James Loy:

When we think about our favorite sports and our favorite teams, we often think about the thrill of the competition and the inspiring feats of athletic accomplishment, as well as sports ability to create community and its power to inspire and connect us to one another. But there's another side to sport, a newer side, and it's no exaggeration to say that it's a side that is beginning to mark some very dramatic and very fundamental changes across the entire industry.

Adam Beissel:

It goes without saying that analytics is completely transforming the way that we both watch and play sport.

James Loy:

That's Adam Beissel. He's an assistant professor in the Department of Sport Leadership and Management at Miami University. Dr. Beissel is a sports sociologist who specializes in global sport mega events and global sport politics, as well as the ways in which data and analytics are transforming the games and the events we love. But data and analytics specifically their use in sport in particular are not only transforming this industry, it's also leading to what some have called the analytics revolution that is setting the pace for transformations across large parts of society.

Adam Beissel:

Discursively we hear the Moneyball-ization of X, Y, and Z, and whether it's banking, or retail, or movies, music, other forms of popular culture to mean the use of data analytics and information across any industry to find market inefficiencies.

James Loy:

We'll talk about this Moneyball-ization of society as well as what we may be gaining and what we may be losing with such an emphasis on data today, and about how athletes themselves are dealing with the new pressures this can create and even what it might mean for the rest of us.

Adam Beissel:

Issues around mental health, depression, anxiety for athletes they're not new. They've been there, but perhaps as society shifts, maybe there's an opportunity for athletes like Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka, Kevin Love to articulate their concerns. We can also then look at sport as perhaps maybe being on the front end of creating an awareness in society that then can change society. And so that completes the sort of product and producer of society relationship between sport and broader contemporary US society.

James Loy:

That is all on the way on this episode of Reframe.

James Loy:

Dr. Adam Beissel, thank you for being on the podcast. Let's just start with data and analytics. How much is it now influencing the industry at large today?

Adam Beissel:

Yeah, I think when we look at the impact of data analytics and statistics on the sport industry, we probably want to break it down into two aspects. The first is on the business side. That involves the use of data models and really massive amounts of information to effectively really just changing the way that the business operations of sport are run. On the other side of things, you've got the influence of data and analytics on the on-field performance. That's really what most people think of when it comes to data analytics and sport analytics more broadly. Here we're talking about teams, athletes, fans. The experience of sport is being transformed by a large amounts of information and data. We break it down into a few different parts. The way that rosters are composed, players are identified, tactics on the field or court or ice are implemented. They're being influenced by large amounts of data.

Adam Beissel:

We can look at the NBA for instance and the transformation over the past decade or two of the way that basketball is really contested. 20 years ago, it was quite conventional for a point guard, for instance, to get the ball to a seven-footer in the paint and have them try and score a basket. Now we've seen how really math has taken over this sport and the value of shooting a three-pointer over 1,000 attempts, 10,000 attempts is greater than giving the ball to somebody in the low post and having them try and convert a field goal opportunity. It seems pretty straightforward on the face of it, but that in and of itself, a simple mathematical equation has transformed the way that fans then watch sport and which players dominate, and which players are the ones that the fans identify with, and indeed the team's value when they are trying to put together teams.

James Loy:

So even minor or seemingly obvious database decisions can have deep ramifications?

Adam Beissel:

Yeah.

James Loy:

How much has changed recently in an observable way? I guess fans would probably notice more three-pointers. But with many sports ... I don't know ... baseball might be an example that comes up a lot during our conversation only because I know most about baseball as opposed to other sports. How much might fans notice? When you talk about the way players are recruited or business decisions being made, or even the calculations that are happening in players' heads, are these observable changes that fans might notice necessarily?

Adam Beissel:

Yeah, I think there's a lot of discourse out there right now around the issues that are facing major league baseball and the sport as a whole. The ball is put in play a whole lot less than it used to be over the past 10 or 15 years. Again, it comes back to really looking at the data. A few factors are influencing that outcome. The first is the average miles per hour of a pitch in major league baseball has gone up two to three miles per hour over the past decade or so, and so pitches are coming in faster. They have more movement. They're using data to track spin rate. What that's meant is it's harder for a batter to hit the ball and put the ball in play. Also, defense has gotten significantly better over the past 20 or 30 years. And so once the ball is put in play, it's actually harder to get on base.

