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Showing posts from March, 2015

Little League, Big Data

Last week, I participated in my first Little League draft for my son's baseball team.  This was new territory, as up until now, play has been non-competitive.  This year we will actually have to keep score, and there will be winners and losers. In preparation for the draft, we had tryouts a few weeks ago where we evaluated the kids on a number of different criteria.  Never have I seen so many scared 7 and 8 year olds march through the cages as dozens of coaches with clipboards watched and recorded their every move.  I camped out and watched them pitch, as from what many veteran coaches told me, the key to keeping the game moving along is the pitcher. In preparation for the draft, we were sent a couple of key spreadsheets.  The first one had an average rating of all of the kids tryouts assessments, done by the board members.  The second one contained coaches evaluations for some of the players from past seasons. Lots and lots of nothing more than raw data. Time to fire up AP