This material is exclusively prepared for Ringle Customers Material for your English session Moneyball and NC Dinos: NC Dinos’ strategy and winning [source: https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2020/10/25/sports/Baseball/regular-season-NC-Dinos- pennant/20201025134600454.html] 0 본 자료는 저작권 법에 의해 보호되는 저작물로, Ringle 사에 저작권이 존재합니다. 해당 자료에 대한 무단 복제/배포를 금하며, 해당 자료로 수익을 얻거나 이에 상응하는 혜택을 누릴 시 Ringle 과 사전 협의가 없는 경우 고소/고발 조치 될 수 있습니다. This material is exclusively prepared for Ringle Customers [Summary in English] I. NC Dinos NC Dinos of the Korean professional baseball league clinched their first regular-season title. ● In 2020, for the first time in the club's nine-year history, NC Dinos won the KBO's regular-season title. In their inaugural season in 2013, Dinos finished seventh out of nine teams. Then they made the postseason, finishing third twice, second and fourth once each in the next four years. They suffered through their worst season in 2018 by finishing dead last but bounced back to make the postseason again in fifth place in 2019. This year, Dinos won the regular-season title with the most extended single-season top rank in the league's history. ● With firm support from its CEO and owner Kim Taek-jin, a Korean IT guru, NC scouted Park Sok-min for a whopping 9.6 billion won in 2016. Nevertheless, in 2018, the team's performance fell to the bottom, and the manager resigned. As the replacement, NC appointed Lee Dong-wook, who demonstrated impressive data analysis as the team's fielding coach. ● Lee was rarely mentioned during the replacement process. However, his long experience as a fielding coach equipped him with a detailed picture of every player's caliber and characteristics, from starters and backups to regular lineup players. Lee's comprehensive analysis and effective implementation of data in both training and games fit well with the business style of the parent company, NCSoft, a prominent online and mobile game developer. ● Due to his little-known career history as a player, Lee Dong-wook's appointment made headlines. Korea's professional baseball league has a full roster of managers and coaches with legendary records as players. His career batting average as a professional hitter for Lotte Giants was .22, with five career home runs and a career stolen base record of only one. Lee never stood out in any segment of the hitting category. ● He turned to coaching when he was 29. Moreover, even among coaches, his fielding coach specialty had had little chance to come into the spotlight. Unlike his player career, however, he was able to make himself stand out as a coach. After he joined Dinos, the 1 본 자료는 저작권 법에 의해 보호되는 저작물로, Ringle 사에 저작권이 존재합니다. 해당 자료에 대한 무단 복제/배포를 금하며, 해당 자료로 수익을 얻거나 이에 상응하는 혜택을 누릴 시 Ringle 과 사전 협의가 없는 경우 고소/고발 조치 될 수 있습니다. This material is exclusively prepared for Ringle Customers team has made significant improvements and topped the league's defense index for four consecutive years. NC has succeeded in creating a culture where data analysis and its implications for the game are common and natural. ● The appointment of Lee Dong-wook, who is brilliant in data analysis and utilization, maximized the synergy between the data analysis team, the players, and the coaching staff. NC has been actively applying analysis outcomes to the field. For example, NC used batting data to design a specific training program to reduce ground balls. Such an approach paid off. NC topped the home run ranking in 2019. ● Ever since its inception, NC has focused on developing and advancing a strategy analysis system. NC developed the competency analytics tool D-Locker and began providing up- to-date records, videos, and analyses of every KBO player on the mobile platform. NC provided tablet devices to its players, including bench players, and encouraged them to take advantage of the data anytime, anywhere. Adding various tracking data, such as the pitching analysis system, NC kept making efforts to improve D-Locker's analytical ability. ● NC understood that mere recording of data, even if accurately analyzed, would not boost players' performance and the team's overall rank in the league. Whether it be WAR or OPS, nothing could be done unless the players open their minds and the existing field culture changed. NC made efforts to listen to the needs of the field—they communicated in the very language of the field. ● NC assigned analysts who have a player background to the data team so that their know- how and experience can blend naturally. Also, by providing sabermetrics training to field personnel and helping them understand the system's mathematical and statistical advantages, NC created a cultural bedding on which players were ready to adopt the data team's analyses. ● NC fostered internal empathy and trust that the data analysis team was not there to replace the coaching staff, but to help the team do their jobs through statistical and mathematical techniques. It was clear that the ultimate goal was to play a better game. 2 본 자료는 저작권 법에 의해 보호되는 저작물로, Ringle 사에 저작권이 존재합니다. 