Hail Caesar!! I can't imagine the computer power need to get all these historical columns and rows and databases and informational reports  functioning together, both public and proprietary, but where there is a will, there is a way. 

If they are able to work with the three major sports leagues ( and why not the NHL as a fourth? ) then this company can grow like gangbusters and potentially have a market value in the high millions to low billions. 

https://www.sporttechie.com/lbi-dynasty-mlb-nba-scouting-software-player-contracts/

The Powerhouse Behind MLB Scouting, NBA Player Contracts

Jen Booton January 24, 2018

MELVILLE, N.Y. — In a mid-sized office building in the suburbs of Long Island, a company called LBi Software, with its sports-focused division LBi Dynasty, has been stealthily building scouting software for Major League Baseball since the late 1990s.  

Now, after moving to a shiny new office in November meant to accommodate a growing team of developers (40 of its 56 full-time employees are developers), LBi is setting its sights on expansion.

LBi Dynasty's engineer-heavy team started off developing customizable software systems that for years were used by the league's scouting office. As the impact of the scouting office waned, LBi added the Arizona Diamondbacks, Atlanta Braves, Detroit Tigers, Miami Marlins, Philadelphia Phillies and Toronto Blue Jays to its roster of clients. And soon it hopes to add teams from the NBA. 

Baseball's Moneyballer

LBi Dynasty has done little in the way of marketing since its inception, instead relying on word-of-mouth connections that have largely stemmed from its intimate relationship with the MLB commissioner's office.

A noteworthy ally has been Jay Sartori, who has served as senior director of baseball operations and analytics for the Tigers since he was poached from Apple in 2015. Prior to that, he served for three seasons as the Blue Jays' assistant general manager, where he helped develop the team's analytical database using LBi software. Before that he served for a season as the director of baseball operations at the Washington Nationals, after working for five years as a manager in the labor department at the commissioner's office, where he was first introduced to LBi Dynasty.

Over the past two years at the Tigers, he has helped build out a new central analytics system called Caesar that's powered by LBi Dynasty. While Sartori wouldn't expand on the capabilities of Caesar for competition reasons, he said Caesar, which was implemented in early 2017 and has only been in operation for one full season, forms the technology backbone of the organization, connecting the various divisions of the team and its front office, and making its scouting team more efficient.

"It's our proprietary baseball operations software that's we're really using through all aspects of the organization to support decision making," he said. "The goal at the end of the day is to support every piece of analysis that we do here, for any player evaluation or baseball-related business evaluation."

LBi Dynasty also wouldn't expand much on what it does for individual teams, citing strict compliance contracts that protect their proprietary scouting and player management tools. At its core, however, it builds customizable cloud-based software and apps that help leagues and teams manage a variety of player development and front office operations.

In the late 1990s, LBi started down this path by creating an official scoring system for the MLB. 

A few years later it helped design the league's player management system. Today it helps the commissioner's office manage team rosters and transactions, as well as player contracts across major and minor leagues, and provides tools for both amateur and minor league drafts.

For the clubs themselves, LBi Dynasty can customize each team's app to provide information about player statistics and a host of other information that can help coaches and scouting officials make more informed decisions and aid in player development. It pulls in data from a wide range of third-party sources and complements stats with game video feeds to offer visual context alongside mountains of numerical data. It has even started to pull in video from minor, collegiate and international leagues.

"The latest trend is to get that video at the lowest level possible — even college, or Japanese/Korean baseball," said Keith Hennessy, LBi Dynasty's lead baseball team developer. "As much video as they can find they're willing to put in there to make decisions that are important."

The data feeds and reports LBi Dynasty's software can produce assist with international scouting, amateur scouting and pro-level scouting. They can provide information about individual players or statistics by position, such as catcher game reports, predictions on how a player is expected to progress in any given season, and projected values on what a player is worth.

Teams can analyze injury reports and specific statistics, such as home run counts. Advanced player-searching tools can offer scouts answers to specific queries, such as a list of players who've signed a contract over $100 million.

