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Advanced metrics is the term for the empirical analysis of sports, particularly statistics that measure in-game productivity and efficiency. Advanced metrics were first employed in baseball by Bill James, [1] a pioneer in the field who is considered the father and public face of the practice.
The basic principles of advanced metrics were outlined in The Sabermetric Manifesto by David Grabiner (1994). [2] In the piece, Grabiner explains that Bill James defined sabermetrics, the first advanced metric, as the search for objective knowledge about sports.
To glean objective knowledge, advanced metrics practitioners gather and synthesize thousands of situational game data points from a wide variety of sources beyond high level box score information. A large volume of situational data is then distilled into sophisticated statistics that help sports enthusiasts better understand, compare, and appreciate the on-field performances by athletes. Advanced metrics provide more objective answers to questions such as "which player on the Red Sox contributed the most to the team's offense?" or "who is the best wing player in the NBA?" or "how many touchdowns is Dez Bryant likely to score for the Cowboys?". By removing the subjective observations of sports media members and the emotional opinions of fans, advanced metrics offer a more clinical, rational prism from which to enjoy sporting events and consume sports media coverage.
Advanced metrics were first posited in the mid-20th century, and Earnshaw Cook was one its earliest practitioners. Cook's research for his 1964 work, Percentage Baseball was the first publication citing advanced metrics to garner national media attention. [3] Despite the competitive advantage offered by advanced metrics, the practice was unanimously dismissed by major sports organizations for most of the twentieth century.
In the late 1970s, Bill James helped bring SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research, [4] and the empirical analysis of athletic performance, to national prominence. The analytical perspective on sports championed by James and SABR developed a wider following after Sports Illustrated featured James in the article He Does It By The Numbers by Daniel Okrent (1981). [5]
Former Major League Baseball second baseman Davey Johnson was the first known member of a major sports organization to advocate for the use of advanced metrics. During his time with the Baltimore Orioles, he used an IBM System/360 to write a FORTRAN baseball computer simulation to determine the team's optimal starting lineup. When he proposed his findings to Orioles manager Earl Weaver, Johnson's proposal was summarily dismissed. A decade later, after becoming the New York Mets' manager in 1984, Johnson tasked a team employee with writing a dBASE II application to run sophisticated statistical models in order to better understand the capabilities and tendencies of the team's opponents. [6] At the close of the twentieth century, advanced metrics had gained significant acceptance by the management of many Major League Baseball clubs, notably the Oakland A's, Boston Red Sox and Cleveland Indians.
The adoption of advanced metrics by professional baseball franchises has been largely outpaced by sports fans and sports media. Bill James' first published his Baseball Abstract in the early 1980s. In 1996, Baseball Prospectus [7] sought to build upon Bill James' work when it launched the website BaseballProspectus.com in order to present sabermetric research and related findings as well as publish advanced metrics such as EqA, the Davenport Translations (DT's), and VORP. Baseball Prospectus has grown into a multi-channel sports media organization employing a team of statisticians and writers who publish New York Times Best Selling books and host weekly radio shows and podcasts.
North Carolina, under coach Frank McGuire, was the first known basketball organization to utilize advanced possession metrics to gain a competitive advantage. Since then, advanced metrics enthusiasts in basketball have borrowed aspects of Bill James' philosophy in order to create weighted statistics that measure each player and each team's on-court efficiency. Most basketball-specific advanced metrics feature a per-minute measurement to ensure that a player's incremental team contributions are measured irrespective of usage volume.
Beginning in the 1990s, statistician Dean Oliver and ESPN sports writer John Hollinger first popularized the use of advanced metrics in basketball. Oliver's book Basketball On Paper [8] and Hollinger's Pro Basketball Forecast [9] are credited with the advancement of basketball analytics. Major sports media proponents, such as Hollinger, have helped basketball evolve more quickly from rudimentary statistics to advanced metrics than some other major American sports.[ citation needed ]
Houston Rockets' Daryl Morey was the first NBA general manager to implement advanced metrics as a key aspect of player evaluation. [10] In the years that followed Morey's hiring, the NBA moved quickly to adopt advanced metrics-based player evaluation practices. In 2012, John Holliger left ESPN to become VP of Basketball Operations for the Memphis Grizzlies.
Beyond professional basketball front offices, major sports media websites such as basketball-reference.com are now dedicated to the collection, synthesis, and dissemination of advanced metrics to pro and college basketball organizations, sports media members, and fans.
