Big Data Baseball: Math, Miracles, and the End of a 20-Year Losing Streak Audiobook (Free)

After twenty consecutive losing seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates, team morale was low, the club’s payroll ranked near the bottom of the activity, game attendance was down, and the town was becoming increasingly disenchanted using its team. Pittsburghers joked their town was the town of champions…as well as the Pirates. Big Data Football is the tale of how the 2013 Pirates, mired in the longest shedding streak in UNITED STATES pro sports background, adopted drastic big-data ways of end the drought, about Big Data Baseball: Math, Miracles, and the finish of a 20-Season Losing Streak make the playoffs, and turn around the franchise’s fortunes.

Award-winning journalist Travis Sawchik takes you behind the moments to expertly weave together the stories of the key figures who changed the way the small-market Pirates played the game. For supervisor Clint Hurdle and the front office staff to save lots of their careers, they cannot rely on a free of charge agent spending spree, instead they had to boost the sum of their parts and find hidden value. That they had to improve. From Hurdle losing his old-school ways to work closely with Neal Huntington, the forward-thinking data-driven GM and his team of talented experts; to pitchers just like a. J. Burnett and Gerrit Cole changing what and where they threw; to Russell Martin, the undervalued catcher whose expert usage of the nearly-invisible skill of pitch framing helped the team’s pitchers change even more balls into hits; to Clint Barmes, a good shortstop and among the early adopters of the unconventional on-field shift which forced the entire infield to realign into positions they by no means stood in before. Under Hurdle’s management, a tradition of cooperation and creativeness flourished as he effectively blended whiz kid analysts with graybeard coaches-a kind of symbiotic teamwork that was unique to the activity.Big Data Baseball is Moneyball on steroids. It is an enjoyable and enlightening underdog tale that uses the 2013 Pirates period as an ideal lens to examine the sport’s burgeoning big-data motion. With the help of data-tracking systems like PitchF/X and TrackMan, the Pirates gathered an incredible number of data points on every pitch and ball in play to make a tome of color-coded reports that exposed groundbreaking insights for how to win more games without spending a dime. Along the way, they discovered that most batters battled going to two-seam fastballs, an intense defensive change around the field could turn even more batted balls into outs, and that a catcher’s most effective skill was concealed. All these data points which aren’t instantly noticeable to players and spectators, are the bit of magic that led the Pirates to spin straw in to yellow metal, end the 2013 time of year in second place, end a twenty-year losing streak.