Adam Beissel:

So what that's created then is an outcome where hitters have a challenge of once they get the ball in play, getting on base and they're facing tougher pitches than ever before, and so the outcome that they specialize in then is a home run. So what it's meant by using different forms of data and analysis and information is you've got the ball put in play less, less action overall, and although we tend to, as sport fans like home runs and strikeouts, most people would argue that the quality of what we're watching has diminished over time.

James Loy:

Does that mean that it might make sport a less enjoyable experience for certain fans? If they know that math and algorithms and calculations are driving some of the changes that they may notice in their favorite sports, do they like that? Or do they even connect the dots that this may be what's happening, that data might be behind the changes that they're noticing?

Adam Beissel:

It varies sport by sport. In the case of, I would say maybe the NFL, data's being used to give fans what they want. They want scoring, they want speed, and so they've changed the rules to create outcomes that are more arguably pleasurable for fans. Maybe we could even say the same thing about basketball. Fans tend to like spectacular three-pointers from 35 feet away from Stephen Curry. In other sports, the kind of reduction of what tends to be a artistic expression of physical activity is being reduced to a very quantifiable approach, a very technical scientific approach that a lot of the players and the teams and the coaches and managers they lose that uniqueness of what attracts many of us to sport in the first place.

Adam Beissel:

If we focus on baseball, Theo Epstein, the former general manager of the Chicago Cubs, is kind of the poster boy for the adoption of sport analytics. In fact, he's Yale educated, used sport analytics to build the Chicago Cubs up and give them their first World Series in over 100 years. He got to the point recently where he said, "Well, we figured out the way to use data information and knowledge to optimize sport performance." But I actually think, and this is paraphrasing him, it's not actually been great for the game that what we've produced as a result is a less appealing version of the game of baseball. He resigned recently. Now he's working with the Commissioner's Office in major league baseball trying to think through different rules and tweaks in the age of information to pull those reins back a little bit and return baseball to its more enjoyable, artistic, creative impetuses that really formed the sport for a really long time.

James Loy:

Well that makes me wonder if in a way, is there an overemphasis on data? If we use the Chicago Cubs for an example, of course they famously won the World Series a few years ago for the first time in 100 years or whatever, but the last couple of seasons, not so much, right. This season they're doing very poorly. They're back to the Chicago Cubs we've always known and loved.

James Loy:

So if data doesn't really guarantee success, is there too much of an emphasis?

Adam Beissel:

Yeah, we can turn back to Moneyball at the turn of the 21st century, of course, the famous book by Michael Lewis that was then turned into a movie. It's a loose tail of the Oakland Athletics as being what's considered a small market. They didn't have the financial resources as the New York Yankees. And so the Oakland Athletics really had to turn to data information to find marginal gains, to exploit, for lack of a better term, market inefficiencies. For a period of time, what the As found was that baseball players who had a very high on-base percentage, but a low batting average was undervalued in the athletic labor market. They found a lot of those players signed them to really affordable contracts and it produced great success on the field for them.

Adam Beissel:

Now we fast forward over 10, 20 years on a lot of those strategies have been adopted by not only other small market teams, but also the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox and the LA Dodgers. And so what was a marginal gain for them was quickly adopted by teams with more resources.

James Loy:

It's like an arms race.

Adam Beissel:

Yeah, that's right. Now all of the big market teams are as smart. The ones with the massive amounts of resources that can sign players to 100, $200 million contracts are using the same data and information that the Oakland Athletics are. It's been a challenge then for some of those teams that have structural disadvantages in the economics of sport and baseball in particular, to overcome those large market foes.

James Loy:

Moneyball is a great example because I think it's a cultural touchpoint that a lot of people can reference. I was blown away. I saw that recently and I couldn't believe it happened in the 2001/2002 season. Before I saw the movie, if you were to describe the plot to me and ask me to guess when I thought it might've taken place, I would have said, "I don't know 1960s, 1970s." I had baseball cards as a kid in the 80s and 90s, and they always had stats and statistics and data on the back of it, so I always thought this was just a part of sport in general.

James Loy:

Can you talk about how quickly this shift has happened? You say the book is a loose tale of what the movie portrayed, but the general manager had to de-program his staff to think about the game in an entirely different way, which is now seemingly the way that has taken over the entire industry. Can you talk about how quickly and why it happened so quickly that that shift has occurred?

