Podcast: White Sox Big Data Problem

James Fegan gets more under the hood about his reporting and Brian Bannister's recent interview discussing extending pitchers. 

And here's a link to the article being referenced. There's a paywall, but you can sign up for like, $2 a month and get access. It's definitely worth it. 

White Sox seek a more perfect union

Fegan is on the score discussing it right now, started around 12:30 for those with the audacy app

Fegan’s not just a talented writer, he’s a good listen as well. Good sense of humour. 

7 minutes ago, Lyle Moooton said:

Fegan’s not just a talented writer, he’s a good listen as well. Good sense of humour. 

Honestly the Sox are lucky to have him both as a lifelong fan And a writer, and I hope some other offer doesn’t land in his lap to take him away(although I would be happy for him advancing his career)

One bonus "like" for utilizing the criminally-underappreciated word haranguing today...

8 minutes ago, caulfield12 said:

One bonus "like" for utilizing the criminally-underappreciated word haranguing today...

Steve Stone would be proud

24 minutes ago, DoUEvenShift said:

Steve Stone would be proud

And then he would quickly go back to trolling Schriffen.

Just finished listening to the Soxmachine podcast. It’s a really good listen. 

Banninster openly acknowledging they have no chance to keep elite talents like Crochet or Cease long-term is pretty bleak.

1 hour ago, maxjusttyped said:

Banninster openly acknowledging they have no chance to keep elite talents like Crochet or Cease long-term is pretty bleak.

Until further notice or JR's demise...we are the defacto farm or feeder team for the rest of baseball.

Used to be the Pirates or Marlins.

1 hour ago, caulfield12 said:

Until further notice or JR's demise...we are the defacto farm or feeder team for the rest of baseball.

Used to be the Pirates or Marlins.

Yup. I've stopped posting on here because constant doomerism & negativity isn't good for anyone. But what's the point of getting emotionally invested in any of the Sox current prospects if you know they'll be gone in 4-5 years if they become stars.

1 hour ago, maxjusttyped said:

Yup. I've stopped posting on here because constant doomerism & negativity isn't good for anyone. But what's the point of getting emotionally invested in any of the Sox current prospects if you know they'll be gone in 4-5 years if they become stars.

Well, the irony is that Hahn managed to extend most of the Sox young players that were expected to become stars.  The problem was that they didn’t all become stars due to injuries or other factors, or perhaps they just weren’t that good to begin with.

However, per Getz’s recent comments, it sounds like the Sox won’t be using Hahn’s strategy of locking up young players until they truly prove themselves to be high quality players.  But if you wait until young players prove themselves to be really good, are they still going to sign team-friendly extensions at that point or just wait until they hit free agency?

18 minutes ago, WhiteSox2023 said:

Well, the irony is that Hahn managed to extend most of the Sox young players that were expected to become stars.  The problem was that they didn’t all become stars due to injuries or other factors, or perhaps they just weren’t that good to begin with.

However, per Getz’s recent comments, it sounds like the Sox won’t be using Hahn’s strategy of locking up young players until they truly prove themselves to be high quality players.  But if you wait until young players prove themselves to be really good, are they still going to sign team-friendly extensions at that point or just wait until they hit free agency?

No way...the agents will advise them to wait for FA once they make it to arbitration since the White Sox will likely expect hometown discounts again.  The only way is if the team's at least halfway competitive again.

Not signing pitchers to long terms deal isn't a huge deal for me, as I think you should ride them in their early years and then let them leave. You just constantly need guys to take their place when the time comes. I'm more interested in making any positional guys who become very good stick around. First we have to make a few of them become very good.

5 hours ago, caulfield12 said:

Until further notice or JR's demise...we are the defacto farm or feeder team for the rest of baseball.

Used to be the Pirates or Marlins.

I interpret those comments more as “we’re going to try to be Cleveland.”

6 hours ago, maxjusttyped said:

Banninster openly acknowledging they have no chance to keep elite talents like Crochet or Cease long-term is pretty bleak.

