CINCINNATI — Since the Big Bang of Big Data in baseball, teams like the Cardinals have invested millions and manpower to exponentially expand the amount of information they can accumulate and evaluate when making player decisions.
The larger the harvest of info, the less reliant teams are on outliers, on emotion, and the more risk-aware and “data-driven,” as the Cardinals call themselves, they can become. The sheer quantity of statistics and analysis straining their servers has recently prompted the Cardinals to upgrade how they store data. A team trying to get faster, stronger, and deeper no longer applies only to the roster.