Baseball has always been a game of numbers. With modern technology, the detail of data that coaches receive is getting more and more specific.
During the WVU Olympic Sports Coaches Show, head baseball coach Steve Sabins discussed how he uses data to prepare his team for opponents.
“We analyze thoroughly, we’re gonna prepare better than anybody in the country, it’s just what information you give to the kids that you have to be really careful about because 18-22 year olds with unlimited amounts of data is not necessarily a good thing. You want hungry kids that are having fun trying to compete to the best of their ability,” Sabins said.
With the amount of data that comes in, Sabins himself cannot handle all of it. He went on to discuss how he has built a coaching staff of sharp-minded people who can interpret and assist in using the data to their advantage.
“Baseball is a game of mass amounts of data, analytics, and statistics so over the course of the last five or six years, we’ve been trying to build a team of people that are a lot smarter than me, that understand those things and basically can dumb it down and explain, build scouting reports and then we can use that data to build a good game plan,” Sabins said.
Director of operations Joey Cuomo, who has a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics and statistics, director of analytics Nathanael Rorie, who has a bachelor’s degree in data science, and director of pitching Christopher Reilly, who has experience at the MLB level, are all members of the staff who assist Sabins in data collection.
