By the time Moneyball was adapted for the screen, the sport had already moved on to next-level analytics, a steady stream of data that keeps bending around new corners. One of this year’s global improvements, showcased recently at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, will be the exceptionally close reading of fielders’ body movements while they make plays, but each “nation,” each team, has its own mechanism for measuring every aspect of the game. From Evan Drellich’s Houston Chronicle article about “Ground Control,” the database that GM Jeff Luhnow is hoping will help reverse the fortunes of the grounded Houston Astros:
“One of Luhnow’s favorite songs is David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity,’ with the lyrics, ‘This is ground control to Major Tom.’ He happens to be a big Bowie fan and joked that the tune should play every time the site is accessed.
‘That was during my formative years,’ Luhnow said of his affinity for Bowie.
The project itself is permanently in a formative state. There are constantly new features and abilities to add, and what makes Ground Control so powerful is its customizability.
Teams don’t have to build their own databases. When Luhnow arrived, the club used a popular system sold by Bloomberg Sports, and it kept using Bloomberg while Ground Control was built.
Priority No. 1 for the club was getting Ground Control up in time for that year’s amateur draft. Just like this year and 2013, the Astros had the first overall pick in 2012.
By the end of 2012, or maybe early 2013, Ground Control had reached a fully functional state, although that’s a disingenuous characterization considering it’s perpetually in flux.
‘The analytical engine is separate from the interface, so there was a lot of work going on developing the database and developing the interface,’ Luhnow said. ‘The database you have to build right away, because you can’t analyze without having the data in the right format. The priorities were the database first, then the analytical engine, and the interface was a third priority.'”
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“And the stars look very different today”: