Moneyball Disciples Aim to Upend Japan Baseball for Second Year

The former bankers who used statistical analysis of undervalued players to lead the Yokohama DeNA BayStars to a stunning upset in last year’s Japanese baseball championship aim to show that it wasn’t a fluke.

As fans whet their appetite with this week’s games between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs in Tokyo, Yokohama is honing its indicators which predict how well a pitcher will perform at any given moment.

The team pairs that data from its analytics team with the advice of its scouts to use underrated players at the right moment. That combination led to the decision to have Hayato Horioka pitch against the powerful Yomiuri Giants last fall. Horioka, who was cut by the Giants in the 2023 offseason before he came to play on the BayStars’ developmental squad, had thrown a mere six innings during the regular season. The bet paid off, with Horioka helping to seal the game and Yokohama advancing to the championship.

The BayStars have made similar bets with other players who were previously cut elsewhere. “We believe these players have a lot more to give,” said the team’s director of strategy Kenichi Yoshikawa, who used to work in the financial industry.

Thanks to advances in camera technology and biometric monitors, players and coaches are now bombarded with data — from the rotational speed of a ball to the precise angle of an elbow or knee to the variability of an athlete’s heart rate. From basketball to professional cycling, sports teams around the globe now comb all that information to eke every percentage point’s worth of an advantage.

The BayStars credits their Series win to how they selected and applied that data, helping them overcome rivals with bigger payrolls and caches of data. The team beat the odds by tapping the real-life experiences of coaches, scouts and trainers and their intuition — given short shrift in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game and the movie it inspired — to select which data to focus on, according to Yoshikawa and scouting director Tatsuya Hasegawa, another former banker who used to be involved in mergers and acquisitions.

Statistics provide valuable insights, but people are not merely a collection of data points, Hasegawa said.

“It’s important to think ultra-logically and rationally, but that alone sets you up for failure,” he said. “The players are human, with human emotions. No matter what the stock price should be in theory, or what a company should be, that’s not going to move people and may be wrong in the end.”

“It’s the people on the field who most understand where we fall short,” he said. “I listened to them, because they have the full picture on what’s most important.”

An overhaul of the Japanese professional baseball organizations in 2004 brought in new entrants such as data-loving SoftBank Group Corp. and Rakuten Group Inc., followed by mobile games provider DeNA Co.’s purchase of the BayStars in 2011. That and a global embrace of statistical analysis, helped inspire a wave of bankers, marketers, consultants and programmers to seek careers in sports, more than doubling the number of professionals registered at sports recruiting agency Pacific League Marketing in 2023, compared with 2021, according to Akiko Mori, director of public relations. 

Overall compensation in Japanese sports remains low relative to the US, but the influx of workers from other industries may help close the gap, said Mitsuru Tanaka, an associate professor of sports management at Shobi University. “As skilled workers play a bigger role in sports, that in turn expands the market, creating the start of a virtuous cycle,” he said.

For now, the BayStars are tapping managers’ communications and risk analysis skills honed in the world of finance to guide its approach to data analysis. “How do you find a good answer that combines the quantitative and the qualitative?” Hasegawa said. The team’s strength lies in its ability to do so, he said.