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by Patrick Ancipink
Director of Product Marketing, NetQoS.
Baseball has forever been a game adorned with statistics. Have you ever spent a rainy day with the Baseball Encyclopedia as a kid – or as an adult?
However, the dawn of the Moneyball age elevated a wide range of statistics from playground debate to the general manager’s office and contract negotiation. Specifically, Moneyball strategies, which downplay the importance of traditional, 19th century baseball statistics (runs batted in) for ones that modern statistical analysis was more indicative of success (on-base percentage, slugging percentage) has helped teams like the Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays contend for the World Series.
However, even with the Moneyball philosophy, there was still a significant blind spot when it came to quantifying performance in fielding, a traditionally hard to quantify area. Sportsvision, the company best known for bringing us the “first down line” on televised football games is, according to the New York Times, making an attempt to do so.
Which shortstops reach the hard-hit grounders up the middle? Which base runners take the fastest path from first base to third? Which right fielders charge the ball quickest and then throw the ball hardest and most accurately? Although the game will continue to answer to forces like wind, glaring sun and the occasional gnat swarm, a good deal of time-honored guesswork will give way to more definite measurements — continuing the trend of baseball front offices trading some traditional game-watching scouts for video and statistical analysts.
So that’s cool, but beyond my interest as a baseball fan, why am I writing about this? Because I was struck how fielding percentage is analogous to up/down fault management in its limitations.
The primary job of a fielder is to turn batted balls into outs: an infielder by gobbling up ground balls and throwing them to a base, and an outfielder by catching as many fly balls as possible. But errors (and the rate of not making errors, which is fielding percentage) measure only a fielder’s glaring mistakes — they ignore the more important matter of who reaches balls that others do not.
Using fault statistics for measuring network performance has similar limitations. Uptime/downtime is a measurement, but not a proxy for overall performance. Removing blind spots and quantifying performance is exactly what NetQoS is all about.
Also, I was working on a proposal for combining IT and baseball into a professional competitive sport I call “Packetball.” If any of you out there knows Hal and Hank Steinbrenner’s phone number, can you let me know in the comments section? Thanks.