This isn’t really new under Jerry…unfortunately we need him to before we ever shop at the high end of the free agent market, even moreso on the pitching side of things.

4 hours ago, maxjusttyped said:

Yup. I've stopped posting on here because constant doomerism & negativity isn't good for anyone. But what's the point of getting emotionally invested in any of the Sox current prospects if you know they'll be gone in 4-5 years if they become stars.

Got to hope for extensions that buy back a year or two of free agent.  It sucks to operate this way, especially since our only two elite prospects are pitchers, but Jerry is always going to Jerry.

1 hour ago, PaleAleSox said:

Not signing pitchers to long terms deal isn't a huge deal for me, as I think you should ride them in their early years and then let them leave. You just constantly need guys to take their place when the time comes. I'm more interested in making any positional guys who become very good stick around. First we have to make a few of them become very good.

At some point you need to plant your flag with a staff.  Doesn’t mean all five have to stay for their entire career but you gotta have someone be the ace/1/leader, and some guys that stay past their arb days.  There aren’t many teams that are able to stay competitive with a constantly changing starting staff, unless they have a really damn good offense to help them out.  And even then, those teams tend to run into a buzz saw in the playoffs 

I just don’t agree with their idea that pitching is something to use up and dispose of as soon as you need to invest more into it

I'll listen to this this tonight but the headline is sending me. To where? I'm not sure. I think society has a "big data" problem. I have a "big data" problem. It's not interesting. I keep hoping it might be, but it never is. I think it would be interesting if I could have access to everyone's google maps data. But I don't. There are probably a few interesting (as in novel, recent, not publicly available) "big" baseball sets but I sort of think they only apply to pitching. Like, teams definitely have the x,y,z coordinate positions of millions of pitches and the batter's response to it, the spin rate, the count, a bunch of other columns. You could definitely take advantage of that to learn something about pitch sequencing...but then how do you translate it into practice?

Some egghead tells the coaching staff what she's found, the coach relays it to the player, and the player perfectly absorbs the information and nothing gets lost in translation? what if Jairo has some questions, is Ethan Katz going to be able to explain it? And when he can't, don't the coach-player just default to whatever they were doing before? It might be too big to be practical or useful in any way. Maybe it's useful solely on the organizational level when it comes to evaluating talent -- but again you still have to communicate your findings to a bunch of people who might not be math savvy. And what if you made a mistake in your weights matrix and Chris Getz doesn't remember that much from his linear algebra course and then your terrible, wrong ideas get made real and hurt the team? Maybe it's useful for distilling players' tendencies, but if you abstract too much is it even useful anymore? "That guy throws a bunch of pitches that are hard to hit, be mindful up there". 

14 minutes ago, nrockway said:

I'll listen to this this tonight but the headline is sending me. To where? I'm not sure. I think society has a "big data" problem. I have a "big data" problem. It's not interesting. I keep hoping it might be, but it never is. I think it would be interesting if I could have access to everyone's google maps data. But I don't. There are probably a few interesting (as in novel, recent, not publicly available) "big" baseball sets but I sort of think they only apply to pitching. Like, teams definitely have the x,y,z coordinate positions of millions of pitches and the batter's response to it, the spin rate, the count, a bunch of other columns. You could definitely take advantage of that to learn something about pitch sequencing...but then how do you translate it into practice?

Some egghead tells the coaching staff what she's found, the coach relays it to the player, and the player perfectly absorbs the information and nothing gets lost in translation? what if Jairo has some questions, is Ethan Katz going to be able to explain it? And when he can't, don't the coach-player just default to whatever they were doing before? It might be too big to be practical or useful in any way. Maybe it's useful solely on the organizational level when it comes to evaluating talent -- but again you still have to communicate your findings to a bunch of people who might not be math savvy. And what if you made a mistake in your weights matrix and Chris Getz doesn't remember that much from his linear algebra course and then your terrible, wrong ideas get made real and hurt the team? Maybe it's useful for distilling players' tendencies, but if you abstract too much is it even useful anymore? "That guy throws a bunch of pitches that are hard to hit, be mindful up there". 

