The Future is How
For the first time we are getting objective data into how outcomes are truly driven…by how the athlete moves
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If you were an up and coming pitcher looking to gain an edge on the competition, how would you go about putting yourself in the best position to succeed?
I bet you would take a holistic approach.
On the field, you would hire the world’s best pitching coach. He would tell you to lift your lead leg a certain amount, because he believes that would help. He would suggest you speed up your delivery, because that improved a bunch of pitchers he worked with in the past. And he would have you increase your stride length, because longer stride lengths generally correlate with success.
Off the field, you would do the same thing.
You would hire a personal trainer to guide your workouts. She would tell you when to push it and when to rest…which of course would be based on her experience.
She would track your sleep…and she is smart enough to know more is better.
Finally, you would hire a nutritionist- one that is incredibly experienced, who knows what foods are good for most people.
The Future is Personal
But one day, you hear about Whoop- a wearable strap that, among other things, measures your strain, to let you know when you need to take a rest day.
You notice Whoop also tracks your sleep- with a fundamental understanding of your time in different phases- light, deep, and REM.
You then see an ad for Levels, which monitors your personal glucose levels in real time.
You equip yourself with this new tech and take it to your personal trainer. Together, you realize you’ve been pushing too hard and your body needs more rest. She modifies your routine based on the fact that, while you spend eight hours in bed, not enough of time is spent in deep sleep or REM sleep (aka “the good stuff”).
You then loop in your nutritionist, who realizes your blood sugar is spiking at night. You two are surprised by the reaction your body has to your “healthy diet”, so you adjust the plan based on your specific reactions.
So, was your personal trainer wrong? Did your nutritionist make a mistake?
Absolutely not.
Both were doing their best given the information they had. They knew what worked for most people. They understood best practices. They made the exact recommendation any reasonable person could expect them to.
Then, they got more information. They no longer had to estimate. They had true, actionable insight into what was actually going on.
But What About On the Field
Now back to you.
You have made great strides off the field. You are sleeping more…and better. Your training regimen has been optimized for your body, giving you the rest you need.
Day by day, you are getting faster. You are getting stronger.
But what about the expert coach you hired?
Clearly he knows what he’s talking about. He’s been doing this for years. He’s worked with the best…
Just like the personal trainer.
Just like the nutritionist.
That’s when you start to think:
That increase I made in my stride length…was that really optimal for me?
That tweak in my arm slot…will that truly make me more effective?
Focusing on specific joint angles at foot plant..is that actually the best thing for how I pitch?
You still love your pitching coach. He’s forgotten more about the game than most will ever know. But maybe you’re missing something. Maybe you’re missing a clearer look into your data…a clearer look into how your body is performing.
That is when you and your coach talk about bringing biomechanics into your training, so you can learn how momentum flows through your body. You want to discover how specific tweaks change your data- impacting your efficiency, your stress levels, your performance and more.
You want to enter the future of player development: where expert coaching combined with personalized data is the norm.
And lucky for you, the future is now.
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Taking a Step Back
Player development and evaluation is a combination of 1) experience and 2) information…always has been, always will be.
But somehow, information has recently become an argumentative topic.
MLB clubs shift more than ever. NBA teams set three point records annually. And the NFL is trending more and more towards a pass heavy league.
New age sport fans love it. They are fluent in advanced metrics- spouting off WAR, effective field goal %, and EPA per play.
But old school lifers roll their eyes, blaming “analytics”.
But what is analytics?
Analytics is information, expressed in numbers. That is it.
Why is Tom Brady the GOAT? 7 Super Bowls.
What about Michael Jordan? 6 NBA championships. 0 losses. 6 MVPs.
Don’t tell the “get off my lawn” folks….but these are numbers used to explain what happened. These are analytics.
But really, they’re just numbers.
Why We Use Numbers
We use numbers to bring objectivity to a subjective world:
We have imperfect information. We do not know how players will transition from college to pros nor how two stars may play together.
We have variance. The best three point shooters in the world miss more often than they make. Was a late game miss the result of too much pressure? Or just the odds? Was a clutch buzzer beater heroic? Or just a bit of luck?
And we have what ifs. What does Tom Brady’s career look like if he is not paired with Bill Belichick? How about Jordan without Pippen? We will never know. But we do know 7 Super Bowls is unprecedented. As is 6-0 with 6 MVPs.
Sports will always be subjective. We will look backwards and debate history just as we will peek forward and project the future.
But numbers are objective. They are not good. They are not bad. They just are.
Numbers as a Decision Making Tool
As much fun as looking backwards is, ultimately teams are judged by their ability to see the future.
Front offices predict how players will grow, while coaches determine the best strategy- both holistically and opponent by opponent- to rack up wins, and eventually championships.
The rest of the organization follows along. Trainers, R&D departments, medical staffs, and the players themselves make predictions about what inputs will lead to their desired future.
When all these parties analyze the past to make decisions about the future- they use numbers.
They use analytics.
But really, they just use information.
We’re Getting Smarter
No matter the decision, better information should lead to better outcomes. This was true before “advanced analytics”, and it will continue to be true for years to come.
Information is a broad term, and can be broken down into three buckets:
The What
The Why
The How
The What
The What is the headline. What team won, who performed the best, etc.
And the What is pretty useful.
Last year’s champion will likely be in a good position to defend their title. Last year’s MVP will probably have another good year.
The Why
The Why is what the sports world is used to- going beyond what happened and analyzing data to assign credit, dish out blame, and predict the future.
While this has always been commonplace in sports, recently we have gotten a lot better at it.
