'The Batting Lab': the Bad News Bears Meet AI?

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Back in the day, my Little League coach used some techniques one might expect to see in The Bad News Bears, like holding batting practices at an amusement park instead of on a baseball field, giving each kid a roll of coins and sending them into the batting cages to experience faster pitching than they'd see from 9-12-year-olds (it was surprisingly effective training).

So how might kids improve their hitting in the era of AI, ML, and Data Science? Well, as part of their data literacy initiatives, SAS worked with North Carolina State University's softball and baseball teams to collect data on the key moments of an elite player's swing and used that data to help youth players improve their swings in The Batting Lab (Today show video), an AI and IOT take on the traditional batting cage.

As one 11-year-old explained to the Today show, 'There's diagrams and charts and graphs to show us what part of our swing has the most room for improvement.... I would say that they are tricking us to do some math, a little bit.'

But later in the same video, one SAS manager explains that 'We don't need students to grow up to be data scientists. We need them to be data believers — people who believe that if they're going to strategically solve a problem, that data is a component of that.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.