6/12/2023 0 Comments Fangraphs data creatorI think numbers are part of telling the whole story.” “I think (the data) just gives you a sense of context and a sense of where this belongs in history and I think that adds a story to tell,” said baseball analytics writer Eno Sarris, formerly of FanGraphs. Coverage of the game followed after the A’s model, with analytical websites like Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs becoming mainstream. In the years that followed, every organization would build an analytics department filled with full-time data scientists with advanced degrees in computer science, physics, mathematics, or similar. The Red Sox would hire a young Yale graduate with a law degree named Theo Epstein, and James as a senior advisor. Beane’s rebuff wasn’t going to stop the Red Sox and other determined franchises from trying to get close to Oakland’s win-per-dollar ratio. Beane turned down a lucrative offer from the Boston Red Sox, who believed he could help them get more out of a payroll that ranked in the top seven in each of those years. Oakland averaged 94.9 wins and reached the playoffs five times while only ranking higher than 21st in Opening Day payroll once between 2000-06. The film adaptation of Moneyball, however, gave baseball analytics its greatest exposure yet in 2011 and was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Brad Pitt for playing the role of A’s general manager Billy Beane. Tom Tango and Mitchel Lichtman’s ‘The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball,’ originally published in ’06, aimed to take the work of James and ‘The Hidden Game of Baseball’ to the next level. There was deeper value in the information, and eventually, a few desperate teams sought to mine success out of that data.Īuthor Michael Lewis propelled advanced analytics into the mainstream with the 2003 book ‘Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game’ that chronicled how the Oakland Athletics used metrics to assemble a contending team despite being limited by one of MLB’s smallest payrolls.īilly Beane and ‘Moneyball’ have changed the game of baseball – for better or worse. It’s part of telling the whole story.” – baseball analytics writer Eno Sarris “I think (the data) just gives you a sense of context and a sense of where this belongs in history and I think that adds a story to tell. But the analytical community quickly realized that one-number stats aren’t able to portray an entire picture, and analysts moved away from WAR and toward asking smaller questions with smaller answers and different stats that tell you something different. It became apparent that statistical analysis wasn’t just something writers were doing to sell books or fans explored in an effort to win their fantasy leagues.īeyond OPS and WHIP, one of the first big advancements was WAR (wins above replacement), which attempted to take the disparate things a player does on the field and put them into one number. James inspired others to follow with their own ideas, statistics, formulas, articles and books, like John Thorn, Pete Palmer and David Reuther’s ‘The Hidden Game of Baseball: A Revolutionary Approach to Baseball and Its Statistics.’ The flood of new information continued to evolve in the ’90s and accelerated from there. – now Stats Perform – to publish books about his revolutionary statistics.īill James sought to expand the thought process beyond the numbers on the back of a baseball card.īecause of his work that introduced statistical innovations such as runs created, range factor, win shares, Pythagorean winning percentage, game score, similarity scores and secondary average, he would become known as the Godfather of Sabermetrics – the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Starting in the ’80s, fan and aspiring writer Bill James attempted to expand the thought process beyond the numbers on the back of a baseball card and into what he called the “ever-expanding line of numerical analysis.” James eventually worked with STATS, Inc. Revolutionary executive Branch Rickey, who, of course, signed Jackie Robinson and created the minor league farm system, is also considered a pioneer in the use of statistical analysis for writing an article in Life magazine about an early version of on-base percentage. It’s believed to have started to an extent in the 1950s, when some innovative people began to recognize that the traditional ways of evaluating player performance often did not tell the whole story. The fact is: The practice of looking at statistics differently isn’t a 21st-century development. Others stand by a belief that the influx of data and technology has only made Major League Baseball front offices, coaches, players and fans smarter. Some insist the analytics movement that spread across baseball in the early 2000s, inspiring a best-selling book and a hit movie, didn’t just change the game but ruined it.
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