Advanced metrics

Advanced Metrics is the term for the empirical analysis of sports, particularly statistics that measure in-game productivity and efficiency. Advanced metrics were first employed in baseball by Bill James,[1] a pioneer in the field who is considered the father and public face of the practice.

General principles

The basic principles of advanced metrics were outlined in The Sabermetric Manifesto by David Grabiner (1994).[2] In the piece, Grabiner explains that Bill James defined sabermetrics, the first advanced metric, as the search for objective knowledge about sports.

To glean objective knowledge, advanced metrics practitioners gather and synthesize thousands of situational game data points from a wide variety of sources beyond high level box score information. A large volume of situational data is then distilled into sophisticated statistics that helps sports enthusiasts better understand, compare, and appreciate the on-field performances by athletes. Advanced metrics provide more objective answers to questions such as "which player on the Red Sox contributed the most to the team's offense?" or "who is the best wing player in the NBA?" or "how many touchdowns is Dez Bryant likely to score for the Cowboys?". By removing the subjective observations of sports media members and the emotional opinions of fans, advanced metrics offer a more clinical, rational prism from which to enjoy sporting events and consume sports media coverage.

Early history

Advanced metrics were first posited in the mid-1900s, and Earnshaw Cook was one its earliest practitioners. Cook's research for his 1964 work, Percentage Baseball was the first publication siting advanced metrics to garner national media attention.[3] Despite the competitive advantage offered by advanced metrics, the practice was unanimously dismissed by major sports organizations for most of the twentieth century.

In the late 1970s, Bill James helped bring SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research,[4] and the empirical analysis of athletic performance, to national prominence. The analytical perspective on sports championed by James and SABR developed a wider following after Sports Illustrated featured James in the article He Does It By The Numbers by Daniel Okrent (1981).[5]

Advanced metrics in baseball

Former Major League Baseball second baseman Davey Johnson was the first known member of a major sports organization to advocate for the use of advanced metrics. During his time with the Baltimore Orioles, he used an IBM System/360 to write a FORTRAN baseball computer simulation to determine the team's optimal starting lineup. When he proposed his findings to Orioles manager Earl Weaver, Johnson's proposal was summarily dismissed. A decade later, after becoming the New York Mets' manager in 1984, Johnson tasked a team employee with writing a dBASE II application to run sophisticated statistical models in order to better understand the capabilities and tendencies of the team's opponents.[6] At the close of the twentieth century, advanced metrics had gained significant acceptance by the management of many Major League Baseball clubs, notably the Oakland A's, Boston Red Sox and Cleveland Indians.

The adoption of advanced metrics by professional baseball franchises has been largely outpaced by sports fans and sports media. Bill James' first published his Baseball Abstract in the early 1980s. In 1996, Baseball Prospectus[7] sought to build upon Bill James' work when it launched the website BaseballProspectus.com in order to present sabermetric research and related findings as well as publish advanced metrics such as EqA, the Davenport Translations (DT's), and VORP. Today, Baseball Prospectus has grown into a multi-channel sports media organization employing a team of statisticians and writers who publish New York Times Best Selling books and host weekly radio shows and podcasts.

Advanced metrics in basketball

North Carolina, under coach Frank McGuire, was the first known basketball organization to utilized advanced possession metrics to gain a competitive advantage. Since then, advanced metrics enthusiasts in basketball have borrowed aspects of Bill James' philosophy in order to create weighted statistics that measure each player and each team's on-court efficiency. Most basketball-specific advanced metrics feature a per-minute measurement to ensure that a player's incremental team contributions are measured irrespective of usage volume.

Beginning in the 1990s, statistician Dean Oliver and ESPN sports writer John Hollinger first popularized the use of advanced metrics in basketball. Oliver's book Basketball On Paper[8] and Hollinger's Pro Basketball Forecast[9] are credited with the advancement of basketball's version of sabermetrics, APBRmetrics. Major sports media proponents, such as Hollinger, have helped basketball evolve more quickly from rudimentary statistics to advanced metrics than some other major American sports.

