring binder of reports that he could easily access when involved in trade or free agent discussions. These tasks were put upon his army of highly educated and lowly paid staff of baseball outsiders, among whom was Huntington, who came aboard in 1998.
Huntington was hired as the club's assistant director of minor league operations and became part of baseball's first wave of data-savvy lieutenants. Like him, none of his colleagues had ever played professional baseball, a highly unconventional path to a major league front office, but despite this, four of his colleagues—Paul DePodesta, Josh Byrnes, Mark Shapiro, and Chris Antonetti—went on to become major league general managers.
"We were definitely on the forefront of that. Now [data analysis] is a huge piece [of the game]," Hart said. "I think we were on the forefront because I recognized my limitations.... We developed a pilot program of young, smart guys that wanted to get into baseball. [They] helped provide that cutting-edge stuff that allowed the Indians to be ahead of the game. It was fun. We were embryonic."
However, the competitive advantage of cheap, smart labor fresh out of elite schools was to be short-lived as other teams became interested in the analysts.
"The first guy we lost was Paul DePodesta. He was like number three or number four on our depth chart," Hart said. "I remember [Oakland GM] Billy Beane called me. I knew then that [what we were doing] was working. Billy called me at the 1998 winter meetings and said, 'John, you have a guy over there I'm interested in hiring.' I said, 'Oh, really.' He said, 'Paul DePodesta.' I said, 'Oh, shit. Here we go.'"
Huntington advanced his way to become an assistant general manager in Cleveland and left in 2007 when the Pirates offered him their general manager position. The Pirates liked that Huntington had a variety of experiences, having scouted players, worked in player development, and analyzed data. They liked his tenacity and that he had been around small-market success stories. Huntington and the new Pirates club president Frank Coonelly, brought on shortly before Huntington, were in agreement on a plan to dramatically increase the financial commitment to the draft. But Huntington and the Pirates' leadership wanted to implement something else that was integral to the Indians game. Under Hart, Huntington had been exposed to Cleveland's proprietary database, DiamondView. The first version of the DiamondView software was created in 2000, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, when Hart's assistant general manager, Mark Shapiro, asked for a computer database to be constructed that could rank each rival club's top players and prospects. It was essentially a computerized and enhanced extension of the reports Hart had asked to be produced for winter meetings. DiamondView predated the Moneyball Oakland A's and was the first known comprehensive computer database in the sport, able to quickly sort through large samples of data to identify trends and project performance while uploading new data daily. It quickly evolved to include video, injury reports, and salary figures to accompany scouting reports and performance metrics. Using the software, the Indians made key decisions, such as when they elected not to sign aging star Jim Thome to an extension after the 2002 season, in part because of the database, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported. DiamondView revealed Barry Bonds was the only hitter in the prior twenty-two seasons who produced at an elite level after the age of thirty-five, and Thome was seeking a six-year deal that would take him through age thirty-seven.
The Indians balked at signing Thome to a deal that took him beyond his thirty-fifth birthday, so instead he signed a six-year deal with Philadelphia and began a swift decline phase at thirty-four. Moreover, Huntington noted that the Indians found in a payroll analysis that no major league club, dating back to 1985, had won a World Series when committing 15 percent or more of its payroll to one player. This DiamondView finding also influenced the Indians' decision on Thome. DiamondView allowed easy access to and analysis of large amounts of data, helping the small-market Indians avoid making an emotion-based mistake in signing Thome.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Big Data Baseball by Travis Sawchik. Copyright © 2015 Travis Sawchik. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
1. The Meeting
2. Demons
3. Proving Grounds
4. The Hidden Value
5. Point of No Return
6. Shifting the Playing Field
7. Attrition
8. Spinning Gold
9. The Missing All-Stars
10. Geography Test
11. Arms Race
12. Magic Art
Epilogue: A Perfect Circle
Acknowledgments
References