Altogether, LBi Dynasty's software not only ties together the various divisions of a baseball franchise but also forms detailed player bios that teams can analyze like interactive baseball cards as they make important scouting and player-development decisions. Think of it as a very sophisticated aggregator. 

"The idea of the club apps is to consolidate all the disparities of information the club gathers from different departments and put them into a single unified piece of software," Hennessy said. "Clubs wants as much information as possible, and they're willing to pay to get as granular as possible."

Basketball And Data

More recently, LBi Dynasty has extended some of its services to the NBA. While it doesn't yet serve individual basketball teams, it's helping the league navigate a complicated player management system that touches upon rosters, salary caps and the convoluted world of NBA contracts.  

The basketball league's software can track players and monitor the legalities of a trade to make sure teams are complying with regulations. LBi is hoping this maturing relationship with the NBA will give it an in with certain teams in the same way its relationship with the MLB has evolved over time.

All of this, of course, comes as player-tracking technologies and analytics continue to shape both sports and the industry as a whole. The commissioner's office has been helping the clubs by spearheading its own league-wide analytics initiatives, including the installation of the camera-based Pitch F/X system at every park to track the velocity and spins on pitches and, subsequently, the jointly radar- and camera-powered Statcast system that catalogs just about every motion on the field of play. MLB also became one of the first professional leagues in 2016 to let players wear specific wearables during games.

"I think we're seeing a real explosion in baseball analytics throughout the game," Sartori said. "The amount of data that's available to clubs is now exponentially greater than it was even five years ago. There's been really rapid growth in what teams can do."

The NBA, meanwhile, struck a multimillion-dollar deal with Sportradar and Second Spectrum in 2016 to track and visualize game-day statistics, and while the NBA's collective bargaining agreement for now bans wearables during games, the league has experiment with wearables in the G League and has approved of a limited list of wearables that teams can have players voluntarily use during practice.

In a blog on sports analytics posted last month, MIT graduate Evan Wasch, who now serves as senior vice president of basketball strategy and analytics at the NBA, said that the "biggest story in basketball analytics on the horizon will be the integration of disparate data sources to uncover unique and powerful insights," which is the niche in data aggregation that LBi Dynasty has targeted.  

"Right now, teams and the league office collect and analyze many different data sets — game events, game and player tracking, practice and training, wearables, and injury and medical, just to name a few," he wrote. "Each data set is relevant for one or more set of stakeholders, from general managers to coaches to medical personnel to analytics staffs. But the ability for these data sets to fully speak to each other is still relatively limited, and the opportunity exists to combine them in potentially game-changing ways."

If successful, he said, this would create a data revolution that would potentially "advance basketball competition" and "quality of play."

Rounding out the top three professional sports leagues in the U.S. is the NFL. The league has grown more tech-savvy in recent years with trackers in NFL jerseys and balls and a fresh deal with Amazon.com and Zebra Technologies to better visualize data next season.

LBi Dynasty was tight-lipped about future plans involving other leagues. But a few months ago it initiated a preliminary working relationship with the NFL. It wouldn't comment beyond that, but perhaps it's a sign of what's to come.

Sent from my iPhone

Is the "Perfect Model" always perfect and the pitching guru wars

SMART POWER FOR PITCHERS: SMART POWER TRAINING SYSTEMS FOR PITCHERS

				SMART POWER FOR PITCHERS: SMART POWER TR... The following is a response from Paul Nyman to a post on the internet about over and underload training: The ...
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This was the tail end of one of my exchanges with Paul Nyman @ SETPRO one of the early pioneers in the pitching guru wars. He was pretty good with advanced training methods for hitters as well.

The following is a response from Paul Nyman to a post on the internet about over and underload training:

The Slav,

Words can be very difficult medium for communication. Stress for a marathoner is different than stress for a pitcher.

Stress to me means elevating the level of activity beyond the point of normal activity.

