The Statistical Revolution

There are many things I love, but two things that stick out are sports and mathematics. Call me a dork (you wouldn’t be the first one) but one is my career, and the other has always been a passion of mine. When I was a kid, the math in sports was minimal, and I was calculating batting averages as early as 2nd or 3rd grade. That was about as far as it got. In baseball, all that anyone cared about were the big three, batting average, home runs, and RBI’s. In football, we had yardage, TD’s, sacks, and interceptions. In basketball, it was points, assists, and rebounds.


But behind the scenes, things were changing. This finally started getting revealed with Michael Lewis’ 2003 book, Moneyball, about the Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane who had started using statistical analysis more than scouts to evaluate players and draft minor leaguers. Since then statistical analysis has exploded in baseball, and the “new school” way of thinking is called sabermetrics. A few of the earlier stats have made their way into the mainstream baseball lexicon such as OPS and BABIP and there are dozens of others that look far more in depth than the basic statistics can even dream of. It is also starting to take off in other sports, such as basketball. Although it seems as if a lot of the advanced stats there are kept more close to the vest and not shared with the general public. Football has also been awaken, as we now have stats to measure all players, not just the efficiency of the “skill” positions. The guys at football outsiders have been using statistical analysis to predict games for the past few years and do remarkably better than the mainstream analysts.

So it would seem, that the best way to break into the sports world these days is not to work on your jump shot, hit the weight room, or practice your knuckleball, but to find new and exciting ways of using mathematics. The sports world has finally wisened up and realized that the eyes do often deceive us, and that objective evidence is a lot more valuable then subjective analysis and the opinions of people that are always rife with bias. So keep punching on those calculators and you too could be the next big thing in sports!