Adam Beissel:

Of course, statistics and baseball are synonymous. There had been statistics being tracked within professional baseball for over a century, but it came to a point where data science and information was able to objectively assess which statistics mattered. What we had found at the end of the 20th century, so 1980s, 1990s was that traditional statistics like average, weren't all that predictive or as predictive of performance as other statistics like on-base percentage. Traditionally in baseball, they would have used slugging percentage, which it gets kind of complicated, but it sort of values a double at the same as a single, but what data analysis and analytics tells us is that a double is a different value. It's not exactly double of what a single is. So the pioneering work of Bill James in the late 1970s, 1980s, really started to think through the ways in which statistics were being used in baseball and place an emphasis on different statistics.

Adam Beissel:

So over that period of the 1980s, 1990s, particularly in baseball when home runs were emerging around the steroid era, there was a change in thinking and ways of knowing to turn toward seemingly objective knowledge acquisition over the subjective assessment of scouts and coaches who use their conventional wisdom of, well that's the way it was, that's the way we've always done it, toward a far more objective, mathematically, scientifically-based approach.

Adam Beissel:

Moneyball depicts that transition. It's a caricature. It's an embellishment. If you look at that famous scene from the Moneyball movie where Brad Pitt, who's playing Billy Beane is in that office and trying to get his scouts to think through, well, hold on a second, why do we do it that way, to question the ways knowledge was always acquired and the ways things were always done, that scene is quite influential. And not just sport, but the ways in which data and analytics are influencing other industries as well, from music, to movies, to television, and a lot of forms of popular culture and business more broadly.

James Loy:

Of course most industries from movies, music, television, other forms of popular culture, and as Adam Beissel just mentioned, business more broadly, have focused on data and analytics for quite some time. Data-driven decision-making has long been an essential part of business success across the board. However, something else has been happening in recent years. The sheer emphasis and priority around data and analytics has escalated dramatically, and in many ways it's been the sport industry that's been pioneering and trailblazing this analytics revolution.

James Loy:

So what is it about the sport industry that somehow is able to chart new courses into the analytical unknown?

Adam Beissel:

Sport is unique in that we have access to large amounts of data in the sports realm that we simply don't have in any other industry. We have some things in music for instance of charts and plays and streams and album sales, similar to movies where we have box office sales and maybe views on Netflix, but sport is almost an open book. It's a great laboratory for economists and analysts to study because they can use it as a very kind of narrow case study if you will, for empirical analysis of different ideas, theories and concepts.

Adam Beissel:

Discursively we hear the Moneyball-ization of X, Y, and Z, and whether it's banking, or retail, or movies, music, other forms of popular culture, Moneyball broadly construed has been sort of appropriated or its meaning has shifted away from a very narrow sense of ... we're talking about a story of the Oakland Athletics in the 2000s to mean the use of data analytics and information across any industry to find market inefficiencies, undervalued assets, or undervalued strategies that can create more marginal gains for businesses across different industries.

James Loy:

What do you think all the implications might mean? What are we losing? What are we gaining? What does this all mean with such an emphasis on data and analytics?

Adam Beissel:

Yeah. I think one of the really interesting things to me, again, I'm looking at sport mostly, but sport is one of those super structural elements of society that's informed by the kind of economic base. So we can turn to other forms of popular culture to understand how data analytics are influencing what we consume. If we look at movies for instance, the percentage of movies that are either superhero movies/franchises, remakes, or sequels, most movies that are out there that are released every year fit one of those three criteria.

Adam Beissel:

In fact, there are only, I think, six movie companies or movie studios out there that actually make films and they make about five to six movies per year. Well, why is that? Well, it becomes quite bottom line driven that they know if they input $100 million, $150 million into a new superhero movie, they can generate a billion dollars in revenue that they can pay back to those investors, their shareholders, and they're guaranteed, for lack of a better term, success and a return on their investment. They know that they can look at demographics information and create a portfolio of movies over the course of a year that targets specific markets.

Adam Beissel:

So you'll have from one studio, for instance, you'll have your superhero movie, you'll have your kid's movie, you'll have your rom-com, you'll have your movie that is designed to win awards, so the one candidate per studio that's put up for the Oscars.

