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Sabermetrics is the original or blanket term for sports analytics, the empirical analysis of baseball, especially the development of advanced metrics based on baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. The term is derived from the movement's progenitors, members of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), founded in 1971, and was coined by Bill James, who is one of its pioneers and 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.
Pythagorean expectation is a sports analytics formula devised by Bill James to estimate the percentage of games a baseball team "should" have won based on the number of runs they scored and allowed. Comparing a team's actual and Pythagorean winning percentage can be used to make predictions and evaluate which teams are over-performing and under-performing. The name comes from the formula's resemblance to the Pythagorean theorem.
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.
A draft is a process used in some countries and sports to allocate certain players to teams. In a draft, teams take turns selecting from a pool of eligible players. When a team selects a player, the team receives exclusive rights to sign that player to a contract, and no other team in the league may sign the player. The process is similar to round-robin item allocation.
The Syracuse Orange are the athletic teams that represent Syracuse University. The school is a member of NCAA Division I and the Atlantic Coast Conference. Until 2013, Syracuse was a member of the Big East Conference.
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.
Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?: Baseball, Cooperstown, and the Politics of Glory is a book by baseball sabermetrician and author Bill James. Originally published in 1994 as The Politics of Glory, the book covers the unique history of the Baseball Hall of Fame, the evolution of its standards, and arguments for individual players in a typically Jamesian, stat-driven manner. James drives home early on the heated and biased nature of Hall of Fame arguments between fans and writers alike. He states that his goal is not to serve individual players or candidates but to "reinforce the truth in what other people say" and to "serve the argument itself."
Football Outsiders (FO) was a website started in July 2003 which focused on advanced statistical analysis of the National Football League (NFL). The site was run by a staff of regular writers, who produced a series of weekly columns using both the site's in-house statistics and their personal analyses of NFL games.
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.
The Keltner list is a systematic but non-numerical method for considering whether a baseball player is deserving of election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Developed by baseball statistician Bill James, it makes use of an inventory of questions regarding the merit of players relative to their peers. Enshrinement in the Hall of Fame is the highest honor in baseball, with only 263 players having been inducted as of 2020. Election to the Hall is also permanent. However, selection for the Hall is by election; no "cut-offs" or objective criteria exist. It can therefore be difficult for voters and fans alike to determine which former players are deserving of the honor.
William Joseph Pecota is an American former Major League Baseball infielder. He is the namesake of PECOTA, a sabermetric created by Nate Silver and owned by Baseball Prospectus.
The Texas Sports Hall of Fame recognizes athletes, coaches, and administrators who have made "lasting fame and honor to Texas sports". It was established in 1951 by the Texas Sports Writers Association. Once it made its first induction in 1951, Texas became the first U.S. state to have a sports hall of fame.
In baseball statistics, earned run average (ERA) is the average of earned runs allowed by a pitcher per nine innings pitched. It is determined by dividing the number of earned runs allowed by the number of innings pitched and multiplying by nine. Thus, a lower ERA is better. Runs resulting from passed balls, defensive errors, and runners placed on base at the start of extra innings are recorded as unearned runs and omitted from ERA calculations.
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.
Wins Above Replacement or Wins Above Replacement Player, commonly abbreviated to WAR or WARP, is a non-standardized sabermetric baseball statistic developed to sum up "a player's total contributions to his team". A player's WAR value is claimed to be the number of additional wins his team has achieved above the number of expected team wins if that player were substituted with a replacement-level player: a player who may be added to the team for minimal cost and effort.
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.
The Butler Grizzlies are the sports teams of Butler Community College located in El Dorado, Kansas, United States. They participate in the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA) and in the Kansas Jayhawk Community College Conference.
The Jaffe Wins Above Replacement Score, commonly abbreviated JAWS, is a sabermetric baseball statistic developed to evaluate the strength of a player's career and merit for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Created by averaging a player's career WAR with their 7-year peak WAR, its "stated goal is to improve the Hall of Fame's standards, or at least to maintain them rather than erode them, by admitting players who are at least as good as the average Hall of Famer at the position, using a means via which longevity isn't the sole determinant of worthiness."
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.
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- ↑ Aaron Schatz, "Hard Times for the Class of '96", FootballOutsiders.com (July 8, 2004).