Ben Lindbergh

Travis Sawchik

Two New York Times-bestselling authors chronicle the next revolution in baseball: the data-driven quest to build better players Fifteen years after Michael Lewis brought the Oakland A's' groundbreaking team-building strategies to light in Moneyball, every team takes a data-driven approach to evaluating players, and the league's smarter front offices no longer have an edge. As Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik reveal in The MVP Machine, instead of out-drafting, out-signing, and out-trading rivals, baseball's best minds have turned to out-developing opponents, eking extra runs out of athletes who were seen as finished products. Lindbergh and Sawchik take us inside the transformation of former role players into home-run kings, and show how washed-up pitchers have emerged as aces. The MVP Machine charts the future of a sport and offers a lesson for any business: success comes from developing the people already working for you, rather than from bringing in star performers from elsewhere.

How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players

The MVP Machine

Pittsburgh Pirates manager Clint Hurdle was old school and stubborn. But after twenty straight losing seasons, his job on the line, and knowing the small-market Pirates had few resources to spend on quick fixes, he was ready to try anything. So when he met with GM Neal Huntington in October 2012, they decided to discard much of what they knew about the game and instead adopt drastic "big data" strategies. Going well beyond the infancy of number-crunching that was featured in Moneyball, the data the Pirates employed was not easily observable and it was not found on the back of baseball cards. They collected millions of data points on pitches and balls in play, creating a tome of reports that revealed key insights for how to win more games without spending a dime. They discovered that pitchers could dramatically improve by adding a new pitch, that an aggressive adoption of defensive shifts could turn more batted balls into outs, and that a catcher's most valuable skill was hidden. But maximizing this data also required a human element. The old school and new school camps had to work together, not against each other. Hurdle had to convince the Pirates' clubhouse to embrace these unconventional, yet groundbreaking methods. Under his leadership a culture of collaboration and creativity flourished as he successfully blended whiz kid analysts with graybeard coaches. This symbiotic teamwork was unique to the sport, and it helped the Pirates reveal hidden value from the avalanche of data pouring into the game. All this led to the end of the longest consecutive run of losing seasons in North American pro sports history. The Pirates' 2013 season is the perfect lens for examining baseball's burgeoning big-data movement. InBig Data Baseball award-winning journalist Travis Sawchik uses flawless reporting to take you behind-the-scenes to reveal a game-changing book of miracles and math.

Travis Sawchik

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