I'm not the best person to explain any of this. I would think that any player interested in becoming a better player has more than a passing acquaintance with pitching labs and heat maps. Nobody has to worry about Chris Getz carrying the 3. Data's run, and it's in a readable format. Just like any job. If you're going to advance beyond carrying things and stacking them somewhere, you have to know how to create and use spread sheets, presentation programs, converting a picture to a PDF, etc. 

20 minutes ago, nrockway said:

I'll listen to this this tonight but the headline is sending me. To where? I'm not sure. I think society has a "big data" problem. I have a "big data" problem. It's not interesting. I keep hoping it might be, but it never is. I think it would be interesting if I could have access to everyone's google maps data. But I don't. There are probably a few interesting (as in novel, recent, not publicly available) "big" baseball sets but I sort of think they only apply to pitching. Like, teams definitely have the x,y,z coordinate positions of millions of pitches and the batter's response to it, the spin rate, the count, a bunch of other columns. You could definitely take advantage of that to learn something about pitch sequencing...but then how do you translate it into practice?

Some egghead tells the coaching staff what she's found, the coach relays it to the player, and the player perfectly absorbs the information and nothing gets lost in translation? what if Jairo has some questions, is Ethan Katz going to be able to explain it? And when he can't, don't the coach-player just default to whatever they were doing before? It might be too big to be practical or useful in any way. Maybe it's useful solely on the organizational level when it comes to evaluating talent -- but again you still have to communicate your findings to a bunch of people who might not be math savvy. And what if you made a mistake in your weights matrix and Chris Getz doesn't remember that much from his linear algebra course and then your terrible, wrong ideas get made real and hurt the team? Maybe it's useful for distilling players' tendencies, but if you abstract too much is it even useful anymore? "That guy throws a bunch of pitches that are hard to hit, be mindful up there". 

Being baseball Luddites is exactly what got the White Sox into this mess.

11 minutes ago, WestEddy said:

I'm not the best person to explain any of this. I would think that any player interested in becoming a better player has more than a passing acquaintance with pitching labs and heat maps. Nobody has to worry about Chris Getz carrying the 3. Data's run, and it's in a readable format. Just like any job. If you're going to advance beyond carrying things and stacking them somewhere, you have to know how to create and use spread sheets, presentation programs, converting a picture to a PDF, etc. 

My thinking is that the sort of math and programming background required to do anything interesting with "big data" specifically is outside the budget and scope of any professional sports team. Like, if you have that skillset, some quantitative trading firm is paying you a lot more than even the Dodgers will. And you probably aren't making slideshows and giving presentations except to other nerds. You would have to hire an entire department of well-paid employees to see any kind of result in a timely manner. at least two phd statisticians, a sql developer, and a fourth person who knows how to talk to people and probably has a minor in physical education. You invest all that and will it even help? The proof is sort of in the pudding when it comes to finance, there's a track record, there's a body of literature, but that doesn't exist for professional sports that I am aware of. It could be groundbreaking.

Also I'm looking at the Dodgers and Rays staff directory of people who work on data analysis, and they're just some dudes. I'm trying to make the point that data analysis and big data analysis are different. The costs are certainly different. You get no argument from me if the Sox just hire some dude to do regular ol data analysis and cook up some hotspot maps. But all that really is is having an enterprise subscription to Statcast and having some person who can, like you say, turn it into a pdf and email it out lol. Boring to me.

25 minutes ago, southsider2k5 said:

Being baseball Luddites is exactly what got the White Sox into this mess.

it's not being a Luddite, it's a question of "does it even matter if no one can interpret it". or what's the point of a theory with no practical value? lots, I think, just maybe not in this context. or maybe it is. 

5 minutes ago, nrockway said:

 

it's not being a Luddite, it's a question of "does it even matter if no one can interpret it". or what's the point of a theory with no practical value? lots, I think, just maybe not in this context. or maybe it is. 

If the assumption is that the people who are creating this data are too stupid to understand it, that's a place I can't go.