CMU, sports analytics good fit
School plays host to key conference over weekend
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Rob Engel calls it the bar test.
No, he’s not talking about the exam hopeful lawyers have to take in order to practice law. Engel’s test is more a gut check about whether advanced baseball statistics on a TV screen would make sense to fans watching a ballgame at a noisy bar.
Would the stat make sense to the average fan? What if the sound on the TV is off? Is a newer stat like catch probability self-explanatory?
“Kind of like telling a joke,” said Engel, director of baseball engineering at MLB Advanced Media. “You don’t want to explain the punchline of a joke. Otherwise, it’s probably not a good joke.”
Engel, 29, helped build out the back-end software of MLBAM’s most popular tools, such as Statcast and Gameday, and leads a team tasked with capturing and distributing data to MLB’s 30 teams. As one of the league’s top software developers, Engel, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s software engineering master’s program, was named MLBAM’s 2014 employee of the year for his initial buildout of Statcast. He’ll discuss his work at the first CMU Sports Analytics Conference Saturday and Sunday on the university’s campus.
The conference, which is open to the public and jointly organized by CMU’s Statistics & Data Science department and the Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Club, highlights the university’s contributions to the field of sports analytics. works for the NBA (CMU held a conference focused Brian Burke, an analytics on hockey analytics specialist at ESPN, will in 2014.) give the keynote address.
In addition to Engel, various The conference also features sports analytics experts presentations from academics connected to CMU and Pittsburgh and industry experts, will appear at the a poster session, a conference, including: demonstration of Yurko
Analytics experts for the and Horowitz’s football software Pirates (Bob Cook), Steelers and a mixer. The Tartan (Karim Kassam) and Penguins Data Science Cup, a data (Sam Ventura); science competition for Buddy Clark, cofounder CMU undergraduates and of bat-tracking high school students, will company Diamond Kinetics follow Sunday. and professor at Pitt; Priya While sports analytics Narasimhan, CEO and conferences are sprouting founder of YinzCam and up across the country, organizers professor at CMU; CMU say this gathering alumnus Sandy Weil, director provides an opportunity to of sports analytics at highlight and bring together Kroenke Sports & Entertainment; the work of CMU students, Peter Carr, a research alumni and faculty. scientist at Disney “From my perspective, I Research; Pitt faculty member generally wanted to show Konstantinos Pelechrinis; off all of the great stuff that CMU statistics graduate everybody affiliated with student Ron Yurko, one Carnegie Mellon and Carnegie of the conference organizers; Mellon sports analytics and CMU alumnus are doing,” said Rebecca Maksim Horowitz, who Nugent, associate department head and director of undergraduate studies in CMU’s statistics department. “It’s clear that Carnegie Mellon is building quite the name for itself, but it’s been spread out.”
Yurko said the focus on technology also distinguishes it from other conferences. Engel is an example of that intersection: A native of the San Jose, Calif., area, he played catcher and pitcher at Macalester College in Minnesota, where he majored in computer science, and got his master’s in software engineering at CMU’s Silicon Valley campus in 2011.
When he started looking into careers in software engineering, Engel didn’t think he would be able to merge computer science and baseball, assuming baseball jobs were limited to the field or the front office. The spring before Engel graduated from CMU, his father suggested he take a look at the careers section of MLB’s website. Lo and behold, Engel stumbled on an engineering job at MLBAM in New York, a job he described as “the perfect marriage” of his interests.
Now based in San Francisco, Engel leads a 12-person group tasked with engineering MLB’s back-end software and capturing and distributing baseball data to fans, websites, vendors and teams. Anytime you see advanced baseball metrics on your computer, phone or TV — whether 3D graphics that show a pitch’s path or data on exit velocity and launch angle — you can thank MLBAM, the league’s media arm. One graphic (shown above) uses yellow bands to illustrate the probability that a baserunner on third will score on a sacrifice fly, based on the outfielder’s arm, the baserunner’s speed and so on.
Baseball has pioneered the way on analytics, so it’s inevitable this type of technology will continue its reach into homes, bars, stadiums and front offices. For example, Engel’s team is working on augmented reality software that would allow fans at stadiums to click on their iPads and see a baserunner’s chance of stealing second base given the pitcher/catcher combination.
“The idea is we can make it a personalized broadcast in the stadium,” Engel said.
The CMU Sports Analytics Conference starts at 8 a.m. Saturday at Baker Hall, 4909 Frew Street, Oakland. Registration is free for high school students, $15 for undergrad/graduate students and $75 for the general public. Complete details are at www.cmusportsanalytics.com/conference.