http://www.wired.com/2015/04/baseball-stats/?utm_content=buffer77f36&utm...
In the 1980s, sabermetrics, statistical analysis of baseball, was generally derided by scouts and general managers, even though baseball was the most quantified sport in the world.
By the early 1990s, the use of statistics was so well known that Fantasy Baseball started an entire fantasy sports industry, what had once been the domain of Strat-O-Matic and computer simulations became available for real world players in real time and by the mid-1990s it was so popular that the very people who pioneered it dropped out, because baseball was being done by spreadsheets and people who had little love for the game.
Ozzie Smith had little value in fantasy baseball. Ozzie Smith!
But still it hadn't caught on in general management and scouting departments, who instead showed up and watched players and wanted a certain 'look'. Eventually, sabermetrics changed all that, the Oakland Athletics put together good teams using cast-offs from other organizations that had statistics that looked good, like On Base Percentage. Soon, everyone recognizes its value.
But statistical analysis is only as good as the data. Defense, for example, is difficult because the home team keeps score - the home team may have a hit while the away team may have an error for the same play. Someone with terrible range on defense may have no errors while someone roaming all over the field may seem to have a lot.
sabermetric analysis is still only as good as the systems that capture data from the field—who hit what to whom. The lightning-quick shortstop out there between second and third base, he's harder to quantify. But by the time the first Major League Baseball pitch is thrown this season, all 30 ballparks will have a new tracking system called Statcast that can rank defensive powerhouses just as well as star batters. It uses cameras, radar, and sophisticated AI to put numbers on every element of a play—from the rpm of the pitch to the exact trajectory of the ball to the fielder's split-second defensive moves. Time to put aside hits, runs, and RBIs; this season's promising rookies are metrics like “route efficiency” and “spin rate.” Get ready for Moneyball II: The Reckoning.
