By Stephen J. Nesbitt, Rustin Dodd and Eno Sarris
The email landed in Cláudio Silva’s inbox on the evening of Dec. 6, 2011. One of the first things he noticed was the three letters in the subject line: MLB.
Baseball?
Silva was an NYU professor who specialized in data science and computer graphics. He had once worked at AT&T Labs and IBM Research. Those were initials he understood. But MLB? Silva grew up in Fortaleza, Brazil, a coastal city where baseball had little relevance. When he got his doctorate at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he never bothered to learn the rules.
The email was written by Dirk Van Dall, who was working with Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM), the league’s digital arm. It was forwarded to Silva by Yann LeCun, another NYU professor and one of the world’s foremost experts on machine learning. Silva read the first few lines. It concerned a secret project in the works. “MLBAM is working with a vendor on technology to identify and track the position and path of all 18 players on the field,” Van Dall wrote. The problem, he continued, was that the resulting firehose of data would need to be compressed, coded and organized on the fly for use by broadcasters, analysts and coaches.
Van Dall didn’t mention the project could revolutionize the sport, transforming the way teams evaluate players or how fans watch games. Nor did he use the project’s eventual name: Statcast.
Silva wasn’t sold. Sharing the email with Carlos Dietrich, another Brazilian graphics expert, Silva said, “It seems interesting. But it has no academic value.”
Still, Major League Baseball wasn’t a brand to brush off. Plus, compared to other corporate pursuits, this project seemed unusually laid back. When Silva and Dietrich agreed to consult, the league gave them no non-disclosure agreements or legalese, just a CD containing player-tracking data from a game earlier that year — Aug. 2, 2011: Kansas City Royals 8, Baltimore Orioles 2. That, Dietrich would say, was the day “Statcast actually started.”
That data set spawned years of research, testing and technological innovation. Two Brazilians who barely understood baseball created a data engine — code name “black box,” because no one else knew how it worked — upon which would be built the structural bones of Statcast, the tracking system that turbo-charged another wave of the sabermetric revolution.
It’s been 10 years since a primitive version of Statcast debuted at the 2014 Home Run Derby. The “Statcast era” has been one of profound change. New stats have been developed and popularized as a result, and the modern baseball vernacular has swelled, with phrases like exit velocity and launch angle entering common parlance. The firehose of data has swelled analytics staffs, transformed scouting and player development, and punctured cherished beliefs. (You thought you knew how power was produced? Think again.) Statcast is everywhere — produced and promoted by the league — but not for everyone. It enthralls analytically inclined fans and irks others.
Billions of data points have been distilled into insights that have made baseball a smarter game. But a better one? That’s up for debate.
“Something of the old school feels lost,” Cubs pitcher Drew Smyly said.
“The old-school game is the past,” countered Mets designated hitter J.D. Martinez. “We can’t play this game like that anymore.”
Ten years before the email, on a Saturday night in Oakland, Derek Jeter ranged across the diamond to field an errant relay throw and flipped the ball to catcher Jorge Posada in time to tag Jeremy Giambi and preserve the New York Yankees’ lead in Game 3 of the American League Division Series. At MLB’s Park Avenue offices the next morning, debate raged. What if Paul O’Neill had been in right field instead of Shane Spencer? What if Spencer’s throw had hit either cut-off man? What if A’s manager Art Howe had pinch-run Eric Byrnes for Giambi? Where had Jeter come from?
And why, asked one league executive, can’t we measure all of that?
The seed for the Statcast project was planted.
Statcast’s red and blue circles have become familiar to a large subset of baseball fans.
“We wanted to get into the DNA of what allows plays to happen,” said Cory Schwartz, now MLB’s vice president of data operations. “But before you run, you have to walk. You have to start with the pitch, the origin of the action.”
That part became possible in the late 2000s when PITCHf/x — a system of cameras tracking pitch velocity and movement — was installed in each big-league ballpark, inundating clubs with data and ultimately spurring a pitching revolution. Conversation inside the former Oreo cookie factory in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood that served as MLBAM headquarters turned to the next frontier: a full-field tracking system.
“The holy grail has always been if you know where the players were,” said Joe Inzerillo, who led MLB’s multimedia efforts at the time. “Knowing where the ball is in baseball is great. But knowing where the players are and where the ball is unlocks all of this other data you can start to look at.”
