Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Moneyball and the Rise of Advanced Statistics in Sports

Episode Date: May 16, 2023

Ever since organized sports began, people have been collecting statistics.  These statistics were originally collected to let people know what happened during a game they might have missed.  However, over time, these statistics became more and more sophisticated, and they eventually began dictating how the games themselves were to be played by uncovering truths that were overlooked. Learn more about Moneyball and the rise of statistics in sports on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors BetterHelp is an online platform that provides therapy and counseling services to individuals in need of mental health support. The platform offers a range of communication methods, including chat, phone, and video sessions with licensed and accredited therapists who specialize in different areas, such as depression, anxiety, relationships, and more. Get 10% off your first month at BetterHelp.com/Everywhere ButcherBox is the perfect solution for anyone looking to eat high-quality, sustainably sourced meat without the hassle of going to the grocery store. With ButcherBox, you can enjoy a variety of grass-fed beef, heritage pork, free-range chicken, and wild-caught seafood delivered straight to your door every month. Visit ButcherBox.com/Daily to get 10% off and free chicken thighs for a year. InsideTracker provides a personal health analysis and data-driven wellness guide to help you add years to your life—and life to your years. Choose a plan that best fits your needs to get your comprehensive biomarker analysis, customized Action Plan, and customer-exclusive healthspan resources. For a limited time, Everything Everywhere Daily listeners can get 20% off InsideTracker’s new Ultimate Plan. Visit InsideTracker.com/eed. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ever since organized sports began, people have been collecting statistics. These statistics were originally collected to let people know what happened during a game that they might have missed. However, over time, these statistics became more and more sophisticated, and they eventually began dictating how the games themselves were to be played by uncovering truths that were often overlooked. Learn more about Moneyball and the rise of statistics and sports on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep, only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow?

Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. and millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly

what you've been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. For those of you not interested in sports, let me assure you that while this episode may seem like a sports episode on the surface, it's really an episode about mathematics and business. And for those of you who live in countries where they don't play baseball, again, the origins of the story do start with baseball, but they most assuredly do not end there. The story begins in 1858, when the game of baseball was still figuring out what the rules of the sport were.

One of the fathers of the sport, Henry Chadwick, developed a succinct way to summarize what happened in a baseball game that could be published in newspapers. His system was known as a box score. The box score came from the system of recording cricket scores and consisted of two parts. The line score was a two-line summary of the runs scored in each inning and the final tally of runs, hits, and errors. Below that was a list of what each individual did during the game. For batters, for example, it initially recorded the number of runs, hits, put-outs, assists, and errors that each player made. Over time, the box score changed a little, but not a lot.

You could look at Chadwick's original 1858 box score and figure out what was being reported. Over time, the statistics changed slightly to cover at-bats, runs, hits, runs batted in, home runs, based on balls, and strikeouts. Pitchers got their own stats, which covered what they gave up in terms of hits, runs, earned runs, based on balls, strikeouts, and home runs. By the time professional baseball started, a very particular style of play had developed. The game was based on having a very high batting average and stealing bases trying to get runs.

Everyone in baseball just assumed that this was the best way to play the game. Now fast forward to 1971, when 16 baseball historians met in Cooperstown, New York, to found the Society for American Baseball Research, known as Sabre. Saber was initially designed to document and record baseball history, and the creation of the organization came soon after the release of the Baseball Encyclopedia in 1969, which provided the career statistics for every professional baseball player who ever played. This was not the first encyclopedia of baseball, but it was unique in that the authors literally built the database of statistics up by checking every box score of every game ever played. It was one of the first books to be written with the aid

of a computer that organized all the data. Major League Baseball established the Special Baseball Records Committee whose job it was to go back and clean up old statistics, fix out statistics were interpreted under old rules, and find any gaps in the historical record. Over time, historical baseball statistics got better, as did contemporary baseball statistics. The person who's credited with using baseball statistics for advanced analysis was Bill James. In the 1970s, while working as a night security guard at the Stokely Van Camp's Pork and Beans Canary in Kansas, he began writing articles asking statistical questions which had never really been asked before, like which pitchers and catchers were the best at preventing stolen bases,

