Big Data Baseball
Math, Miracles, and the End of a 20-Year Losing Streak
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4.8 • 37 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Great read
Great book and insight in the rise of big data and analytics. Great for the geeks in us.
Must-read for Pirate fan / sabermetrics fan
2013 was such a magical season for the Pittsburgh Pirates. This book lets you relive it all and shows that maybe it was more science than magic. Very well done and hard to believe this was the author's first book.
Great Book!
This book is a great read for any fan of baseball! It goes into superior depth of the new competitive advantage of winning at the MLB level (specifically the Pirates) with analyzed quantifiable data that is embraced by the entire organization. Great story of using brain power to win instead of overpaying and using wild spending to acquire players for a winning team. Plus it is very refreshing to read about a positive non-drug fueled advantage for a winning in today's MLB!