Moneyball revolution isn’t in stats — it’s in health

For years, the smartest minds in the game have used the Moneyball approach, trying to understand what happens on the field through advanced statistics, and using that information to refine the way organizations evaluate talent and spend money on players.

Major League Baseball has been implementing a rigorous analytics system, even monitoring fields with radar that tracks every movement on the field, from the angle of the ball as it comes screeching off a bat to the efficiency of the route that an outfielder took to that same ball as it heads toward the warning track.

Health, especially pitcher health, is the great frontier for baseball research and organizational improvement.

Howard Cole of Forbes, working with numbers provided by baseball analyst Will Caroll, says that between 2008 and 2012, MLB teams lost $1.1 billion in pitcher productivity due to injury.

And yet, baseball organizations who have invested in management teams with math skills have not similarly recruited from the medical, biometric, and nutritional fields.

Team doctors rarely travel with the team.

The home team shares their team doctor with the visitors.

What happens to players when teams start generating terabytes of biometric data on every individual player? But if players and their union permit it, teams can do so much more to protect players’ health and long-term earning potential.

But the economics of Major League Baseball mean that professional sports teams have an incentive to get on the bleeding edge of research on preventative health-care for repetitive stress injuries.