Why Should A Professional Baseball Team Try Out Ballparkview?

The Case for Implementing This Technology in Your Organization

By: Jim O’Flanagan

Editor’s Note: This article is one of a multi-part series. It is syndicated from OAPSIE.com. Find the series homepage at http://ballparkview.com 

An Edge. A leg up. A lead. Secret Sauce. A head start. The eye of the tiger. The thrill of the fight.

No matter the euphemism we choose, they all mean the same thing in a business setting.

Why would a team want to employ Pennantview and Ballparkview?

To gain an advantage over their free market competitors! More runs! more wins! A shot at the Pennant (hence the name, Pennantview.

We believe these great things and more await an enterprising professional baseball team that employs Pennantview. That team will have a material advantage compared to their peers in the following areas:

• Identifying undervalued players
• Player injuries. There will be a measurable decrease in the number of player injuries due to increased knowledge of player’s bodies.
• Pricing players contracts
• Sabermetrics led the way in developing the above results.

Managers will have more information to make great baseball decisions. This includes things like using the right pitcher on the right day, or whether to play the left fielder deep or shallow.

A Little History

So let’s get down to discussing why a professional baseball team would use Ballparview. In the introductory article to this series, we spoke about the baseball history that is pertinent to Ballparkview.

About 50 years ago, people began to think of actions on a baseball field more as financial derivatives rather than as a baseball box score. They sliced and diced teams, players, seasons, and careers into finer and more precisely priced financial derivatives. WAR is statistically similar to the volatility of a stock or bond.

That same type of derivative logic is applied to baseball by Sabermetricians.

About 25 years ago, professional baseball teams began employing these methods at the highest levels of their organizations. A few years after Moneyball (the book) was released, everyone seemed to have a serious Baseball R&D department.

The Situation Today

Today, Professional Baseball is very uneven financially. During the 2022 season, approximately $222 million separated the Orioles and the Dodgers in team payroll. Put another way, the Dodgers spent about 6.5 times the money that Baltimore did.

This is an old argument, but it’s a good one. The facts remain the same as they were in the 1990s, when Sabermetrics was first taking hold.

The real determining factor in baseball team performance is run differential (team runs scored - team runs allowed). In 2022 the Dodgers were +331, the Orioles -14. In that light, the Dodgers got exactly what they paid for. That is the systemic part! There is no obvious way for Baltimore to spend 2X on payroll, let alone 6.5X. Their market and the labor agreement don’t support it.

For their part, Baltimore exceeded expectations last year, because the had a bottom level payroll but finished in the middle of the pack. The fact remains they now have to outperform expectations every year given the current distribution of probability and statistics technology. The source of this outperformance requirement is their lower payroll.

Statistics itself and the law of large numbers do not support that happening with consistency. To consistently make that jump to division contention every year, something new is needed.

Computation Helps Close The Gap

This gap is systemic in baseball. The labor agreement’s rules on division of revenue is still heavily weighted towards clubs with big markets and even bigger local revenues.

In the last generation the talent in the game of baseball has gotten more evenly distributed. This includes players on the field and R&D talent in the front office.

This cannot be avoided with baseball’s revenue sharing agreement. Teams keep the lion’s share of their locally generated revenue, which is different from most other professional sports leagues.

Additionally, absent a fundamental shift in the economics of the game, and revenue sharing, this Gap will always exist. The only difference between the hi and low teams, then, is their successful application of technology compared to their competitors.

A professional baseball team should try out Ballparkview because:

• Pennantview will have a direct impact on team performance. This tool is the guide.
• Your team will have fewer injuries.
• Your team will have higher likelihood to outperform
• It will help them win more games.
• More runs and wins gives your team a shot at the post season.
• There will be an increase in team revenue; wins are correlated with team revenue.
• It is an asymmetric way to gain a technology advantage
• It is a step change in technology

#Ballparkview and #Pennantview get implemented, your team takes the Pennant and the Series!

The team's front office and GM get mad R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

This is hyperbole, perhaps, but not totally off the base.

Conclusion

In the introduction we also discussed that after more than 30 years of spread, probability and statistics technology has saturated the professional baseball market.

It no longer provides an Edge. Ballparkview helps get it back. Just as cool and as slick as U2's The Edge!

Wanna try something new? Does Sir Isaac Newton know baseball? Let's find out!

Postscript

Don't forget to check out our Poster Presentation Displayed at SABR 51 in Chicago, Illinois!

Thank you for reading, attending, following along, and considering this technology package for your organization. We sincerely appreciate it.

#pennantview #ballparkview #physics #generativeai #engineering #projectmanagement #softwaredevelopment #kindness