An Algorithm for the true value of your team.
August 30, 2010.
What happens when baseball executives show up at a physics and computer science conference?
I had the opportunity to find out this past Saturday at the Sportvision Pitchf/x conference in San Francisco.
Sportvision might be the most recognizable small company in Silicon Valley, as they make the ubiquitous yellow first down lines on American football broadcasts.
As a company with expertise in sensors and software, Sportvision has embarked on a new mission to making a digital record of every major league baseball game.
This effort started with Pitchf/x, a technology that tracks the trajectory of pitches.
The data for every pitch thrown in the majors in the last three season is available online.
The baseball blog community has made a huge contribution in analyzing this data, and Sportvision highlights this work at their conferences.
Many of the talks on Saturday focused on Fieldf/x, Sportvision's new technology with the more ambitious goal of tracking every player and event on the baseball field.
August 10, 2010.
This time of year, top European club soccer teams go abroad to prep for the upcoming season.
Teams like Manchester United used to come to the United States and play exhibition games against other European club teams.
This summer, they took on teams from Major League Soccer (MLS).
After beating the Philadelphia Union, a first year expansion club, Manchester United lost to the Kansas City Wizards, the 12th ranked team in the Power Rank.
"The progress is obvious," said Sir Alex Ferguson, the silver haired dean of European club managers (think of him as the Dean Smith of European club football).
"We realized that in the game against Philadelphia and just as much against Kansas City. There's a massive improvement in the organization and standard of play. That would be the reason I think they're ready to play the best teams in Europe now."