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TechTimes has a new interview with Bill James, a pioneer in the field of sports analytics (specifically applied to baseball); James started publishing his annual newsletters ("Bill James Baseball Abstract") in the late 1970's, coining the term 'sabermetrics' along the way, which arguably launched the trend of sports-related "stat geek" publications that continue to this day. He and likeminded peers came up with several new metrics which they felt provided answers to certain useful questions with more precision than one could obtain with the traditional ones used by baseball insiders and fans to evaluate players from time immemorial (batting averages, hits and home run totals, runs batted in, pitchers' earned run averages). But, don't call James a statistician or a 'numbers guy':
Sabermetrics are not stats. In fact, sabermetrics don't really have a damn thing to do with stats. It's really a misunderstanding... If you're looking at the stats for small advantages, that's not sabermetrics. If you're using the numbers to try to represent the baseball universe and trying to understand what is actually going on in the game, that's what makes sabermetrics.
To James, the value of sabermetrics is more qualitative than quantitative. He gives a couple examples of how sabermetrics are being used by nearly every major league team today: batter-specific defensive shifts, particularly of infielders, based on location analysis of each batter's hit balls; and pitch framing (the catcher's art of selling a pitch thrown outside the strike zone as a strike to the plate umpire, using body language and glove position).
Since 2003, James has been employed by the Boston Red Sox to assist in player evaluation; however, James still maintains an active role in the sabermetrics community. A particularly good interview by Stephen Dubner was published on Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics blog in 2008, which goes into considerable baseball detail.
Original Submission
(Score: 2, Informative) by cellocgw on Sunday July 19 2015, @12:29PM
Dunno what he's on about, but the reason for, say, the Ted Williams shift is that he (and big Papi) are overwhelmingly more likely to hit to right. Note that word "likely." They don't hit there every time, and some of their hits to right evade the shift, but as the saying goes, "that's the way the smart money bets." It's completely about using statistical analysis of previous performance to predict probably future behavior.
Catchers framing the plate is nothing new; similarly there were first basemen in teh 50's who would smack their glove just before the ball arrived to try to fool the umpire into thinking the runner lost the race to the bag.
And finally -- if it weren't for statistical analyses, managers would still be madly using the sac bunt to move runners to second. Now that the evidence is overwhemingly clear that giving up an out is a losing proposition, they.... oh, wait... [yeah, it's dang hard to change 100 years' worth of robotic behaviour just because of reality]
Physicist, cellist, former OTTer (1190) resume: https://app.box.com/witthoftresume
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @04:36PM
I think James is saying that he's like a scientist, where coming up with the questions is a big part of it. Not just proposing new types of averages to answer questions like "who is the best hitter in baseball." Everyone knows that Lou Boudreau created that shift against Ted Williams, and it was used against other sluggers since then, but then the sabermetrics guys came along and collected the location data on each hitter and tried to turn it into a science.