"Professional baseball is an insular business, so when Jeff Luhnow showed up for his first day of work as the St. Louis Cardinals’ vice president for baseball development, he already had two strikes against him: He was a former management consultant at McKinsey, brought in to shake up the organization. And the sum total of his baseball experience was the McKinsey fantasy league and a business school paper he’d written on how the Chicago Cubs could win the World Series." When hell freezes over.
the worse thing the Cubs could do would be to win the World Series. Half of their faithful fans would breath a sigh of relief and say, "Never Again." Half the stands would be empty. They'd fuck up Wrigley trying to appeal to the new young crowd who likes a winner. It would be horrible.
nothing better than getting on that Red Line on a fine spring day. By the time you get there, the whole car is filled with Cubs Jerseys, playing hookey from work. And most of them get off a few stops early so they can drink themselves to the field. Win lose or draw, you had yourself one fine day.
The KC Royals use MoneyBall style analysis. I believe the Cubs under Epstein does too. One important component of these people's analysis is Monte Carlo Analysis. Oracle Crytal Ball makes Tornado Charts simple. http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/crystalball/overview/index.html
Sports analytics is an interesting field. I don't follow baseball in my country but I did stumble across this video on a basketball player tracking system used in the NBA:- You can spend hours digging up interesting material on sports analytics. However, I usually have to stop to remind myself that my time would be better spent researching trading systems rather than pretending to work when my wife brings me a cold beverage. I guess the player tracking data itself might be quite valuable if you were trying to build a model of crowd behavior given the objectives of crowd participants (e.g. players divided into two teams) and some physical constraints (e.g. dimensions of the basketball court). In time, I expect that some of the better sports data analytics companies will branch out, transferring the lessons learned from sports analytics to other business areas.