In a suburban batting cage, two 10-year-olds engage in friendly bragging about their exit velocities as they begin their practice. Just a short distance down the street, a 14-year-old lies within an MRI tube, silently praying for good news as he discovers the perfect blend of extension and ride on his fastball. Thousands of miles to the south, a scout intently watches 16-year-olds play, running through a mental checklist of biomechanical markers that could potentially shape the next great Latin star. Back in the north, a 19-year-old happily accepts his free sleep and wellness tracking device from his new team, ready to closely monitor his biometrics.

Data's Dominance in Baseball

Data has permeated every aspect of baseball. Gone are the days when teams had to struggle just to obtain their numbers. Keith Law of The Athletic recalls his time in the Toronto Blue Jays' front office in the early 2000s, stating, "I was the stats department. But the joke was everything fit on one laptop. It was not comparable to what people are doing today. It was a lot of scraping data. Acquiring data was such a huge part of the job. There was less time for what you really call analysis. … So much of it was getting the data and getting it into a usable form. Data was not very clean."Now, every team has access to data on various aspects, from pulses to pull rates. The data has won, and it plays a crucial role in every team's decision-making process. However, the question remains: "Is data dead?" An executive at baseball's Winter Meetings poses this very question. "Everyone's got it. Is there really a competitive advantage in it anymore?"Baseball's stat arm continues to produce advanced statistics that are available to the public, with more sophisticated numbers accessible to each team. As teams all look at the same numbers through a centralized system, the focus shifts to how they utilize those numbers rather than just acquiring the data.

The Data and Analytics Industry

The data and analytics industry has witnessed some consolidation in recent years. Zelus Analytics, a freelance analytics department founded by former Dodgers research and development head Douglas Fearing, was acquired by Teamworks, a company that provides teams with an operating system. The new combined company has no limitations on the number of baseball teams it can work with, and more than half of baseball teams have a relationship with either side of the company. In theory, every team in baseball could potentially use the same company to manage their data pipelines.Esteban Navarro Garaiz, senior technical product manager for Zelus, explains how their services are utilized by baseball teams. "We work with all kinds of R&D sizes and maturity. Some see us as a complement to their own internal systems, or as a check, or as a blended projection. … But we also have R&D teams that rely on our products for their day-to-day and game strategy. As a company working with multiple teams, we can't build custom things for each team, that would not be feasible, so a lot of our products are tailored to team needs so that everyone can use them."

Biomechanical Data and Its Implications

This spring, multiple sources in analytics departments expressed some concerns about the precision of Hawk-Eye's biomechanical data, specifically in the pelvis area, compared to that offered by Kinatrax, a tracking company with more experience in baseball. However, those concerns are now alleviated as Sony, Hawk-Eye's parent company, acquired Kinatrax in October. This acquisition could potentially lead to all teams having access to the same biomechanical data at some point.Front office executives now face a different challenge than in the early 2000s. Instead of focusing solely on acquiring data feeds, they need to invest in maximizing the use of that data. When interviewing potential job applicants, they look for certain qualities. Mariners vice president and assistant general manager Andy McKay emphasizes empathy, stating, "They're still human beings. That's a human being you're putting a 45 on. Every single thing these players are doing is tracked and cataloged, they're evaluated on it, it's stored forever, they can't hide from it, and not a human being in the world would want to work that way. Empathy. My ability to sit in your shoes and see the world from your lens, that's hard to do. Empathy is a big one."Newly hired Marlins director of pitching Bill Hezel highlights the importance of communication skills. "The thing that is maybe the most valuable is the most old-school thing — the coach's ability to communicate with the player and develop a relationship with the player. The knowledge is becoming more ubiquitous. Every team has tech, so the big separator is your ability to communicate that information to the athlete in a way that is not just digestible, but they can actually take action and leverage that information."

Soft Skills in Hiring

Brewers manager Pat Murphy shares his perspective on hiring. "When I'm interviewing a guy and he mentions the word loyalty more than once, he's out. That's a given. If they mention work ethic. It's a given, it's a life work. I'm trying to look for something deeper. Be authentic. You go in humble, and understand that someone is going to take a chance on you … that it's not about you. This isn't about rocket science, it's about people."Reds international cross-checker Phillip Stringer looks for high-energy people who are curious and don't take themselves too seriously. "I've found, working with the Royals, the Dodgers and now the Reds, that people that are willing to give of themselves and not necessarily expect you to give them all of the influence and the power to make decisions in the department on day one, and approach their job with humility. That goes a long way. Being flexible and patient can take you a long way."Law also emphasizes the importance of being open-minded during his time in a front office. "I wanted people who were open, open-minded. I had to change my mindset too. I came in as a stats guy with no scouting background and pretty quickly realized that there was a whole world that I didn't understand at all. I can reject it, or I can learn about it. I took my own path a little bit. They took a lot of time to talk to me. They wanted to ask questions, but they would answer my questions."

Uncovering New Data Sources

An example of uncovering new data sources is the work of Dylan Drummey, whom the Cubs just hired to handle computer vision projects. With the help of @camarcano, they aimed to classify whether a catcher had one knee down or no knees down using YOLO for pose point data and created a 50/50 OKD-NOKD dataset to train a classifier. Frame-by-frame accuracy during training was approximately 80%.Jimmy Buffi of ReBoot is excited about one-camera marker-less motion capture, which would provide teams with more biomechanical data on players in remote locations or those not in front of Kinetrax or Hawk-Eye cameras. There are still ways to discover new data sources and gain a competitive edge.

The Future of Data in Baseball

Every team still needs to participate in the ongoing data race. There may be more data streams yet to be uncovered. However, the numbers business is heading towards a certain level of maturity. As teams seek a new advantage, they might consider soft skills like humility and empathy or focus on the processes that transform data into actions on the field, just as much as the specific data itself. Increasingly, everyone is looking at the same numbers.(Photo of Josiah Gray: Jess Rapfogel / Getty Images)