So if a person is normally throwing a baseball at 80 mph, we must find a way to elevate the stress on his body beyond the 80 mph level.

There is both physical and mental stress.

One of the least understood training issues is the need to create explosive "intent".

Without opening a can of worms, tribe999 asked the question of what is a difference in philosophy in between "other programs" and SETPRO's.

One significant difference is my belief that we need to train the intent to throw hard as opposed to following a mechanical sequence.

The way that pitching mechanics is being taught (in general) is by "picture association".

In other words a visual and verbal representation of the pitching process is used to convey the "external" picture (information) of the pitching process.

It is then left for the person doing is picture or reading the words to "internalize" this information into a sequence (motor program) of posture and muscular actions.

The problem with this is that a lot of the important information cannot be or should I say is not being transmitted by many of these pitching programs, pitching.com being one of them.

And it is not because they are intentionally doing this. It's because they just don't know how to create a richer picture (more information that can be used to more effectively create the internal actions necessary).

In short this is a long-winded way of my saying there's a difference between a pitcher being mechanical and having good mechanics (maximizing his potemtial).

I don't subscribe to the principal that if you work on your mechanics "that velocity will come".

Your velocity will not happen unless you make it happen.

If this occurs because of a specific pitching program, that all well and good.

But is not the pitching program that develops your velocity, it is YOU the player that develops the velocity.

The pitching program is/was only a means for you to achieve that.

I guess you might say that I have a more "holistic" approach to developing pitchers.

As opposed to the cure by "prescription" approach.

Anyway, back to the question of stress.

By definition as long as the effort to throw as hard as possible is there, throwing a different weight baseball has the possibility of creating greater stress.

One of the physiological aspects of the body that I don't think is really understood as much as it should by those who wish to improve their ballistic performance i.e. throwing or swinging a baseball bat, is a fact that muscular response is not linear to the force applied.

I see this phenomenon very clearly if you measure the velocity of a player throwing different weighted baseballs.

Many players can throw a 6 ounce baseball as hard (same velocity) as a five ounce baseball. Even though the 6 ounce baseball is 20 percent heavier than a five ounce baseball. This is a great illustration (to me anyways) that this particular player(s) is not trained to their maximum throwing capabilities.

The reason I say this is because with players that I work with who I believe are throwing a very high-level in terms of their potential, there is a noticeable or significant difference in velocity of their throwing a regulation five ounce baseball as compared to a 6 ounce baseball.

The same is true with them throwing a five ounce baseball as compared to a four ounce baseball.

So therefore players inability to throw a 6 ounce baseball almost as hard as a five ounce baseball indicates that there is undeveloped potential primarily in the form of neuromuscular capabilities.

And in fact significant gains can be made in short periods of time due to neuromuscular recruitment as opposed to developing additional muscle strength.

The intent to throw hard, the intent to swing hard is every bit if not more important than the actual building a strength of the muscle itself.

And we continue to "bump heads" with the specificity principal. Especially the higher we attempt to rise in our athletic capabilities.

I believe that longer durations or lower level throwing, and we have to be very careful asked what we mean by lower level, can be beneficial because my belief that prolong stress, assuming its above a certain level, will lead to physical adaptations in the form of increased tissue size (tendons and ligaments in particular).

And we have to be very careful in what is meant by duration and intensity.

But low level throwing will not in itself develop the neural systems to be explosive.

For those people or very involved in trying to understand how the body develops athletic power, there are different classifications for this power.

As example for football the training professional is more concerned with strength-speed development.

This is different than what the baseball trainer is concerned with for a pitcher, that being speed-strength development.

As far as Coop DeRenne's program, I think is a very good and very safe program to use.

I believe the SETPRO program goes beyond what DeRenne's program started (my sales pitch for today).

As far as MLB and college coaching and training philosophy, I agree 100 percent that their primary job is to maintain a player's ability to perform everyday. As opposed to maximizing their daily performance.