The adoption of advanced metrics by college and professional football organizations has been a gradual evolution. While the sabermetrics revolution in baseball inspired a bestselling book, Moneyball by Michael Lewis, which also became a critically acclaimed film, [11] the advanced metrics movement in football has had no such prominence. [12]
In 2003, the advanced metrics-focused website FootballOutsiders.com pioneered football's first comprehensive advanced metric, DVOA (defense-adjusted value over average), [13] which compares a player's success on each play to the league average based on a number of variables including down, distance, location on field, current score gap, quarter, and strength of opponent. Football Outsiders' work has since been widely cited by analytical members the sports media establishment. A few years later, Pro Football Focus launched a comprehensive statistical database, which soon featured a sophisticated player grading system. [14] Advanced Football Analytics (originally Advanced NFL Stats) has its EPA (expected points added) and WPA (win probability added) for NFL players.
Grantland lead football writer Bill Barnwell created the first advanced metrics focused on predicting the future performance of an individual player, the Speed Score, which he referenced in a piece written for Pro Football Prospectus. After analyzing data pertaining to running back success, Barnwell discovered that the most successful running backs at the NFL level were both fast and heavy, therefore, Speed Score weights 40-yard dash times by assigning a premium to bigger, often stronger, running backs. [15]
The fantasy football community has been one of the driving forces in the evolution of advanced metrics in American football. Fantasy sports writer, and author of How To Think Like A Fantasy Football Winner, C.D. Carter is a leading advocate for the use of advanced metrics in fantasy football analysis. He and peers at XN Sports, NumberFire, and the long-form fantasy football analysis site, Rotoviz.com, have established an informal subculture of fantasy football sports writers who refer to themselves as "degens." The degen movement is responsible for the creation of numerous American football efficiency metrics that better explain past football performances and attempt to predict future player production. Height-adjusted Speed Score, [16] College Dominator Rating, [17] Target Premium, [18] Catch Radius, [19] Net Expected Points (NEP), [20] and Production Premium [21] were recently created and disseminated by degen writers and mathematicians. Building on the work of these writers, sites such as PlayerProfiler.com distill a wide variety of established advanced metrics into a single player snapshot designed to be palatable to the casual sports fan. [21]
In ice hockey, analytics is the analysis of the characteristics of hockey players and teams through the use of statistics and other tools to gain a greater understanding of the effects of their performance. Three commonly used statistics in ice hockey analytics are Corsi and Fenwick—both of which use shot attempts to approximate puck possession—and PDO, which is often considered a measure of luck.
In baseball statistics, on-base percentage (OBP), also known as on-base average/OBA, measures how frequently a batter reaches base. It is the ratio of the batter's times-on-base (TOB) to their number of plate appearances. OBP does not credit the batter for reaching base on fielding errors, fielder's choice, dropped/uncaught third strikes, fielder's obstruction, or catcher's interference.
Sabermetrics is the empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity.
George William James is an American baseball writer, historian, and statistician whose work has been widely influential. Since 1977, James has written more than two dozen books devoted to baseball history and statistics. His approach, which he termed sabermetrics in reference to the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), scientifically analyzes and studies baseball, often through the use of statistical data, in an attempt to determine why teams win and lose.
William Lamar Beane III is an American former professional baseball player and current front office executive. He is the executive vice president of baseball operations and minority owner of the Oakland Athletics of Major League Baseball (MLB); he is also minority owner of Barnsley FC of the EFL Championship in England and AZ Alkmaar of the Eredivisie in the Netherlands. From 1984 to 1989 he played in MLB as an outfielder for the New York Mets, Minnesota Twins, Detroit Tigers, and Oakland Athletics. He joined the Athletics' front office as a scout in 1990, was named general manager after the 1997 season, and was promoted to executive vice president after the 2015 season.
The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) is a membership organization dedicated to fostering the research and dissemination of the history and record of baseball primarily through the use of statistics. Established in Cooperstown, New York, on August 10, 1971 by sportswriter Bob Davids, it is based in Phoenix, Arizona. Its membership as of June 1, 2019, is 5,367.
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is a book by Michael Lewis, published in 2003, about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its general manager Billy Beane. Its focus is the team's analytical, evidence-based, sabermetric approach to assembling a competitive baseball team despite Oakland's small budget. A film based on Lewis' book, starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, was released in 2011.
Rob Neyer is an American baseball writer known for his use of statistical analysis or sabermetrics. He started his career working for Bill James and STATS and then joined ESPN.com as a columnist and blogger from 1996 to 2011. He was National Baseball Editor for SB Nation from 2011 to 2014, and Senior Baseball Editor for FoxSports.com in 2015 and '16.
