Two decades after Michael Lewis unveiled the statistical magic behind the Oakland Athletic’s 2002 MLB season in Moneyball, Web sites such as Baseball Reference, Baseball Savant and FanGraphs have made advanced baseball metrics readily accessible to fans worldwide, but it was not until 2021 that Taiwanese baseball enthusiasts began to gain access to sabermetrics for their domestic league, the CPBL.
Today, the CPBL provides a database exclusively for use by accredited local media featuring advanced metrics such as weighted runs created plus (wRC+) and each pitcher’s wins above replacement (WAR).
However, the CPBL policy has left a large contingent of baseball fans and new media, such as bloggers and YouTubers, without access to numbers that are commonly bandied about on sports talk radio and podcasts in the US.
Photo: Lin Cheng-kung, Taipei Times
That is, until now.
Rebas, a baseball data analytics start-up that “aims to become the Taiwanese FanGraphs,” is poised to fill the gap, Rebas cofounder and chief operating officer Cheng Kai-chun told reporters.
Unlike the publicly accessible part of the CPBL’s Web site, which offers only basic data such as ground ball/fly ball ratios, Rebas offers — for free — advanced sabermetrics such as batters’ whiff percentages, weighted on-base averages and pitchers’ fielding independent pitching.
Photo: CNA
Users can also get a monthly subscription for NT$149 to unlock more metrics, including batters’ whiff percentages against pitch types, first-pitch swing percentages and batted ball distributions.
The name “Rebas” combines “revolution” and “baseball,” symbolizing the firm’s goal to “provide domestic fans with something they’ve never had,” Cheng said.
That goal was clear from the beginning, even before Cheng and his high-school classmate and business partner Chiu Kuan-jung figured out the type of service they were going to offer when they reunited in 2019.
Photo: CNA
Rebas initially focused on building an online statistics platform for regional amateur leagues when it was founded in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic prompted them to start collecting CPBL data, leading to the creation of a semi-automatic system using artificial intelligence (AI) to import and verify data from CPBL games.
AI completes about half the job automatically, enabling the company to finish uploading data within an hour after a game ends, Cheng said.
In early August 2021, Rebas made its Web site public for the first time and traffic quickly increased 50 to 100-fold, he said.
Many of the new supporters were CPBL commentators, who asked Chiu and Cheng to develop more functions and specific data they needed, helping mold Rebas into its current form.
That response led Chiu and Cheng to devote their company to the CPBL and it launched its subscription-based online database in early October last year, just as the CPBL season was winding down.
“We didn’t target fans at first, but the support far exceeded our expectations and that gave Rebas faith to feed on the support of the local fan base,” Cheng said.
As of Thursday, Rebas was collecting about NT$70,000 per month from nearly 500 subscribers, but Cheng expected the number could go higher with this CPBL season just around the corner — the opening game is scheduled for Saturday between the Rakuten Monkeys and the Wei Chuan Dragons.
There are metrics that Rebas is not yet able to provide, such as launch angle, exit velocity, and horizontal and vertical break, that are dependent on high-speed photography and advanced techniques such as TrackMan, which only the clubs might have and do not necessarily share.
Others, such as advanced fielding metrics, wRC+ and WAR, will be available for subscribers for the opener, with the first pitch at the Taipei Dome set for 5:05pm.
Rebas has also initiated discussions with CPBL franchises on potential partnerships in which the clubs provide the cameras and sensors, while Rebas uses its analytical capabilities to turn images and measurements into usable data.
Videoland Sports anchor Jacky Lee, a sabermetrics enthusiast who also cohosts the Hito MLB podcast, is one of the broadcasters happy to have the Rebas data at his fingertips.
“There used to be a huge difference between broadcasting an MLB game and a CPBL game. I know where to find the MLB data I want and can do it even during the broadcast, but it was way harder for a CPBL game,” Lee told reporters.
The data will enable chroniclers of baseball in Taiwan to bring new narratives and perspectives to the national pastime, especially as basic data have been missing from similar accounts in the past, he said.
Another example is Tainan Josh, a Taiwanese baseball YouTuber who shot a video to share how Rebas has helped him garner the data he wanted to discuss CPBL topics.
“Rebas has realized what I wanted to do and has done it even better, and I have profited from it as well,” Josh said in a YouTube video.
Cheng, who described what Rebas is doing as “infrastructure work,” said its comprehensive database would help foster analytics talent in the near future, with CPBL clubs likely to fight to recruit them within a few years.
In September last year, Rebas held the inaugural Baseball Data Analytics Competition in conjunction with rival StatsInsight and the Taiwan Society of Baseball and Softball Science. Thirty teams — 50 percent more than expected — registered.
Rebas said that the competition will be held again this year, courtesy of a sponsorship it has received.
From just two high-school baseball players to a company of four staff, five interns and a recording team of about 10 people, Cheng said he never dreamed four years ago that Rebas would come as far as it has today.
That has changed his mindset from “trying whatever we can” to “having a sense of responsibility to the industry,” but forcing the company to evolve remains the goal.
“Rebas is far from reaching its ultimate form,” Cheng said. “The revolution will never stop.”
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