MLB 2023 World Series champion accelerated data delivery time by 24 hours without incurring any additional costs of new compute
ARLINGTON, Texas, October 22, 2024 — Astronomer, the company behind Astro, the leading data orchestration and observability platform powered by Apache Airflow®, today announced that the MLB 2023 World Series champion Texas Rangers is leveraging Astro to optimize their use of data analytics to gain a competitive edge both on and off the baseball field. With Astronomer, the Rangers are able to scale their use of Airflow to analyze game data, comprehensive player health reporting, predictive analytics of everything from pitch spin to hit trajectory, and more - without incurring additional compute costs.
Major League Baseball (MLB) has long been known for its reliance on record-keeping and statistical analysis, but in recent years, the pressure to enhance performance has elevated data teams into critical roles. While traditional baseball statistics like batting averages and on-base percentages have been tracked for over a century, 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 Rangers, in particular, are leading the charge in harnessing this data-driven approach to deliver actionable insights, such as player health monitoring and game strategy adjustments, helping them stay competitive and ultimately contribute to the 2023 World Series championship, the team’s first championship in over 60 years of existence.
By 2015, the Rangers had a small but effective data team using an on-prem stack to manage growing data needs, but as data demands increased, bottlenecks began to appear, especially in real-time game analytics. Tools like Cron and even Airflow struggled to scale, leading to delays in providing actionable insights.
“The bottleneck delays in our live game analytics pipeline were holding us back from delivering real-time insights to our players and coaches,” Oliver Dykstra, Full-Stack Data Engineer for the Texas Rangers. “With Airflow alone, we were processing data too slowly, sometimes even missing the critical, immediate post-game window. 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.”
To address this, the Rangers partnered with Astronomer to implement Airflow through Astro. Astro’s worker queue feature ensured CPU-intensive tasks, such as real-time analytics, received dedicated computing power, significantly improving performance. As a result, the Rangers reduced pipeline processing times by over 80%, allowing them to process multiple additional pipelines in parallel and deliver game-day analytics much more efficiently.
Dykstra continued, “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. 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.”
“Baseball is one of the most intensive stat-tracking sports in the world, but that has not always been the case - especially when it comes to near real-time, in depth-statistical analysis,” said Pete DeJoy, SVP of Products and co-founder, Astronomer. “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. 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.”
Further Resources:
- Read more about the Texas Rangers on Astro in this case study
- Receive a free Airflow Health Check
- Download Astronomer’s white paper on Full-stack Orchestration in the Age of the Data Product
- Try Astro now with a 14-day Free Trial
About Astronomer
Astronomer empowers data teams to bring mission-critical software, analytics, and AI to life and is the company behind Astro, the industry-leading data orchestration and observability platform powered by Apache Airflow®. Astro accelerates building reliable data products that unlock insights, unleash AI value, and powers data-driven applications. Trusted by more than 700 of the world’s leading enterprises, Astronomer lets businesses do more with their data. To learn more, visit www.astronomer.io.
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