James Loy:

Oscar bait, we call that.

Adam Beissel:

Yeah, Oscar bait. Yeah.

Adam Beissel:

We like to think that, "Oh, there's just a new movie out," but there's an entire science behind what we're seeing. The critique of course, is that what we're losing in this and what we're losing in this, let's just call it blockbuster-ization of movies where you want to have those big summer, big dumb action movies, the superhero movies, or those remakes, or those sequels is you're losing the kind of creativity, the originality of unique scripts and the diversity of different actors and different directors when it becomes quite homogenized to ensure that a movie is going to generate a billion dollars.

Adam Beissel:

I would say that sport, and the criticism of sport is that we're losing that uniqueness, that [foreign language 00:18:10] as we call it. It's a sort of French word to say that artistic expression, that joy, that instantaneous joy that we get from watching sport, that euphoria, maybe there's something also being lost in other forms. You look at what movies are coming out and say, "Okay this weekend it's another superhero movie, or it's another sequel." I love superhero movies and I've seen all the Marvel movies, but I think what's being lost is that originality, that creativity, the opportunity for someone to write a really good original script and create something new that we've never seen before.

James Loy:

Right. Absolutely. My friends and I talk about that all the time. There does seem to be a general sense we've lost many of the cool, unique cult classic movies from the 80s that just don't exist today. In sport, what would be the analogy I suppose, would be unique plays or desperate attempts, things that just won't be tried because it doesn't fit the formula.

Adam Beissel:

Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. Even the way that athletes' bodies look in a way, and how they move. We talked a little earlier about the influence of data analytics on teams themselves. If you lined up all of the left tackles eligible for the next NFL draft, they're pretty much all going to look the same. They're going to run the same 40 times. They're going to be able to bench press the same amount. The way bodies are created, for lack of a better term, through disciplinary regimes of power and training and strength and conditioning, they're quite homogenized.

Adam Beissel:

I think what we're losing perhaps, and this isn't an anti-data crusade by any sense, what we're really talking about is the consequences of what math and what objective science is telling us verse what attracts us in many ways to sport and other forms of physical culture in the first place. That's that uniqueness, that originality. We think back to our favorite athletes of all time and the way they move and the way they look, and maybe we're losing some of that uniqueness. I think that's a valid critique of not only the way the games are played, but also the bodies that produce those games as well.

James Loy:

At this point, you might be wondering like I was about the pressure this can put on those bodies and on their minds. It may be one thing to have a bland or formulaic script, or it's all well and good to use data to optimize supply chain management, but today NBA and NFL athletes train with sensors that monitor their heart rates, reaction times and distance covered. On-field cameras pinpoint tiny details that can boost efficiency. It can almost sound like those dystopian scenarios that affect other industries like delivery services, for instance, where drivers can be subjected to brutally constricted timetables all in the manner of hyper-efficiency.

James Loy:

For athletes, it can be about more than just pure performance. Baseball, for example, has long been known for the mental aspects of the game. Just your basic matchup between a pitcher and a batter requires knowledge of each other's respective strengths and weaknesses. Then pitchers have to multiply that knowledge of an individual batter by nine to account for all the players in a single game, then multiply that number a dozen times over again to account for all the batters they'll face throughout the entire season. But now they also have to consider new variables like ball spin rate and launch angle and exit velocity and barrels, which describe when a ball is hit with the perfect combination of exit velocity and launch angle.

James Loy:

At some point, does it all become too much, too much to keep track of, too much pressure, too much emphasis on perfection and what might some athletes face as a consequence?

Adam Beissel:

I think that's a great question because I would say as a sports sociologist that sport is a product and producer of society. In a way it reflects what's happening in wider society. So in the case, I think you brought up data tracking, tracking time off, and how quick you can make your deliveries or how quick you can pick things from the warehouse, there's an analogy then to think through what an athletic laborer is experiencing in relation to its management. Here we're talking about the owners. A lot of people will point out, well these are million dollar athletes, but we've got million dollar athletes in some cases, not all cases and billionaire owners. So we're just simply talking about that same labor/management relation, but just on a different scale.

