While reporting The MVP Machine, my book about baseball’s player-development revolution, I visited Driveline Baseball, a hotbed of data-driven development, and had my pitching mechanics motion tracked by an array of 15 cameras. The NBA debuted its own ball-and-player-tracking system in the 2013-14 season, followed by the NFL last year and the NHL later this year. MLB introduced an automated pitch-tracking system in all big-league ballparks in 2008 and upgraded to complete player-tracking in 2015. For another, though, ball sports are increasingly becoming digitized. For one thing, owners in more established sports leagues sometimes double dip in upstart esports leagues: The Overwatch League’s New York Excelsior, Los Angeles Gladiators, and Boston Uprising, along with the Fusion, are all parts of the portfolios of ownership groups that also hold franchises in one or more of the four largest leagues in the U.S. Just as esports have long mirrored traditional sports-right down to the star players who sabotage themselves by punching, slamming, or throwing something in frustration-traditional sports are starting to resemble esports in some respects. “It really kind of tells the story of London Spitfire’s season just with a single metric, because as outstanding as Profit was in the finals, their ability to even get to the season playoffs was largely due to Birdring’s turnaround,” Trautman says. But Birdring, who had been at about 110 before his injury, dropped down to 70 while he was playing through pain before bouncing back up toward the end of the season. According to PIR’s designer, Overwatch League stats producer Ben Trautman, Profit’s PIR-a single number that purports to capture player performance in team fights, expressed on a scale where 100 is average-held steady at roughly 120 until spiking to 140 in the playoffs.
#Overwatch stats full#
But by the playoffs, he was back to full strength, forming a devastating tag team with another London DPS player, finals MVP Joon-yeong “Profit” Park.Ī new Blizzard-produced player-performance metric, player impact rating (PIR), which was unveiled on Wednesday, aims to express stories like the Spitfire’s in statistical terms. A midseason wrist injury-which, as Birdring later revealed, he incurred by slamming his hand against his desk while playing the platformer Getting Over It-compromised his performance (when he was able to play at all) in the middle of the regular season. London’s up-down-up trajectory mirrored that of one of the team’s DPS (damage per second, or high-damage-dealing) players, Ji-hyeok “Birdring” Kim. In the playoffs, though, they went 6-1, dispatching both Los Angeles clubs before sealing the Fusion’s fate. After going a combined 15-5 against their opponents in the then-12-team (now 20-team) league in the first two regular-season stages, they slumped to a combined 9-11 in stages 3 and 4 and entered the playoffs with a worse overall record than four of their competitors in the six-team playoff field. The Spitfire followed a perplexing path to the playoffs. In the inaugural season of the Overwatch League, the Blizzard-operated esports venture that launched last year with a four-stage season that ran from January through July, the London Spitfire recovered from a second-half swoon to defeat the Philadelphia Fusion in the finals in front of a loud crowd at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center.
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