After twenty consecutive losing seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates, team morale was low, the club’s payroll ranked near the bottom of the sport, game attendance was down, and the city was becoming increasingly disenchanted using its team. Pittsburghers joked their city was the town of champions…and the Pirates. Big Data Baseball is the tale of how the 2013 Pirates, mired in the longest losing streak in UNITED STATES pro sports history, adopted extreme big-data strategies to end the drought, about Big Data Baseball: Math, Wonders, and the finish of the 20-Calendar year 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 what sort of small-market Pirates played the overall game. For supervisor Clint Hurdle and the front office staff to save their jobs, they could not rely on a free agent spending spree, rather they had to improve the amount of their parts and find hidden value. That they had to improve. From Hurdle dropping his old-school ways to function carefully 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 switch more balls into attacks; to Clint Barmes, a good shortstop and one of the early adopters from 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 lifestyle of cooperation and creativity flourished as he effectively blended whiz kid analysts with graybeard coaches-a kind of symbiotic teamwork which was unique to the sport.Big Data Baseball is Moneyball about steroids. It really is an entertaining and enlightening underdog story that uses the 2013 Pirates time of year as an ideal lens to examine the sport’s burgeoning big-data motion. By using data-tracking systems like PitchF/X and TrackMan, the Pirates gathered millions of data factors on every pitch and ball in play to create a tome of color-coded reports that uncovered groundbreaking insights for how to win more games without spending a dime. In the process, they discovered that most batters battled going to two-seam fastballs, an intense defensive change around the field could convert more batted balls into outs, and that a catcher’s most effective skill was concealed. All these data factors which aren’t immediately noticeable to players and spectators, are the bit of magic that led the Pirates to spin straw directly into gold, end the 2013 period in second place, end a twenty-year losing streak.