Baseball statistics refers to a variety of metrics used to evaluate player and team performance in the game of baseball.
In sports analytics, sabermetrics is the empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. Sabermetricians collect and summarize the relevant data from this in-game activity to answer specific questions. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research, founded in 1971. The term "sabermetrics" was coined by Bill James, who is one of its pioneers and is often considered its most prominent advocate and public face.
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 about baseball history and statistics. His approach, which he named sabermetrics after 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.
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. It describes the team's sabermetric approach to assembling a competitive baseball team on a small budget. It led to the 2011 film Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill.
In professional sports, scouts are experienced talent evaluators who travel extensively for the purposes of watching athletes play their chosen sports, and they determine whether their set of skills and talents represent what is needed by the scout's organization. Some scouts are interested primarily in the selection of prospects; younger players who may require further development by the acquiring team, but who are judged to be worthy of that effort and expense for the potential future payoff that it could bring, while others concentrate on players who are already polished professionals, whose rights may be available soon, either through free agency or trading, and who are seen as filling a team's specific need at a certain position. Advance scouts watch the teams that their teams are going to play in order to help determine strategy.
Jeff Sagarin is an American sports statistician known for his development of a method for ranking and rating sports teams in a variety of sports. His Sagarin Ratings have been a regular feature in the USA Today sports section from 1985 to 2023, have been used by the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee to help determine the participants in the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship tournament since 1984, and were part of the college football Bowl Championship Series throughout its history from 1998 to 2014.
Paul DePodesta is an American football executive and former baseball executive who is the chief strategy officer 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 of Major League Baseball (MLB). DePodesta was also general manager of MLB's Los Angeles Dodgers. He is also known for his appearance in the book and movie Moneyball about his early career as an assistant with the Athletics.
A sports rating system is a system that analyzes the results of sports competitions to provide ratings for each team or player. Common systems include polls of expert voters, crowdsourcing non-expert voters, betting markets, and computer systems. Ratings, or power ratings, are numerical representations of competitive strength, often directly comparable so that the game outcome between any two teams can be predicted. Rankings, or power rankings, can be directly provided, or can be derived by sorting each team's ratings and assigning an ordinal rank to each team, so that the highest rated team earns the #1 rank. Rating systems provide an alternative to traditional sports standings which are based on win–loss–tie ratios.
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).
Scouts are professionals hired by NBA franchises to evaluate player talent or opposing teams' preparation or strategies. A prospect scout typically looks for younger players with potential or existing players whose rights may be available through free agency or trade. An advance scout, however, helps prepare the team by studying the strategies or tendencies of opposing teams. Scouts travel extensively, attending basketball games to do these evaluations.
Earnshaw Cook was an American early researcher and proponent of sabermetrics, the analysis of baseball through statistical means.
John A. “Jack” Zduriencik is an American radio broadcaster and former professional baseball executive, scout, and player. He currently works as a radio host for KDKA-FM, which is affiliated with the Pittsburgh Pirates. He also served as the general manager of the Seattle Mariners from 2008 until 2015.
Baseball Think Factory, abbreviated as BTF or BBTF, was a sabermetrically-oriented baseball web site which featured 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.
Win Shares is a 2002 book about baseball written by Bill James and Jim Henzler. The book explains how to apply the concept of sabermetrics to assess the impact of player performance in a combination of several areas, including offensive, defensive, and pitching on their team's overall performance. The resulting "Win Share" also takes into account factors such as the era in which the player was active to allow easy comparisons between players from different eras. The book focuses primarily on the many formulas involved in computing the final number of win shares accumulated.
Sig Mejdal is the assistant general manager for the Baltimore Orioles of Major League Baseball.
Muthu Alagappan is a former medical resident known for his professional basketball analytics. He was born in England and raised in Texas. During college at Stanford University, he began an internship at big data startup company Ayasdi, where he leveraged their software on basketball statistics to determine 13 distinct positions of play. After he spoke at the 2012 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, several professional teams began to use the company's software. He was given the top prize at the conference, and GQ called his work both "a new frontier for the NBA" and "Muthuball"—an allusion to Moneyball baseball statistical analysis known for revolutionizing the sport. Forbes included him in their 2012 and 2013 "30 Under 30" list of influential people in the sports industry. His work has received mention in The New York Times, ESPN, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and Slate.
Sports analytics are collections of relevant historical statistics that can provide a competitive advantage to a team or individual by helping to inform players, coaches and other staff and help 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 this film, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane relies heavily on the use of baseball analytics to build a competitive team on a minimal budget, building upon and extending the established practice of Sabermetrics.
Wayne Leslie Winston is an American academic who serves as Professor Emeritus of Decision and Information Systems at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University.
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.
Hoops is a college basketball-themed 1986 video game published by Hoops for IBM PC compatible computers written by Jeff Sagarin and Wayne Winston, with additional coding done by Jeff Klopfenstein. Billy Packer, the CBS basketball analyst, also provided defensive rating statistics for the game. The publisher ("Hoops") was run by Sagarin and Winston, and the game was sold only by mail order.
