Sean Arbaut/MSU Minot State’s Mark Ossanna bats during last year’s NSIC Tournament.

The biggest challenge for the Minot State baseball team is one it can’t control: the weather.

It’s no secret that the sport isn’t played year round in Minot. Even four months might be a stretch depending on the winter, which puts the team at a major disadvantage when playing warmer weather teams.

Because the Beavers spend so much time practicing indoors in the cages, the coaching staff, led by head coach Sam Bosnier, have turned to analytics to track performance. Unlike the Oakland Athletics in the book and film Moneyball, Minot State is more focused on player development than on-field analytics.

“We’re in the cages, and it’s like ‘how do we improve in a batting cage?’,” said Bosnier. “What we do is focused more on the developmental side, and are what we’re working on in practice negatively or positively impacting the growth of the player?”

For example, among pitchers the coaches can evaluate whether improvement is taking place by comparing numbers to data of major league players and evaluating mechanics.

From a hitting standpoint, launch angles are evaluated to see how successful an at-bat might be.

“Maybe we look at how hard it was hit,” said Bosnier. “If we constantly hit the top of the net, the top of the batting cage, and it’s a 30 degree launch angle, you have to hit it 120 degrees for it to leave the park. And if you didn’t, then it’s probably a fly out.”

Those kinds of evaluations allow the coaches to forecast the outcomes for when the team does get on the field, and to compare the results to benchmarks of major league players.

“Now we can go more specific,” said Bosnier. “As we make adjustments, they may start to buy in more, because now they actually know what it is. It’s not an assumption. It’s a fact.”

Another challenge with analytics is on the recruiting trail. The prevalence of social media and the sharing of data means that recruits and players are arriving on campus much more data-savvy than previous generations. Many recruits have also been working with private coaches on swings and pitches using the same technology that Minot State uses throughout their high school careers. Those recruits then expect those tools to be used, or they will choose a different school to play for.

The technology also allows the team to compare recruits’ workout numbers to those of the current roster to make apples-to-apples comparisons of talent during the evaluation process.

“The numbers aren’t the difference between winning and losing. There’s so many other factors that go into it,” said Bosnier. “But what we do know is that if we can consistently produce a swing over and over and over that produces an optimal exit velocity and launch angle, we’ve got a chance. If we have pitchers that are improving and have better shape, better execution and have optimal spin rate, horizontal and vertical break, then we’ve got a chance.”