First published in 2003, the best-selling-book-turned-movie “Moneyball” is generally credited with launching the analytics revolution that today dominates the baseball landscape. It chronicles how then Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane leveraged data analytics to help the small-budget A’s take on deep-pocketed rivals such as the Yankees and Red Sox.
In reality, however, analytics had been part of the baseball landscape long before Beane took it mainstream. Bill James, widely regarded as the father of modern baseball analytics, published his first Baseball Abstract in 1977, and the Society for American Baseball Research, the organization now synonymous with analytics in baseball (hence the term, “sabermetrics”) was formed six years earlier.
