Would you be able to shed any light on this please? I've not even watched the film............
I read the book (Micheal Lewis is a great writer), and have seen the film. You're talking about sport analytics. I'm fascinated by it (and would love to get into sport/football analytics software development!). It's massive in the states across all sports, when we announced an owner who likes NFL and an American Chairman I did half expect us to go down that route, and am quite surprised we haven't!
I should probably start by saying I'm not that into baseball, and almost everything I know of the sport is through being slightly obsessed with sabermetrics/moneyball (so you'll have to excuse any lack of knowledge about the sport itself!).
In the 70s a guy called Bill James started collecting baseball statistics. Rather than collecting statistics about the game, he wanted to devise a method which could objectively assess players. He called this "
sabermetrics". From a blurb (via Wikipedia):
Bill James defined sabermetrics as "the search for objective knowledge about baseball." Thus, sabermetrics attempts to answer objective questions about baseball, such as "which player on the
Red Sox contributed the most to the team's offense?" or "How many home runs will
Ken Griffey hit next year?" It cannot deal with the subjective judgments which are also important to the game, such as "Who is your favorite player?" or "That was a great game."
Over the years he's discovered a staggering amount of ways to statistically measure baseball players/teams (
see here for a synopsis of a few of them). To provide one example: OBP (on base percentage, although you have to get used to 'mericans calling things percentages that aren't actually a percentage!) measures how often a batter reaches a base (a bit simplified) using the following equation:
H = Hits
BB = Bases on Balls (Walks)
HBP = Hit By Pitch
AB = At bats
SF = Sacrifice Flies
Don't worry too much about the maths, the important thing to realise is that these are all stats readily available for every game, every play and every player past (going back to 1871!), present and future. This is stuff that is recorded at every game. The uptake of sabermetrics coincided with the advent of powerful computing, it suddenly because possible to feed all these stats into a computer for every player in the league (indeed, every player that ever existed!) and generate tables of advanced statistics using sabermetric equations.
Before Billy Beane, scouts/GMs had used subjective views (how good he looks, or to use an example from the film, finding players who have the right "tools") and looked at the traditional stats. They'd maybe look at runs batted in, home runs, etc. Billy Beane (and Paul DePodesta, played by Jonah Hill in the film) decided to ignore traditional statistics completely, and even ignore scouting opinion on players, and recruit players solely using sabermetrics. They realized sabermetrics wasn't just good for looking back at how a player
had performed, they could also use it as a way to predict how players
will perform in the future (and that this is a better gauge of a player's abilities than traditional statistics, which were still being used by the rest of the league at the time). To use the example above, they realised things like hits and home runs were overrated methods of assessing a player, and that over the course of a season, how often a player got on base (OBP) was a more important statistic. Because this was being ignored by the rest of the league, they could sign players with very high OBP, but who perhaps had lower hits/home runs/whatever relatively cheaply.
They were moderately successful (they didn't actually win anything!), but they completely changed baseball player recruitment across the league. Every team now uses sabermetrics.
This is already becoming part of football, you've probably heard of things like Prozone (now part of Football Manager), Opta, InStat. I'm not sure there has been (or indeed, will ever be) the same sort of revolution and consensus that happened with baseball/Moneyball. The weird signings Liverpool made (i.e. Andy Carroll for £35 million) were said to be driven by Moneyball-type analysis of players.
I would highly recommend reading the books
The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Football is Wrong and
Soccernomics if you're interested in this kind of thing (Adkins name checked one of these books when he was hired btw!). Oh, and if you're into baseball at all, there's a game called Out of the Park Baseball which is the baseball equivelent of Football Manager, and includes sabermetrics. It's a great way of learning about it (after you've watched Moneyball of course!).
