(Bloomberg) — The former bankers who used statistical analysis of undervalued players to lead the Yokohama DeNA BayStars to a stunning upset in last year’s Japanese baseball championship aim to show that it wasn’t a fluke.
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As fans whet their appetite with this week’s games between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs in Tokyo, Yokohama is honing its indicators which predict how well a pitcher will perform at any given moment.
The team pairs that data from its analytics team with the advice of its scouts to use underrated players at the right moment. That combination led to the decision to have Hayato Horioka pitch against the powerful Yomiuri Giants last fall. Horioka, who was cut by the Giants in the 2023 offseason before he came to play on the BayStars’ developmental squad, had thrown a mere six innings during the regular season. The bet paid off, with Horioka helping to seal the game and Yokohama advancing to the championship.
The BayStars have made similar bets with other players who were previously cut elsewhere. “We believe these players have a lot more to give,” said the team’s director of strategy Kenichi Yoshikawa, who used to work in the financial industry.
Thanks to advances in camera technology and biometric monitors, players and coaches are now bombarded with data — from the rotational speed of a ball to the precise angle of an elbow or knee to the variability of an athlete’s heart rate. From basketball to professional cycling, sports teams around the globe now comb all that information to eke every percentage point’s worth of an advantage.
The BayStars credits their Series win to how they selected and applied that data, helping them overcome rivals with bigger payrolls and caches of data. The team beat the odds by tapping the real-life experiences of coaches, scouts and trainers and their intuition — given short shrift in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game and the movie it inspired — to select which data to focus on, according to Yoshikawa and scouting director Tatsuya Hasegawa, another former banker who used to be involved in mergers and acquisitions.
Statistics provide valuable insights, but people are not merely a collection of data points, Hasegawa said.
“It’s important to think ultra-logically and rationally, but that alone sets you up for failure,” he said. “The players are human, with human emotions. No matter what the stock price should be in theory, or what a company should be, that’s not going to move people and may be wrong in the end.”
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