When I was in Atlanta at the National Strength and Conditioning Sport Specific Training Seminar for Baseball, the head training person for the Cleveland Indians said that if a player injured himself because he was doing something that the trainer recommended and was not part of the normal training routine for that athlete then the next day he would be out looking for a new job.

Dr. Frank Fultz of the Atlanta Braves related the same story about Chipper Jones. That Chipper Jones have to come to him and that Chipper have to take total responsibility for his decisions before Dr. Fultz would designed a more aggressive training program for Chipper. This training program resulted in Chipper Jones increasing his strength significantly and going from 20 plus homeruns to 50 homeruns the next season.

I have said hundreds of times that if you expect to perform at the highest level you have to accept the risk of this expectation.

But the key point is that it is "managed" risk.

You use sound training principles, something which most baseball people haven't or won't learn about.

Training principles that former "high jumpers" knew about thirty years ago.

Principles that former major league pitchers or s should I say say someone who pitched three innings in the Major Leagues has no idea about.

Slav, I'm sorry, your post was such a good one, good questions and no sarcasm, but I couldn't resist.

Paul Nyman

Theses discussions around a set of "perfect" pitching mechanics came back to me front and center when I heard Mark Prior on MLB/Sirius say that he "cringed" when he heard the term used to describe his mechanics.

https://www.si.com/thecauldron/2016/08/03/mark-prior-chicago-cubs-no-regrets

Given what happened, I still grimace when I think about those people who said I had perfect mechanics. The Kershaws, the Greinkes, the Arrietas — even they have times when their mechanics are off, and they are the best pitchers on the planet. As a pitcher, there are just times when you feel like you can’t sync up; when your sequence is off. That’s a big part of a pitcher’s responsibility: To execute and to find that groove. I never thought my mechanics were perfect. I just thought that I had a solid delivery that suited my body. I threw the way I had been taught; the way I had since I was six years old.

This was Tom House's doing, using words more to sell than to inform, but it is what it is. If I were to apply the term "perfect" to anyone's mechanics, and I would use the word optimal, it would be Nolan Ryan, who threw 95+ from 19 years old to 45 years old at the MLB level, without much injury down time, except his blister problems early in his career, which may have been related to his National Guard duties. Next, would be Tom Seaver. 

We've come full circle in trying to change arm-slots and mechanics around some pre-conceived models, that we almost ruined guys like Jake Arieta, Clayton Kershaw, Madison Bumgarner and others, who were changed, floundered and then insisted on their own that they were going to either succeed or fail by doing it "My Way" like Sinatra.

If it ain't broke, stop trying to break it! - CS

Take Me Out to the Brain Game - SBNation.com

The go-to phrase from Moneyball. Dyktra was going to "stick" future Hall of Famer Steve Carlton in a spring training game, when all the other rookies had stars in their eyes. Classic.

Take Me Out to the Brain Game - SBNation.com:

“Lenny didn’t let his mind screw him up. The physical gifts required to play pro ball were, in some ways, less extraordinary than the mental ones. Only a psychological freak could approach a 100-mph fastball aimed not far from his head with total confidence.”

- Michael Lewis, Moneyball

'via Blog this'

Watch for these sports analytics developments in 2018 | MIT Sloan Sports Analytics

This is another destination on the bucket list. It's a little distant, but for a couple of days, a stat-geek, baseball fans nirvana. I'll see if the wife is up to it after we take in the SABR junket in Pittsburgh this year.  Mrs. TheSlav is a good soldier for wanting to hang out amongst such a nerdy crowd.

http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/articles/watch-for-these-sports-analytics-developments-in-2018/

Watch for these sports analytics developments in 2018

Integrated data sources, an emphasis on communication, and new fan experiences.

By Brian Eastwood  |  December 28, 2017

Why It Matters

For 15 years, sports teams have led the way in using analytics for competitive advantage. Three experts tell us about the discipline's next frontiers.

When most people hear the term "sports analytics," the first thing that comes to mind is "Moneyball" — the 2003 book and 2011 film that detailed use of predictive analytics to evaluate on-field talent and find players with skills or other talents that competitors have overlooked.