and how the average age of a team affected performance. In 1977, he published the first Bill James Baseball Abstract. He dubbed the study of baseball statistics Sabermetrics, named after the Society of American Baseball Researchers. Sabermetrics began to question many of the long-held assumptions about how the game of baseball should be played. One of the first traditional statistics to be challenged was the batting average. A player's batting average is determined by dividing the number of hits by the number of at-bats. However, a walk is not considered an at-bat. What James and others realized was that a walk was as good as a hit insofar as the player didn't get out. Also, what the player did when they didn't get

out mattered a great deal. Hitting a home run was more valuable than getting a single. Stolen bases were downplayed unless a player was good enough to successfully steal a base about 80% of the time. Pitching wins were also deprecated as they didn't reflect a pitching performance so much as a team performance. New statistics were created which attempted to capture the complete value of a player under a single number. As statistics became better and computers became better, it was possible to do even more sophisticated analyses. Still, for years, Sabermetrics remained in the realm of enthusiasts. Baseball traditionalists had no need for whatever fancy algorithms that a bunch of eggheads were producing. Baseball had been around for 100 years and was doing quite fine, thank you very much.

However, it was only a matter of time before Saber Metrics found its way into professional baseball. While there were individual cases of players and managers using advanced statistics in the dugout, the person credited with using Sabermetrics at an organizational level was Billy Bean. Bean was a former baseball player who was appointed the general manager of the Oakland Athletics in 1997. Oakland is considered a small market team. They didn't have the budget of teams like the New York Yankees or the Los Angeles Dodgers. Bean needed to figure out a way to assemble a team that was competitive on a budget. his predecessor, general manager Sandy Alderson, began using Sabremetrics to find undervalued players.

Bean continued this strategy, which resulted in the athletics making the playoffs from 2000 to 2003. Most famously, the athletics won 20 games in a row in 2002, which set an American League record. And this was done despite having one of the lowest payrolls in baseball. This was documented in the 2003 book, Moneyball, the art of winning an unfair game, and was later turned into a movie starring Brad Pitt as Billy Bean. The cat was now out of the bag, and teams began hiring their own statisticians. In 2003, the Boston Red Sox hired none other than Bill James. One of the former readers of his baseball abstract was now the owner of the club.

The very next year in 2004, the Red Sox won their first championship in 86 years. With every team deploying statisticians, undervalued players were no longer undervalued. Statistics began to explode when everything started to be tracked. Companies set up systems in every Major League ballpark to track the movement of every hit and pitch. The speed of every pitch thrown was measured, as was the velocity off the bat, and even the angle of the ball after it was hit. Managers eventually, begrudgingly, began adopting the recommendations of statistics. Pitchers were changed more frequently. Defenses would shift players to increase the odds of getting individual batters.

out. Players in the dugout had access to videos of every pitch they or opposing players ever faced. Batting averages went down, home runs went up, strikeouts went up, and games got longer. At the top of the show, I mentioned how this wasn't just a story about baseball, and that's true. The revolution in sports statistics started with baseball, but that's because baseball was a game uniquely suited to collecting statistics. Everything that happens in a game can be broken down into discrete elements which can be tracked and recorded. Other sports, however, are more fluid. Basketball, football, soccer, rugby, and hockey involve constant motion, not discrete actions

like baseball. Nonetheless, advanced statistics are now working their way into those sports as well. Basketball was one of the first. One of the first things they realized was that game level statistics were pretty much meaningless. They often reflected how long someone played, not how well they played. Instead, they focused on what players were able to do per minute. Someone who scored 20 points in a game might not have played as well as someone who scored 10 points in a game

if the person with 20 points played three times as many minutes. They also looked at the plus minus for each player. Plus minus was actually developed in ice hockey and simply looks at the score differential when a player enters a game versus when they sit down. If they entered the game at multiple points, then those point differences are just added up. Plus minus is actually a pretty simple stat. Current efforts in basketball statistics are much more sophisticated. They are following the ball and every pass that is made during an entire game.

From that, they can develop maps that treat basketball like a network and individual players like nodes on a network. This network analysis proved that Phil Jackson's triangle offense with which he won 10 NBA championships really does work. Not that 10 NBA championships didn't already do that. American football doesn't lend itself as well to advance statistics simply because most players on the field never touched the ball. However, the data has made a few coaches at lower levels of the sport make radical changes. Kevin Kelly, the head coach of Pulaski Academy in Arkansas, won nine championships in 18 years by never punting.

