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Dark matter is the stuff in the universe we can't see but, because of its apparent gravitational force on everything we can see, we assume it exists and that it influences everything. As science advances, the deeper we can peer into the structure of the universe, the more we learn about how it really works. Quick leap - the same is true in baseball. Some people think the game is slow and that's because either they aren't aware of or simply don't appreciate everything that goes on in the spaces in between the action. This is the stuff we can talk about all day and that's why we love the game, each pitch it's own mini-big bang of new energy, after which all the elements regroup and no two circumstances are ever exactly the same. In my last post, I told you about a Sabremetrics course available at edX.org that will help us catch up on the modern interpretation of statistics that spawned the "Moneyball" revolution over the last decade. Just as you do that however, MLB announced that it will take baseball number crunching to the next level, where no man has gone before, with an effort to measure and record the spaces in between those spaces I mentioned. Let me explain.
Baseball has always been a game of statistics but the 1.0 kind were expressed in hard and fast scoring results: hits, runs, stolen bases, strike outs, etc. If I can make this nice and neat, this includes the first wave of "joins," to use a database term, that conjured up things like on-base percentage by combining multiple known stats. I'll call the "Moneyball" revolution "stats 2.0" where computing power enabled guys with advanced college degrees to merge data and create new ways of looking at a player's value.This pretty much used the same information that was historically always available, but looking at it from a different point of view and creating a cause and effect relationship between what a player does and how it affects the team in the long run.
While Sabremetrics is scientific, there's still an art to interpreting the results of so much data, but with the ability to dig deeper, science has given us "metadata," data about data. This is the new frontier that baseball is pursuing with a new system that will measure every action on the field, stuff we previously couldn't see, or more precisely, stuff we previously couldn't measure, "stats 3.0." How far and fast everyone moves, what their starting points are, how quickly they react to one thing in order to make another happen. This is the data related to the data that is hits, putouts, stolen bases, etc, - data about data. Regardless of the value that this information ultimately holds, we're going to see the game in a new light. For example, a shortstop might make a great diving play, get up and throw a runner out and this play will be beamed around the globe in 1.21 gigawatt instant. The same ball might be a forgettable routine play for another shortstop because he positioned himself better, read the pitch, or perhaps just because he got a quicker first step. One could argue the guy who made the routine play is the better player, the implications of which are far reaching. The point is, as much as fans love dissecting every aspect of the game, there is stuff going on in the baseball universe that we still can't see, and it influences everything. And just like in the scientific world, launching the effort to inspect the universe doesn't mean we'll solve the mystery of it, only that we'll have more information. That's the science part, reaping the data. The real art however, is in how we use all this information to gain knowledge, which in my opinion generally holds true whether we're talking about baseball or not. Here comes the future!
Here's a link to MLB's recent announcement about how they will introduce this baseball Hubble in a few stadiums this year and league-wide in 2015. CLICK HERE
Jim Tosches is an amateur umpire and blogger in Encinitas, Ca and author of the book, "The Rules Abide: The Thinking Fan's Guide to Baseball Rules (With History, Humor and a Few Big Words)"
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