Having edited video for the Chicago White Sox in the 1980s, Inzerillo understood the value of automating work that was usually being done manually by clubs, like creating spray charts to position fielders and craft pitching plans. But the technology to do so was in a nascent stage. Sportvision, which ran PITCHf/x, had an expensive camera array that yielded unreliable results. European soccer clubs were using various machine vision setups, but in baseball the ratio between the size of the playing surface, the players and the ball made it challenging to capture minute movements accurately.
“We didn’t want to do something people would historically look at and say, ‘Oh my God. What were they thinking?’” said Inzerillo, now an executive vice president and chief product and technology officer at SiriusXM. “If we couldn’t measure it accurately, if it wasn’t scientific, we didn’t want to put it out.”
The solution for Statcast came from a pairing of two European companies. The Swedish company Hego had a 4K camera setup that would provide a stereoscopic view of the field. (When it was clear the project was too large for Hego’s two-person operation, Hego merged with graphics giant Chyron.) Trackman, a Danish golf company that broke into baseball with a ball-tracking device engineered by a man who’d used radar to track missiles, agreed to assemble a large array of radar panels for each stadium.
In 2013, Salt River Stadium in Scottsdale Ariz., was the testing ground for the next generation of baseball tech: Sportvision and ChyronHego cameras alongside Trackman radar. The Statcast system would need to work day or night, in weather conditions ranging from downpour to sun glare to dense fog. Silva and Dietrich installed extra equipment to validate the vendors’ output. They found that Sportvision’s results were rife with errors because it smoothed curves and made assumptions for missing data.
ChyronHego amassed a war chest of data and presented it to MLB executives in New York. They built a baseball diamond in a spreadsheet and showed how, when they input a line of data, players appeared, in position, on the screen. “At that moment,” former Hego CEO Kevin Prince said, “baseball management rocked back on their chairs and said: F— me.”
MLB had its holy grail: radar to track the ball, cameras to track players.
As data began to trickle in during Statcast’s experimental stage, then-MLBAM CEO Bob Bowman and his staff began writing down everything that could be quantified in a single baseball play. They listed more than 100 ideas. They then whittled it to about 20 “golden” metrics that would comprise Phase One of the public Statcast rollout, everything from exit velocity to sprint speed to secondary leads to fielder range.
“So much of baseball record-keeping is (an) accounting of what happened,” Schwartz said. “So and so hit 30 home runs or had 200 strikeouts. That’s backwards looking. But skills analysis enables you to look forward and look at whose skills will potentially lead to better results. That’s what baseball scouts and talent evaluators have been trying to do since before our dads were here.”
Statcast would measure process — evaluating a player’s skills with more accuracy than the eye test.
Constructing each metric took careful consideration, plus a little bit of a sniff test. The initial leader for catcher pop time — how long it takes a catcher to receive a pitch and get it to second base — was Los Angeles Angels backup Hank Conger. “No offense to Hank Conger,” Schwartz said. “We knew that wasn’t right.” MLBAM intern Ezra Wise, now an analyst for the Minnesota Twins, was dispatched to watch Conger. Wise learned Conger short-hopped most throws, and the pop-time “stopwatch” halted as soon as the ball hit any object, grass or glove. Once the metric was adjusted to measure the throw to the center of second base, Conger slid to the bottom of the leaderboard and J.T. Realmuto popped to the top.
Statcast had no name when it was introduced by Bowman at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in March 2014. The system was in alpha testing that season, active in just three stadiums — Citi Field in New York, Miller Park in Milwaukee and Target Field in Minneapolis. It was also installed in Kansas City and San Francisco ahead of the 2014 World Series. In Game 7, Giants second baseman Joe Panik made a diving stop and turned a game-defining double play. Statcast not only concluded that Panik had a slightly negative reaction time — he was moving toward the ball’s eventual path 10 feet before it met Eric Hosmer’s bat — but that Hosmer would have been safe if he hadn’t slid into first base.
By 2015, with the Trackman-ChyronHego set up in all 30 MLB ballparks, Statcast insights began infiltrating broadcasts and game coverage, where data like launch angle could be used to explain a home run explosion during that season’s second half. Yet the data wasn’t available anywhere fans could find it until MLB contacted Daren Willman, a software architect at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office in Houston. Willman had created a site called Baseball Savant that provided pitcher matchups, leaderboards an…