Moneyball is a movie based on a true story in which Billy Beane, the director of Oakland athletics, tries to find undervalued players using a new statistical approach for baseball. This is because Oakland lost a few important players after the play-offs in the season of 2001. By chance Billy meets Peter Brand, a young economist who focuses on statistical idea’s about how to evaluate players. Using this statistical approach the Oakland athletics win 20 consecutive games even though they have a small budget (wikipedia, 2018). This is can be seen as a initial example of data-driven performance optimization. This presents how data can atone for a lack of money and/or resources and add to performance by more adequate decision-making. After this occurence the sport world has emerged tremendously. Different sorts of technology, such as AI are now integrated in sport analytics, since so many things in sports are quantifiable. A few examples of AI in sports are: scouting and recruitment, training and performance, maintaining player health and fitness, and broadcasting and advertising (Forbes, 2019).
Even though, it is almost impossible to evaluate humans, it is possible to quantify their performance with AI. By using individual and team performance data, players’ capacity and potential can be measured. Here, we are not talking about common stats, such as home runs or amount of hits, but about using complex metrics. This allows to include for numerous factors, which humans can only partly take into consideration. This way performance improvement can become more easy and reliable, since it enables coaches to determine players strengths and weaknesses more accurate. Also, AI enables the use of historical data, to forecast players market value and optimal performance. Lastly, AI can help in the preparation for matches by identifying patterns in for instance antagonist’s tactics. All of this makes it possible to predict sports more reliable.
However, humans behavior and therefore performance still has some unpredictability. Will at some point human behavior /sport performance become completly predicatable? And if sport performance becomes completly predictable will it still be exciting to watch?
references:
Forbes. (2019). Here’s How AI Will Change The World Of Sports!. [online] Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/03/15/heres-how-ai-will-change-the-world-of-sports/#3861c18a556b [Accessed 1 Oct. 2019].
Wikipedia. (2019). Moneyball. [online] Available at: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball [Accessed 1 Oct. 2019].
