Baseball Analysis as Opening Day Nears

A bit more fun this week, though the analysis is quite serious.  If you are a data geek as I am then you should be hitting up 538.com every day for their latest and greatest.

The Boston Red Sox have been at the front of much of this work though everyone seems to trail that Moneyball guy over on the West Coast.

Here is a great little piece on the changing game of baseball as data shifts the thinking of everyone involved with the game.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/three-trends-to-watch-in-baseball-this-year/

Here is a snippet from that piece:

Baseball is changing. I suppose that’s nothing new — baseball has always been changing, but now novel technologies and team philosophies are reshaping the game to a near-unprecedented degree. Pitch tracking, new kinds of defensive positioning, hyper-specialized relief pitching — all are altering the tactical landscape of MLB.

FiveThirtyEight’s season preview is about some of those changes. Tons of season previews concentrate on the teams — our friends at Grantland have been doing a great one of these — so we looked elsewhere for our inspiration. Below you’ll find three of the season’s most important trends alongside three of the players likely to be affected by them. These are the storylines worth keeping an eye on in the 2015 season regardless of your rooting interest. Embrace the change.

Go RedSox!

J.W. Gant