Essay on Baseball: Major League Baseball and Innovation

Submitted By tmasumi
Words: 315
Pages: 2

A culture of innovation and its impact on society is vital. As technology and innovation change the way we do things, the role of an institution to promote and sustain change and advancement becomes paramount. Some, like Apple, do a great job. Others, like Kodak, do not promote and implement innovation in a timely fashion and lose their market share. Over the last 15 years, a seismic change in how baseball teams are constructed and measured has taken place, with technology and innovation central to it . This great American sport for many years evaluated it players and success rate on the same customary rubric it always was taught to evaluate and promote. Baseball owners and GM’s promoted a conventional culture that since its inception in the late nineteenth century, emphasized Homeruns, Runs Batted In, and Wins and Loses as the backdrop for analysis for its teams (companies) and its players (employees). Major League Baseball (institution) and most of its GM’s and owners attempted to find and pay players based on mainly those long revered statistics and metrics. Technology and innovation have led to a new generation of GM’s assessing the game and its players through a new rubric entitled Sabermetrics . This paper will look at the role innovation (sabermetrics) has played in changing how the game is assessed, while at the same time addressing how Major League Baseball and its key stakeholders have adjusted to the role of this innovation and its new metrics based analysis.