Baseball and Analytics: a Case of Complementing Machine with Human Skills

This is going to be a short post because I am having problems with this administration site where I add posts. I previously could not log in to make my post and thus had to go to a helpdesk. They were able to fix things up. The problem supposedly stems from coding problems with the core program that holds or runs this website.

And I'm having problems actually working with this post system. So this is going to be short.

I have read that there are now automatic writing programs that write up business articles or sports articles without the help of a human being and that one could not tell that a software wrote the article. Lately I have been reading sports articles (and I generally don't read sports articles) that still have the author's byline and these stories have feel good components to them. The stories are stories with emotional pull, not just a play by play recitation of what happened during the game. I wonder if sport writers are now applying the human component that can't be gleaned from statistics?

And then, I saw this article "Astros’ World Series win may be remembered as the moment analytics conquered MLB for good". Since the Moneyball was written, I  think baseball has been moving towards analytics, but apparently the Astro's win

was very convincing. The article talks about how the team management broke apart the team to rebuild it, using analytics. During that time, they had to go through the trough in rebuilding the team, player by player. And now, the Astros won the Series. So everyone else is going to try the same thing.

There is a really heartwarming story in the article about one of the players, Charlie Morton, who was ditched by his old team before the Astro's brought him into the team. Charlie thought that because of his age, his injuries/surgeries and his poor showing in the games, he was going to have a tough time with his career, but the Astro's saw something in him.

But the really interesting thing about the article was that the team was rebuilt using analytics and human qualities. The team management combined the quants with the staffs' skills in sussing out the qualities of each of the player: probably qualities such as tenacity, humbleness, the fit within the team, willingness to try something new to improve. These are qualities that are probably still not readily picked by the analytical software. This is an example of complementing the machine with the human.

I wish more businesses thought the same way. Instead, quite a few business will have the Wall Street kind of thinking of just flatly replacing people with machines. Here's the latest article describing how half of the bank's workers will be replaced by machines: Deutsche Bank CEO Suggest that Half of Its Workers Could Be Replaced by Machines.