
Baseball, Judgment, and Technocracy - longdefeat
https://thefrailestthing.com/2019/06/30/baseball-judgment-and-technocracy/
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FooHentai
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.

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jimmytucson
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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Williams)

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rollinDyno
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.

