The Future of Sports

Its been a while since the book Money Ball came out, but its effect on sports is still being felt in a big way. The book written took a look at how MLB general manager Billie Beane took a much different look at statistics, and how they should be valued. Beane and his colleagues thought that many of the games statistics, were out dated and didnt really determine what was most valuable. They used statistics like on base percentage and slugging percentage were the best statistics to measure how valuable someone is offensively. More importantly it opened the way for new statistics to be openly accepted and it was a way for a simple game to be examined through many highly advanced statistics. This is often referred to as sabermetrics, and I doubt you will find many baseball teams that don't employ some sort of stat head to examine to take advantage of this new phenomenon.

I have read bits and pieces of the book, and I don't find all the numbers to be that exciting. I do however think that this empirical way at looking at sports is very exciting, and I feel like it is changing the ways sports are being played. Recently I have been following this mans blog. His name is Wayne Winston, he is a former math professor, and recently worked for the Dallas Mavericks trying to examine how statistics can be better used to gain an advantage. He came up with a plus/minus system that looks at which line-ups play the best together. His contention was that there are a lot of statistics that measure how good a player is offensively, but very few take into account how good a player is while playing with other players. In basketball you have to play both offense and defense, so just looking at offensive stats by themselves will probably not be the best way to build a team. By taking a look at how good a player is over the average player you can see just how effective that player is. Again the numbers can be dizzying, but I find it amazing that this type fo stuff is just starting to become the norm. Have the old statistics in sports become outdated?

I remember a few months ago. Bill Belichek was taking a bunch of heat for going for it on the 4th down in his own territory in a game that they were winning against the rival Colts. I am almost certain that Belichek looked at the numbers when making that call, and ignored what was certainly going to be a shit storm, by not playing it by the book and punting the ball. The play ended up not working and they lost the game, but I believe that Belichek made a call based on statistics that most people just couldn't understand. I think he was way ahead of most of his counterparts in this regard, as much of the NFL is still called the way it is written the so-called "book". However those days may soon be over.

Over the weekend MIT held there annual conference on how analytic's can be used in sports. The link that conference can be found here. Some of the most innovative owners and GMs were in attendance including Billy Beane, Mark Cuban, Daryl Morey, Bill Polian, and Jon Kraft. There were some fascinating articles written on topics that range from how valuable an assist is to whether or not you should go for it on 4th and short in your own territory. I think the big thing to take from this is statistical data is being looked at in an all night light, in the last few years. No longer are the days when a simple box score is used to tell the story. Now in almost every major sports owners and GMs are looking for new ways to understand value. I find this to be a very smart and innovative way of doing business, and I think in the near future nearly every professional teams will be employing stat geeks to help make these tough decisions. I mean it is crazy to think that Tony LaRussa or Bill Belichek would go over in the middle of a game to talk to some MIT graduate on what call he should make, but I think the days of that are coming. Well maybe not that extent, but I do think advanced statistics will have a much bigger role in sports in the days moving forward.

Below you can find a link to the True Hoop blog, they did a great job of covering this years MIT convention.

Link