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 the book, starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, was released in 2011.
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 the chief strategy officer for the National Football League (NFL)'s Cleveland Browns.
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).
In American college football, the 2007 BCS computer rankings are a part of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) formula that determines who plays in the BCS National Championship Game as well as several other bowl games. Each computer system was developed using different methods which attempts to rank the teams performance. For 2007, the highest and lowest rankings for a team are dropped and the remaining four rankings are summed. A team ranked #1 by a computer system is given 25 points, #2 is given 24 points and so forth. The summed values are then divided by 100. The values are then ranked by percentage. This percentage ranking is then averaged with the Coaches Poll and Harris Poll average rankings, each receiving equal weight, and the results become the BCS Rankings.
NBA 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 early researcher and proponent of sabermetrics, the analysis of baseball through statistical means.
John A. “Jack” Zduriencik is the former General Manager of Major League Baseball's Seattle Mariners.
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.
Moneyball is a 2011 American sports film directed by Bennett Miller and written by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin. The film is based on Michael Lewis's 2003 nonfiction book of the same name, an account of the Oakland Athletics baseball team's 2002 season and their general manager Billy Beane's attempts to assemble a competitive team.
Sig Mejdal is an American 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.
Muthu Alagappan is a 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 speaking 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.
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, a pioneer in the field who is considered the father and public face of the practice.
Sports analytics are a collection of relevant, historical, statistics that when properly applied 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.
