A story came out around a year ago (maybe two,hell I'm old) about a MLB team buying a Cray and people thought it was crazy to spend so much on a top end machine. I'm not an expert but it appears that a high end machine would be a nice,but not necessary, purchase/toy.
If it costs you a $1M for the hardware to build lineup projection models or to identify "injury markers" that's money well spent. I mean, this is just me talking, but I would have preferred Rizzo and Nats spend $7M on data servers than the less than 100 innings we got out of Chien Ming Wang.
