Pittsburgh Pirates manager Clint Hurdle was old school and stubborn. But after
twenty straight losing seasons and his job on the line, he was ready to try
anything. So when he met with GM Neal Huntington in October 2012, they decided
to discard everything they knew about the game and instead take on drastic "big
data" strategies.
Going well beyond the number-crunching of Moneyball, which used statistics found
on the back of baseball cards to identify market inefficiencies, the data the
Pirates employed was not easily observable. They collected millions of data
points on pitches and balls in play, creating a tome of reports that revealed
key