Almost never. Not only did his team never punt, they also used an on-side kick every time they kicked off. The data showed him that football wasn't a game of yards, it was a game of possessions. Even Hall of Fame coach Don Shula predicted that one day there will be a coach in the NFL who will be brave enough never to punt. Association football, aka soccer, is also starting to see statistics take hold, although it hasn't caught on globally yet. In 2015, Ali Curtis was hired as the Director of Football Operations for the New York Red Bulls in Major League Soccer. He had a very analytic approach to running the team. He immediately fired the team manager and cut several underperforming players.

His move angered fans until they won the supporter shield that year as the team with the best regular season record. When Leicester City won their improbable English Premier League championship in 2016 against much better funded teams, they did so largely by finding undervalued players. Some of the best European clubs have started to hire Sabre matricians, I guess you could call them soccer matricians, to try to give their teams an edge. In 2020, Billy Bean himself took a 5% ownership stake in the Dutch football club Azad Alkmar. Bean's association with the club came from Robart Enhorn, a Dutch former Major League Baseball player who happened to be the general director of the club. Just like the Oakland A's, AZ Alkmar has a smaller budget than the other clubs in their league.

They began using a data-driven approach to signing players and saw a string of success competing at the top of the Aira-Devici, the top Dutch football league. Given the amount of money involved in leagues like the English Premier League, they almost can't afford to not adopt advanced statistics. The difference with baseball statistics is that each team tends to develop their own proprietary models based on their own data, so the information is in public. There is one sport I haven't mentioned yet, the one sport which, like baseball, can be broken down to a series of discrete actions, cricket. Some people in the world of cricket have started to use advanced statistics

to try to debunk myths about the game and to improve decisions made on and off the field. Cricket statistician Charles Davies has tracked down and recorded the results of every test match played since 1877. He published a book in 2000 called The Best of the Best, where he took a Bill James approach at analyzing cricket. With the rise in popularity of 2020 cricket and the Indian Premier League, more money is being invested in the game,

and it's likely that ball tracking systems like those used in baseball stadiums may be installed in the near future to present. provide more granular data. As with baseball, as more money comes into the game of cricket, more effort will be spent by teams trying to gain an edge over their opponents. While advanced statistics can make roster and coaching decisions more efficient, they can also make the game too efficient. Many people have claimed that the use of statistics has gone so far in baseball that it's making the game boring. Everything has become so optimized that it's no longer exciting. In 2023, Major League Baseball took steps to change the rules

to speed up the game and remove shifting defensive players. There may be other rule changes ahead as well, including limiting the number of pitchers that can be used in a game. The use of statistics to improve decision-making in sports will only grow over time. As datasets become larger and more robust, artificial intelligence programs may be developed to analyze the data to find trends that even humans can't see. And this has opened up a new avenue for those who want to be involved in competitive sport.

Instead of excelling on the field, pitch or the course, court, the most valuable member of a team in the future might be the person who excels in mathematics. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener N-Hand 1022 from Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, My Favorite Podcasts Hands Down. I started listening to this podcast during the pandemic and it was a godsend. It engaged my adalpated brain at a time when the isolation of lockdown was really getting to me. For that, I will be forever grateful. I found every episode to be interesting and engaging, even when I thought I wouldn't care about

the subject matter. My favorite episode has always been the Halifax explosion, but now it's the domestication of cats. Learning more about how they came to be our companions was truly fascinating. It made me wonder, if human agriculture caused an explosion in the rodent population, is it possible that this therefore caused an explosion in the population of cats? So humans, inadvertently created our own companions. Hmm. I also have a few furry little predators at home who appreciated the positive publicity.

Thanks, Gary. I wish you all the best. Well, thanks, Enhand. We obviously have no data on the wild or domestic cat populations from thousands of years ago, but it's very reasonable to assume that the rise of human agriculture

resulted in an increase in the population of cats. More food meant more mice, meant more cats. Where I live, it's very easy to see how farms have increased the population. population of white-tailed deer, which feed on corn. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostergram, you two can have it read on the show.