Michael Lewis’ 2003 book Moneyball jump-started the industry of baseball into adopting business practices that most other industries had already experienced. Baseball executives were making multimillion-dollar decisions in a field where most everything had been recorded but were not taking advantage of all the data available to guide them. Like many decision makers, they were using their expertise, intuition, and their gut to guide their decisions. These were smart and motivated people so for the most part they were doing it well, but until they resolved to put to use the predictive ability that lay in their data, they were in effect fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. Despite the pushback, quants were brought into the system to take advantage of the value that lay in this previously unused data.
In this white paper, Sig Mejdal, Vice President and Assistant General Manager of the Baltimore Orioles, describes how JMP capabilities have helped him discover the predictive ability in the data, illustrate it to others and create tools to ensure the utilization of the findings.
By sharing specific moments in his career, Mejdal demonstrates how he has put JMP to work – in evaluating players for the MLB draft, assessing talent in free agency, evaluating player performance, and many other areas – to get and stay ahead of other clubs.
Mejdal also shows us how he uses JMP to share findings and tell stories in a way that traditional, often non-analytical, baseball decision makers can understand. Using JMP Graph Builder and the interrelationships between JMP graphs Mejdal discovered he could find hidden patterns in the data, and communicate his analysis and guide users to the answers, often by simply dragging columns of data into JMP Graph Builder.