As Jonah Keri reported yesterday in Grantland, the Houston Astros made an interesting hire or two in the recent past. One of these hires, Sig Mejdal, is the most compelling to me:
“All the pieces of information that you can imagine that we evaluate on an everyday basis to make decisions, we’re going to do that in a systematic way,” said new Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow, who brought Mejdal with him from the St. Louis Cardinals, where Luhnow ran the scouting department and Mejdal served as director of amateur draft analytics. “Utilizing information technology capabilities and pretty sophisticated tools and techniques.”
One such piece of the puzzle, as Keri reported, is the use of biomechanical information, something of a hobby/obsession of Mejdal’s. The idea of this data used to correlate probabilities of injury and performance is an extension of the idea we are pushing across in analytical performance analysis. We can help fill this space by (1) tracking tendency against the correlation and causation fo injury automatically and (2) by taking said tendency analytics and turning it into recommendations for preventative measures.