Sports
Moneyball, past the movie: how sabermetrics rewired baseball
11 min
How a cash-strapped team's embrace of statistics upended baseball scouting and strategy, the backlash from traditionalists, and the data arms race it set off across every major sport.
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Show notes
The Oakland Athletics identified outs as the scarcest resource, limited to twenty-seven opportunities per game.
Traditional scouting once favored a good face over on-base percentage, which was a significantly undervalued asset.
The Boston Red Sox ended an eighty-six year drought by hiring Bill James to apply data science.
Market arbitrage for player statistics corrected within twenty-four months as wealthy teams adopted analytics.
Basketball three-point attempts doubled since two thousand two as teams prioritized high-value scoring zones.
Football teams now use Expected Points Added to justify aggressive fourth-down attempts on the field.
In this episode
- 1Intro1 min
- 2The Inefficiency of the 'Good Face'2 min
- 3The Sabermetric Resistance2 min
- 4The Arbitrage Window Closes3 min
- 5The Global Contagion of Data3 min
- 6Outro1 min
Sources
- The Moneyball Effect: How Data Analytics Transformed Professional Sports — DataField.Dev Blog
- Moneyball and the Data Revolution | Baseball History
- Moneyball 20 Years Later: A Progress Report On Data And Analytics ...
- Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
- Moneyball Beyond the Movie | Homeruns Without Borders
- Skip Sauer on the Economics of Moneyball - Econlib
- Case Study 2: Moneyball — Data Science Before It Had... | AI & ML for Business | DataField.Dev
- Analytics, Rule Changes, and Baseball’s Revival - Wharton Moneyball | Acast
- Billy Beane found a window. Then everyone else saw it
- The Invisible Edge: Inside MLB's Secret Analytical Arms Race
- An Economic Evaluation of the Moneyball Hypothesis - American Economic Association
- Former A’s owner Steve Schott reflects on ‘The Streak,’ winning on a budget and more
- BEANE BALL: OAKLAND GM TAKES SMALL MARKET INTO THE BIG TIME | New York Post
- Moneyball Chapter 2: How to Find a Ballplayer Summary & Analysis | LitCharts
- An oral history of 'Moneyball' Draft
- Greenberg: Talking to Michael Lewis on the 20th anniversary of ‘Moneyball’
- Moneyball : The Art Of Winning An Unfair Game
- Moneyball Chapter 4: Field of Ignorance Summary & Analysis | LitCharts
- Faith in figures proves to be a big hit
- An audience with Billy Beane: Moneyball, sport’s data revolution, and his role as a ‘Trojan horse’
- Moneyball: The Most Influential Book in the History of Sport
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