Baseball, Judgment, and Technocracy | Hacker News Reader

Baseball, Judgment, and Technocracy

thefrailestthing.com

23 pointslongdefeat4 comments

Bit strange to see a piece like this not refer explicitly to Moneyball (2011), or the book by Michael Lewis on which it's based. The film's fantastic, and shows how Oakland Athletics pivoted their player selection process from the talent scout gut-feel approach to a sole focus on statistics, and the dramatic turnaround it brought.

Then again, the piece focuses on the human aspects of removing the mystery behind the game, perhaps it doesn't need to speak to why/how that came about.

The exclusion seems deliberate to me. If Moneyball highlights the gee-whiz process of constant optimization, that goes counter to the point of the article, which is about the more romantic elements of the game...and of life.

The quintessential insight from Moneyball was that walks were undervalued at the time.

Now, thanks to a combination of camera tracking and radar, we know the exact location of every player and the ball at every millisecond of the game. This has given rise to a new, hyper-optimized style of play that can’t be replicated at other levels (minor leagues down to college, high school, and little league) due to the technology and analaytical skills needed to harness this information. It’s starting to become clear that the optimizations slightly favor pitching and defense more than hitting, which some argue leads to a boring, “3 true outcomes” style of play.

You’re never going to see the exotic shifts they use in the major leagues on the playground or in an indie ball game because they don’t have statistics on the exact trajectory of every ball the current batter has ever put in play at their finger tips. At those levels, they’ll continue putting 4 fielders evenly spaced in the infield and 3 evenly spaced in the outfield, the way they had in the major leagues for more than a hundred years* until Statcast came along.

* With some notable exceptions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Williams

Those closing lines really struck me. Deshumanising as technology has been during the last century, it has been this way that we learned even more about what makes us human.

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