ABCDEF - Astros, Baseball, Cheating, Data, Ethics, and Finances

“…Luhnow is widely considered to be one of the most successful baseball executives of his generation, credited with ushering in the second “analytics” revolution in baseball and rebuilding the Houston Astros into a perennial Postseason contender. But while no one can dispute that Luhnow’s baseball operations department is an industry leader in its analytics, it is very clear to me that the culture of the baseball operations department, manifesting itself in the way its employees are treated, its relations with other Clubs, and its relations with the media and external stakeholders, has been very problematic. At least in my view, the baseball operations department’s insular culture – one that valued and rewarded results over other considerations, combined with a staff of individuals who often lacked direction or sufficient oversight…”

-          Excerpt from the Statement of the Commissioner

If you are a baseball fan, then your world got rocked by Major LeagueBaseball’s (MLB) Commissioner Rob Manfred’s penalties on the Houston Astros General Manager (GM) Jeff Luhnow and manager A J Hinch.  They are banned from MLB baseball for a year without pay.  Subsequently the owner of Houston Astros Jim Crane fired both of them.  Jeff and A J were fined because they oversaw the 2017 Houston Astros baseball team, which cheated in baseball games using technology.  The following few days after the firings, Alex Cora,  the Boston Red Sox manager, and Carlos Beltran, the New York Mets manager, stepped down.  Both of them were mentioned in Rob Manfred's Statement of the Commissioner report. Alex was bench coach of the 2017 Houston Astros, and Carlos Beltran was a player on the 2017 Houston Astros team.

The 2017 Houston Astros used technology to steal the opposing team’s catcher’s signs.  The catcher’s signs tell the pitcher what pitch the pitcher will throw.  If the batter knows the pitch that he will see, then the batter has a better chance of hitting the ball.  It alters the odds provides an edge to the batter.

If you don't know much about the game baseball, here is a video that provides the basics of the game.

Other than baseball pundits and historians debate if the penalities on Jeff and AJ were harsh enough and the adverse impact to the game,  the following statements in the commissioner's report caught my attention,

"Luhnow’s baseball operations department is an industry leader in its analytics," and

"the baseball operations department’s insular culture – one that valued and rewarded results over other considerations."  

Ideally, in any data and analytics organization, decisions are based on data and not on emotions and "gut feeling."  The Houston Astros focused on the data and results and forgot their mission, which is to play honest baseball and compete.   MLB players, managers, and teams are tempted to cheat because they can win, which in turn leads to more lucrative financial contracts.

Speaking about money. Several years ago, I distinctly remembered listening to a Fresh Air episode on the National Public Radio (NPR).  In the show, the Fresh Air host interviews Michael Lewis about his book Flash Boys.  The show caught my attention.   The Fresh Air website states the following,
"Flash Boys is about the form of computerized transactions known as high-frequency trading, in which the fastest computers with the highest connection speeds get the information first, and make the trade before anyone else can. A millisecond — even a nanosecond — can make all the difference between how much money is made or lost on any transaction."

With machines making trade decisions in a few seconds,  investment banks, hedge funds are exploiting these types of legal cheating using technology.

I believe US law enforcement agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and others are looking into these types of legal cheating using technology.

Major League Baseball (MLB) punished the cheating team, but I believe they are of the tip of the iceberg.  With financial institutions using machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other technologies to legally cheat, we, as a society, need to develop policies based on data ethics.

I, however, haven't read much about data ethics in any major publications like Harvard Business Review, Medium, Gartner, Forrester, and others.  These publications still promote the objectivity of data-driven decisions since it enables organizations to make ideal decisions.  With high-frequency trading,  stealing baseball signs, and others,  I would like to read about how businesses and organizations are promoting data ethics with their workforce.  The domain of Data Ethics should include data stealing,  skewing the data to achieve desirable results, data sharing, speedy data access, and more.

If we don't have penalties for cheating with technology and data, then we may be cheated out of our money.  Companies sharing our personal data for monetary gains is just the being.  Folks need to know what is right and wrong when these individuals work with data and analytics.  We cannot afford to have our trusted institutions to be like the 2017 Houston Astros.

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NOTE: The ABCDEF image is from https://www.123rf.com/photo_10483641_flip-clock-letters-a-b-c-d-e-f.html.

The Ultimate Data Mining Sport

A few days ago, I came across a show on ESPN on the concept of Sabermetrics. According to Wikipedia, "Sabermetrics is the analysis of baseball through objective evidence, especially baseball statistics." The sport of baseball is a unique sport since it is dominated by statistics. As many of you, hitting a ball, which is the size of a tennis ball, with a stick is an not easy task. Now imagine if the ball is coming at you around eighty to ninety miles per hour. What makes it even more hard is that the ball velocity, location and the trajectory of the ball may be different from one pitch to another pitch. The hitter has to decide to hit the ball if it goes through or touches the strike zone. The hitter has to guess what the pitcher's tendencies are and where and what type of pitch he, the pitcher, will throw. As you can see, statistics are the core of any baseball game. Lineups and pitching match-ups maybe altered depending on the pitcher, hitter, weather, ballpark and the time of the game. As an avid fantasy baseball player, I am aware of some of the stats and I alter my fantasy line up everyday.

What does this all mean? Since baseball is game of stats, Major League Baseball (MLB) general managers are relying more on analytical systems like Sabermetrics which give quantitative data on whether a player is valuable to the team or not. Sabermetrics captures statistics which are usually overlooked by regular stats. For example, Sabermetrics does not put alot of value in a player who hits for a .320 average. It does, however, give the player a higher rank if the player hits .320 average compared to a player who is hitting .098 average when the bases are loaded in a tie game at the bottom of the ninth. Yes the Runs Batted In (RBI) stat would say this however the player's RBI stat might be inflated if the player bats in a lot of runs when the games are not close. This might indicate that the player does not do well in pressure.

Even though folks in baseball have figured out on how to quantitatively score their assets to put a better product on their field, IT folks have been struggling with this for number of years. IT folks have a grand vision called Enterprise Architecture where they can map every asset, process, system and other IT variables and start seeing the gaps in their IT enterprises. AS IT business managers look at EA as their panacea for monitoring their enterprises, computers scientists are looking to fields like ontologies and referential systems to capture "inferred relationships" in the IT domain. I believe the IT people, including myself and all of the architects, developers, testers, program managers, project managers, CIO, etc., etc, should take a step back and learn from the baseball folks before we all strike out and head back to the dugout shaking our heads and pondering, "How did I miss that?"