The MVP Machine: How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players

✍️ Ben Lindbergh

That is a book for baseball nerds. It is about how science, technology and data are being used in the sport and how it evolved in the last decade in particular. As the title say, the book is focused on the nonconformists (too much Trevor Bauer, though) who challenged the well established (and most of the times full of non-written rules) baseball tradition. Baseball is probably the most ‘resistant to change’ sport in the United States.

The book is much more deep than the ‘Moneyball philosophy’, as the focus is not finding the hidden gems using data but to develop the talents. The book ranges from high-speed, high-res cameras, wearables, tracking devices to ‘soft’ aspects such as mindfulness and growth mindset. The book as a whole was a bit too technical to my taste and too heavily on testimonials and fragments of interviews. I really think that adding some charts and some figures would have helped me navigating through all the stats and provide some visual aid of the player’s ‘before/after’. It is said the a picture is worth a thousand words and in the case of a data analysis book, a couple of data visualizations would have been great. The glossary and the list of acronyms in the end are a good aid to the reader. Overall it is a good book, but I’d recommend only to those that are heavily followers and fans of baseball.