Sunday Math

The use of data analysis in the world of baseball was popularized in Moneyball, first the book, then the movie. Now the geeks are taking over the front offices in professional football (link requires SI subscription).

Now nearly every team in the NFL has an analytics group, though most are as forthcoming as the CIA regarding the work these employees perform. [snip]

Among those teams riding the stats wave are the Ravens, who announced in August that they'd hired a former NBA statistical consultant with degrees from Yale and Carnegie Mellon to lead their new analytics department. They're just now catching up to opponents like the Patriots, and the 49ers, who in 2001 lured Stanford M.B.A. Paraag Marathe from his consulting job at Bain & Co. to lead their analytics department.

It's nice to know that the San Francisco 49ers are second to none in the analytics arms race:

"There's one team right now that is applying all of this better than everyone else, and that is San Francisco," says [Jaguars executive Tony] Khan. He points to one 49ers play in Week 10, against the Rams: San Francisco faced fourth-and-one at St. Louis's 21-yard line, down 10 in the fourth quarter. The Niners went for it, converted and scored a touchdown two plays later. The game ended in a 24-24 tie. "Most people disagreed with that," says Khan. "But I've seen the chart they use. And certainly guys like [pioneering football statistician] Brian Burke agreed with what they did."

Although the article is about football, the writer throws some love at the baseball Giants:

Throughout professional sports, forward-thinking teams are engaged in an arms race for new technology that can lend them any advantage. The most progressive organizations have quietly begun incorporating video technology into their analysis: Fieldf/x, which tracks players' movements on the baseball field, has been a secret weapon for the world champion San Francisco Giants; and 10 NBA teams use SportVU, which can identify opposing teams' plays based on movements. NFL teams are starting to use similar technology: This year the Falcons, Giants and Jaguars began using GPS tracking technology on their players during practices. (The league prohibits it during games.)

Note: The local basketball team, the Golden State Warriors, uses video-capture technology from Sportvu (aka Stats LLC). Perhaps Titletown will be here sooner than we thought. © 2012 Stephen Yuen

Rarer Than Halley's Comet

The Giants beat the Cardinals today, 7-1, to even the National League Championship Series at one game apiece. Ryan Vogelsong had the best outing for a Giants pitcher this postseason by handcuffing the Cards for seven innings before turning over the ball to the bullpen.

An event that could have future repercussions was the first inning hard slide into second base by outfielder Matt Holliday, injuring (but x-rays showed not severely) Giants second baseman Marco Scutaro. Possibly inspired by the blow to their teammate, the Giants' bats erupted and had the game in hand, 5-1, by the fourth inning.

To this humble observer the most remarkable event was a statistical rarity [bold added]:

Vogelsong doubled in the sixth to become the first Giants pitcher to get a postseason extra-base hit since Jack Bentley homered in the 1924 World Series.

After 1924 the New York Giants played in five World Series. Since moving to San Francisco, the Giants have played postseason baseball ten times, making it to the World Series on four occasions. Through those 88 years of playoffs, not one Giants pitcher had a double, triple, or home run until tonight.

One of the reasons that we love baseball: it has an unrivaled library of statistics that can tell us that what we're looking at hasn't been seen or done for nearly a century (or, in the Cubs' case, for over a century). Perhaps we'll see more such moments in the weeks ahead.