Baseball Prospectus (BP) is an organization that publishes a website, BaseballProspectus.com, devoted to the sabermetric analysis of baseball. BP has a staff of regular columnists and provides advanced statistics as well as player and team performance projections on the site. Since 1996 the BP staff has also published a Baseball Prospectus annual as well as several other books devoted to baseball analysis and history.
Paul DePodesta is an American football executive and former baseball executive who is the chief strategy officer and de facto president of the Cleveland Browns of the National Football League (NFL). He previously served as a front-office assistant for the Cleveland Indians, Oakland Athletics, and New York Mets. DePodesta was also general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The year after leading the Dodgers to their first playoff win in 16 years, he was fired after the 2005 club finished with its worst record in 11 years. He is also known for his appearance in the book and movie Moneyball about his time with the Athletics.
Advanced statistics in basketball refers to analyzing basketball statistics through objective evidence. APBRmetrics is a cousin to the study of baseball statistics, known as sabermetrics, and similarly takes its name from the acronym APBR, which stands for the Association for Professional Basketball Research.
Football Outsiders (FO) is a website started in July 2003 which focuses on advanced statistical analysis of the NFL. The site is run by a staff of regular writers, who produce a series of weekly columns using both the site's in-house statistics and their personal analyses of NFL games.
In sabermetrics and basketball analytics, similarity scores are a method of comparing baseball and basketball players to other players, with the intent of discovering who the most similar historical players are to a certain player.
Robert "Voros" McCracken is an American baseball sabermetrician. "Voros" is a nickname from his partial Hungarian heritage. He is widely recognized for his pioneering work on Defense Independent Pitching Statistics (DIPS).
PECOTA, an acronym for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm, is a sabermetric system for forecasting Major League Baseball player performance. The word is a backronym based on the name of journeyman major league player Bill Pecota, who, with a lifetime batting average of .249, is perhaps representative of the typical PECOTA entry. PECOTA was developed by Nate Silver in 2002–2003 and introduced to the public in the book Baseball Prospectus 2003. Baseball Prospectus (BP) has owned PECOTA since 2003; Silver managed PECOTA from 2003 to 2009. Beginning in Spring 2009, BP assumed responsibility for producing the annual forecasts, making 2010 the first baseball season for which Silver played no role in producing PECOTA projections.
Baseball Think Factory, abbreviated as BTF or BBTF, is a sabermetrically-oriented baseball web site that features daily news stories in baseball, with original content contributed by SABR members such as Dan Szymborski. The site was previously branded as Baseball Primer, and was created in 2001 by the founders of Baseball-Reference. Contributors who have gone on to work for Major League Baseball front offices include Voros McCracken, Carlos Gomez, and Tom Tango. Bill James' Baseball Abstract books published in the 1980s are widely considered to be the modern predecessor to websites using sabermetrics such as baseballthinkfactory and baseballprospectus.
The Hidden Game of Football is an influential book on American football statistics published in 1988 and written by Bob Carroll, John Thorn, and Pete Palmer. It was the first systematic statistical approach to analyzing American football in a book and is still considered the seminal work on the topic.
Sig Mejdal is an American assistant manager, and sabermetrics analyst for the Baltimore Orioles and a former NASA engineer. He previously helped the St. Louis Cardinals make draft picks. Mejdal turned his personal interest in baseball into a career after being inspired by Moneyball in 2003.
Bill Barnwell is an American sportswriter and staff writer for ESPN.com. He has written about a wide range of sports including football, basketball, baseball, soccer, golf and mixed martial arts.
Sports analytics are a collection of relevant, historical, statistics that can provide a competitive advantage to a team or individual. Through the collection and analyzation of these data, sports analytics inform players, coaches and other staff in order to facilitate decision making both during and prior to sporting events. The term "sports analytics" was popularized in mainstream sports culture following the release of the 2011 film, Moneyball, in which Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane relies heavily on the use of analytics to build a competitive team on a minimal budget.
Sherri Nichols is an American software engineer, data scientist, and baseball statistician most known for her contribution to baseball's Sabermetrics movement. Growing up loving baseball and math, Nichols fused the two passions together to start analyzing baseball in a stats-driven manner. Her influence on the infant stages of the Sabermetrics movement in the 1980s-1990s can be depicted from various works such as Nichols' Law of Catcher Defense, her work collecting play-by-play data, and most notably her cocreation of Defensive Average. Nichols' assertiveness and knowledge has greatly influenced other notable baseball statisticians and paved the way for other women to enter the male dominated industry.