Adam Beissel:

There is an overlap between the pressures that an Amazon worker is facing for instance, and how their bodies are really subjected to disciplinary regimes of power in picking from the warehouse and making deliveries super quick, to the baseball player who is trying to satisfy the coach and management and live up to their player contract by emphasizing launch angle, spin rate, or any of these metrics that are being used to define their output.

James Loy:

Does that lead to some of the pressures we've seen athletes face? Most recently and famously, Simone Biles dropped out of her Olympic events because of stress and pressure and mental issues. Are people just unable to handle the pressure in various situations now?

Adam Beissel:

We can look at it from a multitude of perspectives. My colleagues in Sport Leadership and Management would have lots of thoughts on the psychology aspect of it. For me as a sociologist, when I'm trying to think through is how those bodies and those minds are produced by a series of economic, social, cultural, political, technological forces, that those bodies are socially constituted, that they're culturally produced rather than being a biologically determined entity, that they are a product of their environment, for lack of a better term. We're seeing a lot of athletes now feeling comfortable perhaps coming out and speaking about those pressures. Whether we define those broadly as mental health issues, or explain them as anxiety or depression, we probably don't have the vocabulary to properly explain what we're seeing.

Adam Beissel:

We brought up Simone Biles and what surrounded her during the Olympic games. That also then gives us the opportunity to look at sport as both being a product of society and a producer of society. People are learning about mental health through their consumption of the Simone Biles story, and what the pressures are faced by Biles and her own intersectional identity and her past similar to, in some cases, an Amazon worker or an Apple worker, or an educator on for a state university, there are overlaps there. We can think through those pressures that an athlete is facing and relate to them in our own lives.

Adam Beissel:

The difference of course, is that immediately following every competition or every time an athletic laborer applies their trade, they have to answer for their performance. I try and think through this, what would happen if at the end of every one of my lectures, I had to leave the classroom and there was a gathering of press reporters from the school newspaper, and from the Cincinnati Inquirer asking, "So Dr. Beissel, how do you think you did today? Oh, you really messed up that line here. You didn't answer this question really well."

Adam Beissel:

If I can relate to that, the toll that it might take on me, I think if we think about that in our own lives and we try and relate to the pressures that athletes are under to not only perform, but then to explain their performance, both their successes and their failures, immediately following the events as required in many cases by the sport leagues themselves or the governing institutions, I think that adds a whole layer of complexity that I can never imagine trying to do that in my own life.

James Loy:

Right. Right. Also, to bring this back to not only those mental pressures, but how they're connected to other aspects of data and analytics and technology, the French Open, I saw started using real-time popularity metrics on social media. I can't imagine how that might get in your head and might affect how you would play.

Adam Beissel:

Yeah. You brought up the French Open. We recently saw Naomi Osaka echoing similar concerns to the ones that I just made around having to explain a way her performance immediately following her competitions. For her, she wanted to opt out of those interviews. She elected to leave the tournament because of the pressures, not only just of her performance, but of the expectation of fans and sponsors and coaches and her own expectations, and trying to manage all of those.

Adam Beissel:

The good thing I would say is that we're finally perhaps having a reckoning or an ability to speak about these things that have been confronting athletes for a really long time. Issues around mental health, depression, anxiety, for athletes they're not new. They've been there, but perhaps as society shifts, maybe there's an opportunity for athletes like Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka, Kevin Love to articulate their concerns. We can also then look at sport as perhaps maybe being on the front end of creating an awareness in society that then can change society. And so that completes the sort of product and producer of society relationship between sport and broader contemporary US society.

James Loy:

Adam Beissel is an assistant professor of Sport Leadership and Management at Miami University, where he has a lot more to say about the global impacts of sport. In fact, next week we're going to share a special bonus episode that continues our conversation with Dr. Beissel where we'll look ahead to the increasing convergence of technology, economics, and new modes of media consumption and what that might all mean for the future of sport.

Adam Beissel:

We're at this tipping point where it'll probably happen in the next five to 10 years, but there will be a sport league that goes fully streaming. What's interesting for me to think through and I speak with my students about a lot is how might a sport change or the way that we consume sport in an actual stadium change if the rights are now on a streaming service where you don't have to have built-in ad breaks? So what happens if Amazon 20 years from now has the broadcast rights of the NFL?

James Loy:

That, and more on a special bonus episode next week on the Reframe Podcast.