"Big Date Baseball" and "The Sports Gene"

Two days after running a half marathon,
I'm on an intellectual mode.
I need intellectual stimuli every now and then
in order to keep motivated on running.
Man cannot live solely by bread for his body.
He needs bread for his brains too.

I have two books right in front of me.
One is "Big Data Baseball"  by Travis Sawchik,
and the other is "The Sports Gehe" by David Epsten.

I've read the first ten pages or so of both books.
Both in terms of style and content,
I intuitively prefer the latter to the former.
But of course it's too early to make any fair judgement.

Originally both of the books were recommended to me by a student of mine.
Mr. I is one of my students.
He went to the Rio Olympics with Japan's national team of table tennis.
He is an athletic analyst whose job is to collect data about the sport,
analyze them, and make hypotheses about correlations between certain factors and performances (as I understand it).
If you are an avid tennis watcher, you probably notice
that data are shown to TV watchers every now and then
of where each player's services fell,
and where he or she received his or her opponent's services, and so on.
These data, although they are not allowed to be given to the players during the game,
are immediately analyzed once the game is over,
and players together with the help of analysts and coaches try to come up with means to counter their opponent's winning formula.

According to Mr. I, however, application of data to the enhancement of players' performance is still at an embryonic stage. Plus, Mr. I says, even if some exciting things should be found as a result of data analysis in table tennis, things happen so quickly in the sport, it is very difficult for players to make adjustments according to revealed findings.

Anyhow, his point was that the future of his role as a table tennis data analyst was unclear, but nonetheless he reiterated that the field of data-analysis in sports was fascinating, and he recommended the two books mentioned above before he left school.

I am going to read both books alternately for a while, and would like to share with you what I find interesting along the way.