Analytics: From Revolution to Evolution
A SABR member evaluates the growth of analytics in the game
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
. . . Since the calendar flipped to 2025, 16 players under professional contract have had Tommy John surgery. You can track each professional surgery on this website. They range from a 2024 high school draftee who has yet to throw a professional pitch (Blake Larson, second-round selection of the Chicago White Sox) to a pitcher with nearly 2,000 Major League innings and a Cy Young Award under his belt (Gerrit Cole).
. . . Over the last seven full seasons, the numbers of pitchers used my MLB teams who had at least one Tommy John surgery has increased each year. In 2024, that number topped 300 for the first time, with the Yankees and Dodgers leading the way with 17 players each.
. . . A new development in elbow surgery for pitchers has been an internal brace procedure. The first recorded professional pitcher to have the procedure was Mitch Harris, a right-handed reliever who pitched one season for the St. Louis Cardinals. In 2024, eight professional pitchers had the procedure.
Leading Off
Analytics: From Revolution to Evolution
By W. H. Johnson
Analytics. For many traditional baseball fans (and scouts and coaches as well), “analytics” is just a very long four-letter word. A curse. A blight upon the pastime. An inadequate reduction of the superb fusion of athleticism and creativity, along with indescribable fun, to mere numbers, to values that can be captured, studied and graphed. Beginning with Henry Chadwick’s first box scores to the back-of-the-baseball-card math lessons with which many of us first started, quantitative descriptions of baseball and the lesser-included actions in each game have become an industry unto itself.
The 2025 SABR Analytics Conference, the 14th iteration of an event dedicated entirely to the analysis of the game, recently concluded in Phoenix. The kickoff by MLB Network’s Brian Kenny framed the entire event, as it usually does, and invigorated the crowd in a way not often associated with such a specialized field of inquiry. He observed that baseball is becoming a “bastion or logical, analytical thought.” In 1999, Cleveland employed a total of eight analysts for their entire analytical study, but as of last year (2024), there were now 55 analysts in the baseball operations department alone. At the same time, he acknowledged that there are limitations baked into data-driven decision-making. Each player has a makeup, individual mechanics and movement, and the like, and not all of that can be modeled and reduced to simple values
Various research presentations drilled into what some might consider the arcane, but they collectively highlighted the growth of analysis over the previous decade. Two particular briefs, each focused on defensive route running efficiency, were not only fascinating but served as an expression of the explosion of intellectual work engaged in examining every aspect and nuance of baseball in the perpetual search for correctable inefficiencies.
The topics and talks presented by more prominent analysts included a look at the startling growth in Tommy John surgeries by Glen Fleisig. That brief was particularly timely as it comes less than four months after MLB released its own internal 65-page report on the uptick, causes, and consequences of the accelerating pace of pitcher injuries writ large. But more on that in a bit.
On the final day of the conference, eight members of the Milwaukee Brewers’ staff – each with a different role in the larger organization – discussed their personal backgrounds and paths to their coveted job(s) in major league baseball. It was a practical, professional look at what their business is, their livelihood, and it clearly underlined the notion that baseball analytics has gone big-time. There is no going back.
How has this happened? How has a toolset so opposed by the scouts, coaches, and many players 25 years ago become so entrenched in not only how the professionals prepare to play but also in how many of us prepare to watch? There are many contributing factors, including the ability of technology to measure movement at almost imperceptible levels. The Tommy John surgery brief was a precursor to a presentation [after the conference] by four prominent members of the American Baseball Biomechanics Society concerning the MLB study. Even if we collectively agreed to return to the days of just worrying about batting average and runs batted in, the analytical movement would remain. The defensible data that biomechanical…mechanics (?)…can cull from the various sensor inputs of video, RADAR, and related technologies may very likely be critical in actually reducing injuries in the coming years. Yes, biomechanical analysis can be interpreted as the basis for a to-do list in adding velocity to a fastball or spin to a slider, seemingly turning pitchers into well-paid lab rats, but in the hands of trained professionals can also yield insights as to how human bodies decay and fail under some of the enormous strains imposed by the desire for baseball excellence.
That December 2024 MLB analysis of the pitcher injury increases includes some summarized data and a number of anecdotes and quotations by baseball professionals regarding the rate growth, but the real work going forward, isolating causes and developing prescriptive corrections, will be conducted in labs and overseen by experts. When do arm ligaments fail? Shoulder capsules? And so on. Those results will continually foster adaptations in how players evolve. It turns out that the game is always changing, and this fusion of baseball analytics and biomechanics is one of the more promising developments for the future.
There are myriad sources of data available to those of us outside the industry's inner circle. From FanGraphs and Baseball HQ to Baseball Prospectus and MLB’s STATCAST and others, there are on-ramps for any interested baseball observer to join in the study. Professional organizations largely rely on performance and predictive analytics to win next year and do not worry about Hall-of-Fame debates or MVP voting, but for the rest of us, the chance to try to paint a player as performance values can be fun. Done properly, the process demands a great deal of time and work.
But the process may also be fascinating and may add to the understanding of why one team wins and one team loses any given game. Regardless, the analytics revolution in baseball is over. Evolution is underway.
Bill Johnson has contributed nearly 50 essays to SABR’s Biography Project, and presented papers at the 2011 Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, the 2017 and 2023 Jerry Malloy Negro League Conferences, and the inaugural Southern Negro League Conference. He has published a biography of Hal Trosky (McFarland and Co., 2017) and an article about Negro American League All-Star Art “Superman” Pennington in the journal Black Ball. He is on ‘X’: @menckensmemory
Extra Innings
As mentioned in the article, there are a number of places to get started on analytics. Here is a video to give a good starting point: