March 7, 2010

MIT Sloan Summary

If you missed yesterday’s live blogging of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, I’m using this post to aggregate the links and make general comments. The conference doubled in size this year, to 1000 attendees, with 400 on the waiting list. They may try to double it again next year. They moved the conference from MIT to the Boston Convention Center, but there was no loss of hospitality. It was more difficult to meet people, as the larger size was less intimate. My one suggestion for the conference would be to supply power to some rows of tables in the rooms. At this point, most laptops can’t last through an eight-hour conference, and people do want to blog and take notes.

I ran into some old friends from ESPN, and one of them insisted on this picture (click for a larger image):

Baseball Tonight Researchers, Jeff Bennett, Mark Simon, David Pinto

20 Years of Baseball Tonight Researchers. Jeff Bennett, Mark Simon, David Pinto

Over the twenty years of the show, this group led Baseball Tonight research. Jeff took over for me, and Mark followed Jeff. That’s consistency.

Here’s a summary of the conference, with links to each of the posts.

  1. My plan for the conference.
  2. Opening remarks.
  3. Baseball Analytics. This panel was standing room only. The only change I would make here is including Pat Gillick. The former GM is the most vocal anti-analytics GM I know, and it would have caused some tension to bring him on the panel.

    I also edited one thing Dan Duquette said.

    Dan Duquette want to know how to consistently develop great pitching.

    What he really said was that he wanted to develop 20 game winners. You can’t do that without developing a great team, and I assumed he meant 20-game-winner as a short hand for great pitchers. Talking to Sal Baxamusa later, I wasn’t so sure.

    Shiraz Rehman and John Abbamondi give one the feeling that the Diamondbacks and Cardinals are very well run teams. It was also great seeing old friends John Dewan, Tom Tippett and Rob Neyer.

  4. Performance enhancement. I was disappointed to learn during this panel that putting PED users under a doctor’s care to control doses doesn’t work, at least according to Dr. Thomas Murray. It always struck me that an open system where athletes could take these safely if they wanted was better than what the panel described, players upping their doses to out-compete others. I did like Mark Verstegen who believes athletes can achieve the same results (longer lasting too) through proper training.
  5. Bloomberg. I missed most of this for lunch and recharging my computer.
  6. Limits of Moneyball. Bill Simmons took the anti-Moneyball position here, but again, Pat Gillick would have made an excellent panelist here. They did set up some tension as the owners of the Pats and Colts, and the brains behind the Rockets and Mavericks faced off. Mostly they were complimentary of each other, but Mark Cuban and Daryl Morey disagreed on paying for clutch players. Daryl sees no value in clutch statistics for determining contracts, Cuban does. Mark also is big into psychological evaluations to figure who plays well under pressure and who doesn’t. Michael Lewis did a great job moderating, and basically thinks there are no problems with the book.

    The best complaint was from Bill Simmons, who wants new numbers presented in a way that’s easy to understand. Division throws him (his joke).

  7. Future of Attendance. Nice tension here between David Samson of the Marlins and Alec Scheiner of the Dallas Cowboys. Schneiner bragged about the new stadium in Dallas, Samson shot him down, saying he could build three stadiums for that price. The two also sparred over the use of technology in the stadium. For example, Samson didn’t want video screens at every seat, since he thinks it will take away from what’s going on live.

    Samson did make many good points during the presentation about how to keep people moving through bathroom and concession lines, and was honest in saying these stadiums were simply a way to make money. Samson, however, is honest without being tactful, and my impression of him was overall negative. He complained about young people spending too much time texting and not learning to write properly. He misses the point that they communicate differently, and in a way they are developing a new language, or at least furthering the evolution of English. He sounded like a mean old man when he talked about that.

    He also butted heads a bit with Peter Moore, the head of EA sports. Peter’s thesis was that video games do not keep people out of live events, they create fans for them. Samson countered that teams take all the risk, and when the economy goes bad, it’s easy to stay home with the game rather than go to the real one. My gut (and history of the game) tell me Moore is right, but I’m sure there are times when the opposite is true.

  8. Coaching Analytics. Buck Showalter and Avery Johnson were the stars of this panel. Johnson learned about analytics as he coached, and was open minded enough to learn how to use what was offered to him. Showalter was the star of the panel, as he’s been doing analysis for 30 years. None of the concepts of the new statistics are new to Buck. Gene Michael and Buck used OBP and defense to improve the Yankees in the early 1990s.

    Buck has a great pattern recognizer he developed over time. What impressed me is that Buck looks at modern fielding metrics and they agree with what his pattern recognizer tells him. That wasn’t true 15 years ago. That tells me these stats are getting things right.

It’s a great conference, and if you get the chance to attend in the future, it’s well worth the trip. My thanks to Daryl Morey and Jessica Gelman for organizing the conference, and all the student volunteers who made everything run so smoothly.

1 thought on “MIT Sloan Summary

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *