Sports Intelligence in Cuban baseball

Abstract

The analysis of data using recent advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs), is an indispensable tool for decision making in different sectors of society. Sport is one of the leading industries in its use. Currently, professional sports teams present Departments of Analysis aimed at the study of the opposite, self-analysis, scouting and other functions offering scientific support to decision-making. Baseball is a highly complex collective sport. This complexity favors the extraction of a large amount of data of various kinds related to the game, which makes baseball one of the most complete sports in terms of statistics. These characteristics have made baseball the protagonist of the application of data analysis and ICTs as ways to obtain competitive advantages. The teams that participate in the National Baseball Series, the most demanding competition in Cuban baseball, do not have the necessary support in terms of analyzing their own information and those of their rivals. This undermines the results and does not allow the overcoming of the directors and players as far as tactical thinking is concerned. To meet the needs mentioned above, this paper describes the implementation of the principles and methods of Sports Intelligence in Cuban baseball, supported by ICTs and sabermetrics. In this sense, the document objective is to improve the decision-making processes in Cuban baseball based on sports intelligence, for which the document will outline the first indispensable theoretical steps.