해당 자료에 대한 무단 복제/배포를 금하며, 해당 자료로 수익을 얻거나 이에 상응하는 혜택을 누릴 시 Ringle 과 사전 협의가 없는 경우 고소/고발 조치 될 수 있습니다. This material is exclusively prepared for Ringle Customers ● With this accord among them, coaches, players, and data analysts watched videos, discussed data, and searched for solutions. The team stepped forward to overcome distrust. Instead of insisting on the superiority of statistics, the data analysts focused on providing meaningful insight into the on-site decision-making process by figuring out reliable probabilities. ● In 2019, NC once again signaled its strong desire to win, splashing 12.5 billion won, which was the second highest amount spent that year, in recruiting Yang Eui-ji. Behind the scenes of the bold investment was the data analysis. Besides the sums of home runs or batting averages, NC used additional stats, such as on-base percentages, slugging percentages, and deviations in performance per season or opposing pitchers. Leveraging data analysis, NC selected athletes who would play a vital role in the team's victory scenario. ● In the upcoming Korean Series, NC, the regular-season title champion, will face the six- time winner of the series, Doosan. It gets more interesting to see whether NC's data-based baseball will nail down a double-header of the regular season and the Korean Series. II. Moneyball Billy Beane, who had wondered for a long time about the scouts' assessment of his “promising talent,” made a fresh attempt to advance amid Oakland Athletics' limited financial situation. ● The first case of data-based club management in US professional baseball was the Oakland Athletics. The Oakland team's general manager Billy Beane, once a high school prospect but having failed in Major League Baseball, introduced an innovative methodology of adopting statistical and mathematical data analysis more than 20 years ago. ● Billy Beane, who joined Oakland in 1998, was in agony after his team lost the 2001 American League Division Series to the New York Yankees. The club could not afford to hold its top players for the next season because of its limited budget. ● On one scout visit to the Cleveland Indians, Beane met Paul DePodesta, a Harvard graduate with a degree in economics and special assistant to its general manager. Upon DePodesta's radical idea of taking a sophisticated sabermetric approach to scouting and 3 본 자료는 저작권 법에 의해 보호되는 저작물로, Ringle 사에 저작권이 존재합니다. 해당 자료에 대한 무단 복제/배포를 금하며, 해당 자료로 수익을 얻거나 이에 상응하는 혜택을 누릴 시 Ringle 과 사전 협의가 없는 경우 고소/고발 조치 될 수 있습니다. This material is exclusively prepared for Ringle Customers analyzing players, which was a completely different way from other scouts, Beane tested DePodesta's theory by asking whether DePodesta would have drafted him. ● When Beane graduated from high school, most of the major league scouts considered Beane promising. Beane was one of the first-round picks in the MLB draft in 1980. However, his career in the major leagues was disappointing; he appeared in 148 games for nine years in the league, which, on average, held 162 games per year. ● DePodesta said that, based on his method of assessing player value, he would not have drafted him until the ninth round. Beane, who had asked himself for a long time about the discrepancy between his externally estimated value and his actual performance in Major League Baseball, hired DePodesta as an assistant and began focusing on sabermetric principles to obtain undervalued players. Billy Beane's approach paid off: finding indicators that had been overlooked but were essential to winning created a competitive advantage. By recruiting undervalued players and letting them outperform expectations, Beane's approach fundamentally changed baseball. ● Before then, the recruitment, development, and management of athletes depended entirely on experience and intuition. Beane did not follow the prevailing practice of focusing on players' physical builds and batting averages. Instead, he used sabermetrics, which selects players based on on-base percentage. He recruited players who were undervalued and not given a chance to play or those who were released from their team. ● Every scout selected players based on their physique, number of home runs, batting average, intuition, and experience. Managers preferred to have a traditional lineup based on the same principles as the scouts. They vehemently opposed changing to data analysis or allowing players recommended by sabermetrics to take part in games.