“Moneyball”—both the 2003 book by Michael Lewis and the 2011 Brad Pitt movie—hammered home the growing importance of analytics in Major League Baseball. In the years since, the data arms race has continued to surge with each passing season—including 2023, when the Texas Rangers finally won their first World Series championship.

Now, after a disappointing 2024 season, the Rangers are doubling down on data to get back into winning form. New York City-based Astronomer, a leading data orchestration and observability platform powered by Apache Airflow, announced Tuesday that the Rangers are utilizing the company’s Astro solution to optimize the team’s use of data analytics “to gain a competitive edge both on and off the baseball field.”

Astronomer noted that the Rangers “were an early visionary in the sports world by incorporating data orchestration and Astro to start analyzing biomechanical performance, weather conditions, and vast amounts of data from technologies like Hawk-Eye’s video and visualization tracking, while also utilizing AI models to evaluate text-based data such as scouting reports.” The company says the use of Astro helped the Rangers “stay competitive” and ultimately contributed to the team’s 2023 World Series championship, its first in over 60 years of existence.

Cutting down processing times from 20 minutes to ‘just a few’

Oliver Dykstra

According to Astronomer, by 2015, the Rangers had a “small but effective data team” using an on-premises data stack to manage the team’s growing data needs. But as analytics were tasked with doing more and more, data demands increased and “bottlenecks began to appear, especially in real-time game analytics.” Tools like Cron and Astronomer’s Airflow “struggled to scale, leading to delays in providing actionable insights.”

Oliver Dykstra, full-stack data engineer for the Texas Rangers, says those delays in the team’s live-game analytics pipeline “were holding us back from delivering real-time insights to our players and coaches.”

“With Airflow alone, we were processing data too slowly, sometimes even missing the critical, immediate post-game window.” Dykstra added in a statement. “With Astronomer, we’ve been able to streamline our data flow, cutting down processing times from 20 minutes to just a few. This has allowed us to stay ahead of the competition by delivering actionable insights much faster.”

The Rangers would go on to implement Airflow through Astro, whose worker queue feature ensured CPU-intensive tasks, including real-time analytics, got the dedicated computing power they required, “significantly improving performance.”

With that step, the Rangers slashed their pipeline processing times “by over 80%,” Astronomer says, allowing the team to process multiple additional pipelines in parallel and deliver game-day analytics “much more efficiently.”

“By collaborating with the MLB data engineers, we were able to optimize their pipeline performance through Astro’s worker queues, reducing completion times and eliminating CPU bottlenecks,” Dykstra said. “This enabled us to process data in real time, delivering analytics right after the game instead of the next day, giving their players and coaching staff a critical competitive edge. And we were able to achieve all of this without additional compute costs, freeing up resources to scale even further and extend these performance gains across the organization.”

Pete DeJoy, co-founder and SVP of products at Astronomer, calls baseball “one of the most intensive stat-tracking sports in the world”—but notes that this hasn’t always been the case, especially when it comes to near real-time, in depth-statistical analysis.

“The Texas Rangers were early partners in our launch of Astro, a complete data orchestration and observability platform built around Apache Airflow, which has better enabled their players and coaches with actionable insights beyond traditional metrics that much of the MLB lacked,” DeJoy added in a statement. “From adjusting players’ defensive positioning to have a higher chance of securing an out, to tweaks in pitchers’ throwing mechanics to improve spin or velocity, Astro has played a role in helping the Rangers’ data team provide that necessary edge to get the team over the hump in last season’s championship win.”

Now, with the Rangers’ 78-84 2024 season in the rearview mirror, fans across North Texas are saying “Wait till next year.” While we wait, hopefully team will be stacking up data in the right direction—using analytics, a healthy pitching rotation, and whatever else it takes to get back to the World Series again.

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