Two decades ago- with the advent of Moneyball- teams began seeing the flaws in batting average, RBIs, ERA, and other “traditional stats”. Over time, these were replaced with OBP, OPS, WHIP, and other “advanced analytics”, including the all encompassing WAR.
While this may seem like a breakthrough, it really is nothing new.
Batting average, RBIs, ERA, etc. are correlated with team success…as are these new, advanced metrics. The only difference is their effectiveness.
What people call analytics are simply teams looking for variables that are some combination of 1) more correlated or 2) more overlooked than previous ones to exploit an inefficiency in the market.
Smart teams do this today. They did it twenty years ago. And they will do it twenty years from now.
And as the competition either 1) discovers the same takeaways or 2) reverse engineers them, the edge will dissipate and another will need to be found.
Teams (and players) will continually research better ways to understand the Why, as we are nowhere close to solving for the “optimal strategy” in any sport, despite how it may seem.
Eventually, we will discover the flaws in WAR. We may even realize 3-pointers and play action passes are not as advantageous as we think today.
And when we do, it will seem like a revelation. But it won’t be.
Advancements in understanding correlation come gradually.
Just look at how the prominence of the 3 has changed in the NBA over time:
Or the rise of passing in the NFL, which has come even slower:
Despite how drastic these changes seem, they’re not. They occur over years, and sometimes decades.
And that is because teams are not doing anything different. They are using information to look for objective cues in a subjective world.
And to this point, all the cues have come in the form of “Why Data”.
The How
However, we are currently experiencing a true breakthrough. One that will not result in a gradual change, but a seismic one.
We are seeing a monumental leap in knowledge as organizations, coaches, and players move beyond “Why Data” to “How Data”.
Up until this point, teams have had objective data on what correlates to their goals. They also have had experts that are pretty darn good at estimating causation.
This can be as obvious as noticing that teams that shoot more threes win more (correlation)…and then realizing how advantageous the math is (causation).
Or it can be more nuanced with expert pitching coaches having a deep understanding of how to maximize energy transfer through the body to increase velocity.
However, no matter how skilled an analyst, positional coach, or trainer is (and the best are incredible) they are still making recommendations with imperfect information based on previous experience and anecdotal evidence.
Until now…
The Future is How
As was the case with the individual looking to improve- pairing expert trainers and nutritionists with personalized data from consumer tech- teams are just starting to peek beneath the surface.
For the first time, they are getting objective data into how outcomes are truly driven…by how the athlete moves.
In baseball, it is occurring daily.
Nearly every MLB team has a KinaTrax, Hawk-Eye, or Simi camera system in their major league stadium.
Organizations are placing multiple high resolution, high frame rate, video cameras throughout the ballpark to track ball data and player movement… and no one is balking at six figure price tags for installation and annual service.
In fact, clubs are looking to get similar technology at their spring training sites and minor league affiliates. At the same time, they are recruiting data scientists, biomechanists, and more to interpret the data and bring it to the field.
The reason? The ROI is incredible.
All of a sudden, teams can see frame by frame, millisecond by millisecond, what is happening on the field.
They can understand exactly how a pitch ended up at a certain speed with a specific spin rate. Or how a batter got his high exit velocity and ideal launch angle.
Once they understand how everything is happening, they can move beyond talent acquisition…and start making tremendous strides in talent development.
The question then becomes “What is the value of superior talent development of a nine figure payroll?”
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The future is here in baseball and, like the analytics movement twenty years ago, will follow everywhere else shortly.
The Vennare brothers, seed stage investors and founders of Fitt Insider- a newsletter and podcast about sports tech- explain it perfectly:
The movie Moneyball shined a spotlight on the use of statistics in sports. And these days, professional sports teams have entire departments dedicated to analytics.
But now, going beyond the empirical analysis of in-game situations or outcomes, more attention is being paid to what’s happening inside an athlete’s body.
In the gym, on the playing field, and around the clock, new technologies are seeking to quantify performance. Besides simply leveling up, the ability to track every aspect of athletics will impact everything from training and competition to talent evaluation and contract negotiations.
More and more, as wearable sensors, high-speed cameras, computer vision, and machine learning algorithms become ubiquitous, capturing reams of real-time data is becoming routine.
But just because we can collect data, doesn’t mean we know how to use it.
This is spot on.
Teams are looking to maximize the value of their data (which is different than maximizing the amount of data they collect) to bring objective evidence to what was previously a subjective exercise.
The organizations that do this the best will marry 1) subject experts 2) objective body data and 3) a deep understanding of that data.
Not only will the top teams have all three legs, but they’ll have them communicating and working towards a common goal.
And they will do this by using data to empower their coaches….because coaches know best:
Coaches know the right questions to ask.
Coaches know where to look.
Coaches know how to translate what is important to the athlete.
Coaches know when tweaks can be detrimental.
Coaches know how to teach.
Data’s primary job is to empower coaches, and make their job easier, more leverageable, and more effective.
The Future
The future is happening as we speak. Tech is allowing organizations, coaches, and individuals to better understand how to drive performance.
We used to be comfortable prioritizing rest into an athlete’s routine. We now can use Whoop to individualize recovery.
We used to be happy knowing nutrition was correlated with improved performance. We now can use Levels to understand how each individual is impacted differently.
And we used to be OK knowing there was huge value in:
Pitchers with exceptional velocity,
Shooters who consistently make threes, and
QBs with deadly accuracy.
But we are entering a world where we can teach velocity, a world where we can coach consistency, and a world where accuracy can be drilled down to data driven development.
And we are entering a world where all of this is done specifically for the individual.
Welcome to the future. The Future is How.