Personnel decisions are still important, but increasingly sports analytics is driving business decisions such as improving the fan experience, streamlining concession operations, and increasing revenue. And not all of the work is glamorous enough to make it into a Hollywood blockbuster starring Brad Pitt.

We asked three MIT Sloan alumni to share their thoughts about emerging trends in sports analytics in the upcoming year, as well as the untold stories that don't often make headlines.

Integrate data sources to advance competition
The biggest story in basketball analytics on the horizon will be the integration of disparate data sources to uncover unique and powerful insights.

Right now, teams and the league office collect and analyze many different data sets — game events, game and player tracking, practice and training, wearables, and injury and medical, just to name a few. Each data set is relevant for one or more set of stakeholders, from general managers to coaches to medical personnel to analytics staffs. But the ability for these data sets to fully speak to each other is still relatively limited, and the opportunity exists to combine them in potentially game-changing ways.

This opportunity will rely on technologies like machine learning and computer vision, as well as the ability of analysts to create insightful yet simple data visualizations to influence key decision makers at the teams and league. If successful, this next data revolution will serve to advance basketball competition through player performance improvement, injury prevention and recovery management, and even enhanced teamwork and quality of play.

– Evan Wasch, MBA '11, Senior Vice President, Basketball Strategy and Analytics, NBA

Communicate why data is useful
The biggest story in sports analytics over the next year will be the continued focus on applying data analysis to improving athlete performance and injury prevention. This will be a battle in the NBA as long as wearables are banned in-game, but the increase in data collected during practices and with more robust player tracking cameras will challenge NBA analytics departments with the perpetual question: What do we do with this?

Utilizing wearable technology will of course be most crucial for the NFL, as injury prevention [and] minimization will be the most important factor in keeping the league afloat down the road. Hopefully the significant increase in data collected by NFL teams, and the importance of this data, will encourage franchises to invest more in their analytics departments in the next couple of seasons.

From my perspective, the most important untold story in sports analytics is the communication aspect of the job. You can create any statistic you want — but if you're not able to clearly explain what it is and how it can be utilized to improve the team, then the statistic is inconsequential. A lot of my focus is on ensuring our front office and coaching staff fully understand all of the information we're providing them so they can act appropriately on that information. I've read a lot of excellent research on basketball on free websites like Nylon Calculus and at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, but sometimes these researchers need to take a step back and think about how their work could be communicated to people who think Random Forest is a national park in California. The most successful analytics minds throughout sports are all excellent communicators, and that part of the gig never gets its proper shake.

– Jake Loos, MBA '14, Director of Basketball Analytics and Technology, Phoenix Suns (NBA)

Create a different fan experience

The fan experience is something we're constantly revaluating, especially as we see fan preferences change. Before the 2017 season, we did an $18 million renovation to center field [at Minute Maid Park]. Tal's Hill went away, and we had to make sure we put in something really cool.

We put in a field-facing area that offered a different in-park experience. It's open and it's more social. Fans can stand or lean against the bar and watch the game, rather than sitting in an assigned seat. That area was hugely successful, and part of the success was bringing in a popular local brand, Torchy's Tacos. That area became a focal point for people to eat and drink and watch baseball. Now we are thinking, "What are the other opportunities to create a different experience and appeal to food and beverage preferences of our fans?"

One thing that surprises people is that sports teams are basically small and medium-sized businesses. People think about MLB and NFL as huge leagues, but on the team level, we're run as SMBs. One of my projects is working on our mobile technology, and I'm doing everything from analyzing data to standing at [fan entrance] gates and troubleshooting problems, because there's only so many people in the organization. I'm implementing the strategies that we are putting into place. We're like any other company trying to maximize the use of its resources. It's not all sitting in an office writing pretty algorithms or writing analyses. It's boots on the ground.

– Jay Verrill, MBA '12, Director of Business Strategy and Analytics, Houston Astros (MLB)

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