Tippie Magazine (Summer 2021) - Tippie College of Business

BLACK AND GOLD MONEYBALL
BY TOM SNEE
Sam Bornstein grew up loving baseball, but baseball
didn’t love him back. Not at first, anyway.
He played the game for years while growing up in
Wheaton, Ill. But baseball is hard and he was not blessed
with great skills, so his on-field career came to an end
after high school.
Bornstein was always mathematically inclined, though, and he started paying attention
to analytics, the advanced statistics that have taken over the game since former Oakland
A’s general manager Billy Bean published Moneyball in 2003. In the book, Bean explains how
he crunched numbers in new and innovative ways to make the small-market, low-payroll A’s
perennial contenders for baseball’s playoffs. As a result, numbers like launch angle, spin rate,
and Wins Above Replacement are now as important as batting average, RBIs, and ERA.
“I’ve always been an analytical person, and meshing analytics with my love for baseball
made sense,” he says. “In high school, I realized this is what I was meant to do, and I’ve
never looked back.”
Bornstein loves that stuff. He came to Iowa as an undergrad to major in Business Analytics
and Information Systems (BAIS) in the Tippie College of Business. He joined the Hawkeye
baseball team as a student manager as a freshman, then started its analytics department
as a junior in 2019. Now a first-year student in the Master of Science in Business Analytics
(MSBA) program, he heads a unit for Iowa baseball that’s grown to 12 members and helps
Head Coach Rick Heller make planning and strategy decisions.
Analytics has become such an important part of a baseball team’s success that most
teams are continually beefing up their staffs to find that one obscure number that will
give them a slight edge over everyone else. Bornstein hopes to latch on with one of them
when he graduates with his MSBA in December. This summer he’s working for Driveline
Baseball in Kent, Wash., as a research and development pitching floor analyst intern.
“It’s all about helping the athletes get better, giving the coaching staff information they
need to make good decisions, and finding ways to win games,” he says. •
DYK?
Wins Above Replacement, or WAR, is a measure of a player’s value in all aspects of the game.
It helps determine how many more wins the player would make in contrast to a comparable
minor league player or available free agent.
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