AWS Sports

Long considered "America's favorite pastime," MLB has been a leading sport in the adoption of advanced statistics, often called "Sabermetrics," a term coined by statistician Bill James and made famous by the book and movie "Moneyball." But after 143 years of statistic tracking through manual processes, it was time for MLB to eliminate this time-intensive practice by automating data collection and storing it in the cloud, unlocking possibilities never seen before. MLB Statcast, built by data scientists in the Amazon ML Solutions Lab, used Amazon SageMaker to train and deploy a deep neural network to predict stolen base success in real-time by using numerous data including runner's speed and burst, catcher's pop time, pitcher's velocity and handedness, lead-off distance, and the game situation; to predict the change in expected batting average as a batter steps up to the plate based on infield position shift; and to shed light on matchups with pitchers new to a batter based on deep learning pattern recognition.