Sports and competitiveness have always gone hand in hand. Every person wants their local teams or their favorite team to win every single time. In the season of sports people discuss games, players, venue, weather. They dress their favorite teams, play songs, eat particular fields and many times do all steps like praying, standing on one leg, and many other steps to win.
The selectors have to work hard day's night to select the best team, the coaches have to work out for the best match winning player list and then it's all the performance day. The most surprising thing is after so many careful steps and activities, still sports is considered a game of uncertainties and many times the matches change at the last moment, or the best player falters or a new player rises to fame.
Why are we discussing so much about sports? Well, let us imagine a situation, you know little or have known less about a game how it's played, who is the best player to perform, no clue about the budget and yet are asked to make a match winning team. To help you out, you have a bad selection committee, your team’s coach, coaching the team from the past 20 years, and one of the lowest budgets approved, and ofcourse you are a data scientist. To make things more interesting, say the game is baseball.
Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, was devastated by the team's loss to the New York Yankees in the 2001 American League Division Series. With the impending departure of the star players Johnny Damon, Jason Giambi and Jason Isringhausen to free agency, Beane needed to assemble a competitive team for 2002 with Oakland's limited budget.
During a scouting visit to the Cleveland Indians, he met Peter Brand, a young Yale economics graduate with radical ideas about evaluating players. Yes, using data points, statistics, charts, numbers!
And rest is history!! The world got "sabermetrics" method, the future of baseball now used for all games.
And now how do you feel vs when I was giving you the situation. New ideas, new ways and who knows your story may be the next for my blogs. This story is available and you can read more or watch it, either in the book or the movie form: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Its the visualizations of data, proper correlations, graphs and metrics and understanding
the data which may lead to unique visions which are more accurate and helpful.
Happy Learning!!!