When Adam Jones crushed a Hector Rondon fastball -- 98 mph and up at the letters -- for a game-tying home run in the World Baseball Classic this spring, Americans cheered, Venezuelans sank, and one 31-year-old in Caracas had a unique worry:
Did I do that?
That man was Octavio Hernandez, a Venezuelan journalist with a sabermetric background who had been commissioned to produce scouting reports of the Venezuelan team's opponents. Using PITCHf/x profiles (at Brooks Baseball), Statcast data (at Baseball Savant), the wisdom he'd gleaned from a decade reading American stathead sites and a bit of his own original research, he delivered dozens of reports modeled on a Detroit Tigers scouting template that had been slipped to him.