Informs Today: The Podcast Series

Sometimes academics publish and wonder if anyone out there is reading. In the case of Eric Bickel of the University of Texas, he found that one person was. Early in his career Bickel did research on sports analytics/O.R., specifically strategies for baseball players at the plate and their managers. He asked, when should a batter take a pitch? In 2009 he published a related paper in Decision Analysis. Afterward, he received a thank you from a minor league catcher who had begun following his advice. It turns out that that player was Evan_Gattis, now the hot rookie with the Atlanta Braves, and when Sports Illustrated covered Gattis' remarkable first year, it wrote about Bickel's influence on Gattis' hitting. Learn more about this remarkable experience in this new podcast.