LA Dodgers Digital Trading Room by Marc Maleh, Damian Boyd-Boffa, Gene Perelson, and team

Baseball is arguably the most quantifiable data driven professional sport in the world. From the inception of the game, player performance has been quantified and the analysis has only grown more sophisticated with time to determine value and project both athletic and financial performance. The new management for the LA Dodgers has embraced a data-driven approach to reshaping one of baseball’s most legendary clubs. They sought a solution that could integrate the traditional scouting techniques that had defined the team’s recruitment for generations with the new breed of statistical analysis that has given rise to the term moneyball. The front office needed an efficient process to capitalize on the wealth of information inundating the staff; from the team’s internal proprietary scouting reports and medical data to the real-time flow of player salary and performance data provided by our data partner. In the highly competitive world of professional baseball operations, the objective was to make the data work for the team and, ultimately, provide a competitive advantage in how it approached transactions in the sport’s volatile player marketplace. The approach was to build an application framework that would allow the team to interpret varied player data sources and to develop and maintain a proprietary visualization system. Unlocking the raw player data first required our team to engineer a database linking separate, secured data structures, then develop APIs that enabled more sophisticated queries than previously possible. To achieve this, we needed to understand the existing data structures and consolidate them into a usable form that could be rendered through systematic design. Our data engineer worked with our front-end developers to create an efficient method for the application to call the data and display it within the interface. Our user experience, visual and information designers conceived a flexible system that could provide simple, clear results to complex queries. The execution balanced information density and legibility both on the desktop experience and the 17-screen display. This comprised the main innovation of the system: the ability to search, access, and display player information that had previously required analysts to manually gather, compile and display in printed form.