Analysing cricket through a baseball lens

The arrival of the India squad in Florida this weekend has brought in huge throng of supporters hoping to spur a new age for neutral venue cricket possibilities in the USA. But their presence is also drawing attention from an unlikely source with a series of Major League Baseball data miners camping out in Lauderhill for the weekend to see how they can bring their analytics to another sport.

Eleven members of MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM), who help curate data for the online services known as MLB Statcast and MLB At Bat, have set up a trailer at the Central Broward Regional Park to collect as much player and ball-tracking data as possible in an effort to bring their new age stats approach from baseball to the cricket.

“We’re doing some research on how can we apply our Statcast data acquisition technologies to other sports, i.e. cricket, because baseball and cricket are very similar to each other,” says Kevin Prince, a broadcast analyst with MLBAM who is originally from Kent, England, but has been working in the USA for more than 30 years. “So that’s fundamentally why we’re here, to gather all the player-tracking and ball-tracking data hopefully to provide a system that can provide the Statcast type of analysis that we’ve perfected for baseball and hopefully provide that for cricket.”

As part of their technical setup at the stadium in Lauderhill, the crew has set up six cameras mounted to the floodlight towers on the west side of the ground as well as a radar above the sightscreen on the north side. The cameras track player movement while the radar tracks ball movement. The crew had visited Lauderhill last month for the Caribbean Premier League and their interest was sufficiently piqued to make a return for the India-West Indies T20s to see what they can apply from similar baseball principles.

“It’s the fourth-generation stats, more performance driven on the field,” says Per Von Rosen, a technical manager with Statcast originally from Stockholm, Sweden, who came to the USA last year but has previously done cricket analysis in England. “So how hard did you pitch, how hard did you hit, exit velocity of the ball coming off the bat. In fielding, the route efficiency taken to catch the ball.

“So we know where a fielder was when the play started, we know where he caught the ball and therefore we can know which path he took and was it a straight line, did he deviate from that straight path and how fast did he react to the ball off the bat, all of these things. It’s basically putting together his athletic capabilities. Some guys always happen to be in the right place to make the catch and now we’re putting numbers on that.”

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