Taipei, Sept. 2 (CNA) Taiwan’s first ever baseball data analytics competition took place Saturday in Taoyuan and saw baseball lovers from around the country gathering in a bid to grasp the truth of the game via numbers.
About 40 baseball enthusiasts crowded into classroom 3308 at National Taiwan Sport University in Taoyuan to join a day-long conference and watch nine teams use data analytics to give presentations that delved into different aspects of baseball and receive feedback from a panel of eight judges.
Chen Shu-wei (???), secretary-general of the Taiwan Society of Baseball and Softball Science, and one of the primary organizers of the competition, said the result was “beyond expectations.”
He originally proposed the idea in March after the World Baseball Classics drew to a close.
“When we organized the competition, we hoped to see 20 teams registering, but we actually got 30, and they included lots of high school students, and much of their analysis was at a very high level,” Chen added.
The high number of teams signing up led to the number qualifying for the final being increased from six to nine.
As well as the influence of Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball,” a book that disclosed the magical power of analytics in the major league, Chen said he was mainly motivated to organize the competition in Taiwan after learning that the Japan Society of Baseball Science started holding an annual data analytics competition in 2022.
Chen reached out to two Taiwan-based sabermetrics companies — StatsInsight (??????) and Rebas (????) — and they all began preparing for the event in March until it was officially announced in June.
In just 40 days after registration opened, submissions were 50 percent higher than the total number expected.
Shyu Leh (??), co-founder of StatsInsight, which also formed a scouting group for Team Taiwan at the 2023 World Baseball Classics, said he was impressed by the diversity of the topics covered.
Those topics presented by the teams on Saturday ranged from the Taiwan Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL), to the United States’ Major League Baseball (MLB), as well as from Cody Bellinger’s resurge to the Texas Rangers’ success in the MLB World Series, and from the arrangement of the infield shift to a franchise’s recruitment strategies, to name but a few.
Although the studies may have been more effective if participants had more practical experience, Shyu told CNA that he still looked forward to seeing how the competition would impact domestic pro ballclubs, adding that it could help pave the sport’s future in Taiwan.
The highlight of the day centered around Chen Kai-yuan (???), a student from National Taiwan University’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering, whose analysis of the relationship between the CPBL deploying bunt and the probability of winning earned him the Best Popularity award and first place.
A CTBC Brothers fan and a shortstop on his department’s team, Chen said he has many friends to discuss baseball with at school, but that the competition gave him a rare chance to exchange opinions with real experts, such as CPBL commentator Pan Chung-wei (???).
Of the 30 topics covered in the competition, five of them focused on two or more leagues, two were CPBL-specific, and two targeted Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), while 21 were MLB-specific.
According to Cheng Kai-chun (???), chief operating officer of Rebas, this is likely because there is more MLB-related data.
He added that American databases like FanGraphs Baseball, Baseball-Reference and Baseball Savant, give fans indexes like exit velocity, WAR (wins above replacement) and expected stats that are barely accessible to CPBL fans.
However, Rebas will soon roll out a subscription-based online service that will allow CPBL fans to enjoy the fun brought by advanced metrics when watching games, Cheng revealed, adding that he hopes the service will lead to more CPBL-related topics being presented in the competition’s next edition.
Pan, who retired from the CPBL in 2010, told CNA that baseball data analytics in Taiwan has made huge progress compared to back when he was playing, but that it still has a long way to go.
Now that more and more high school students turn pro after graduating, Pan hoped that data analytics being used in the amateur stage would help young players in Taiwan understand their skills and potential better.
Stressing the importance of making baseball data analytics more widespread, Pan said if sabermetrics were more readily available, more amateur baseball aficionados would likely devote themselves to the industry and help boost the development of the sport in Taiwan.
Chen Shu-wei said that developing baseball data analytics is a marathon, and that he wanted the competition to serve as a platform that gives a range of fans a chance to use data to explore different topics and to expose talent to pro franchises.
“There are some people in Japan who were actually recruited by ballclubs after the competition. If that happened to some of our participants, I would consider it the beginning of the next stage,” Chen Shu-wei said.