Houston Rockets' Daryl Morey was the first NBA general manager to implement advanced metrics as a key aspect of player evaluation.[10] In the years that followed Morey's hiring, the NBA moved quickly to adopt advanced metrics-based player evaluation practices. In 2012, John Holliger left ESPN to become VP of Basketball Operations for the Memphis Grizzlies.

Beyond professional basketball front offices, major sports media websites such as basketballreference.com and hoopsdata.com are now dedicated to the collection, synthesis, and dissemination of advanced metrics to pro and college basketball organizations, sports media members, and fans.

Advanced metrics in American football

The adoption of advanced metrics by college and professional football organizations has been a gradual evolution. While the sabermetrics revolution in baseball has already inspired a bestselling book, Moneyball by Michael Lewis, which also became a critically acclaimed film,[11] the advanced metrics movement in football has had no such prominence.[12]

In 2003, the advanced metrics-focused website FootballOutsiders.com pioneered football's first comprehensive advanced metric, DVOA (defense-adjusted value over average),[13] which compares a player's success on each play to the league average based on a number of variables including down, distance, location on field, current score gap, quarter, and strength of opponent. Football Outsiders' work has since been widely cited by analytical members the sports media establishment. A few years later, Pro Football Focus launched a comprehensive statistical database, which soon featured a sophisticated player grading system.[14] Advanced Football Analytics (originally Advanced NFL Stats) has its EPA (expected points added) and WPA (win probability added) for NFL players.

Grantland lead football writer Bill Barnwell created the first advanced metrics focused on predicting the future performance of an individual player, the Speed Score, which he referenced in a piece written for Pro Football Prospectus. After analyzing data pertaining to running back success, Barnwell discovered that the most successful running backs at the NFL level were both fast and heavy, therefore, Speed Score weights 40-yard dash times by assigning a premium to bigger, often stronger, running backs.[15]

The fantasy football community has been one of the driving forces in the evolution of advanced metrics in American football. Fantasy sports writer, and author of How To Think Like A Fantasy Football Winner, C.D. Carter is a leading advocate for the use of advanced metrics in fantasy football analysis. He and peers at XN Sports, NumberFire, and the long-form fantasy football analysis site, Rotoviz.com, have established an informal subculture of fantasy football sports writers who refer to themselves as "degens." The degen movement is responsible for the creation of numerous American football efficiency metrics that better explain past football performances and attempt to predict future player production. Height-adjusted Speed Score,[16] College Dominator Rating,[17] Target Premium,[18] Catch Radius,[19] Net Expected Points (NEP),[20] and Production Premium[21] were recently created and disseminated by degen writers and mathematicians. Building on the work of these writers, sites such as PlayerProfiler.com distill a wide variety of established advanced metrics into a single player snapshot designed to be palatable to the casual sports fan.[21]

Examples

Notable proponents

Popular culture

External links

References

  1. ↑ Zminda, Don. "Bill James Profile". Summer 2010 Baseball Research Journal.
  2. ↑ Grabiner, David J. "The Sabermetric Manifesto". The Baseball Archive.
  3. 1 2 Albert, James; Jay M. Bennett (2001). Curve Ball: Baseball, Statistics, and the Role of Chance in the Game. Springer. pp. 170–171. ISBN 0-387-98816-5.
  4. ↑ "About SABR".
  5. ↑ Okrent, Daniel. "He Does It By The Numbers...". Sports Illustrated.
  6. ↑ Porter, Martin (1984-05-29). "The PC Goes to Bat". PC Magazine. p. 209. Retrieved 24 October 2013.
  7. ↑ Fraser, James (2000). "Baseball Prospectus — Escaping Bill James' Shadow" (PDF). SABR Statistical Analysis Committee. pp. 4–5.
  8. ↑ Oliver, Dean (2003). Basketball On Paper. Potomac Books.
  9. ↑ Hollinger, John (2005). "Pro Basketball Forecast".
  10. ↑ Friedman, Jason (2007). "Rocket Science". Houston Press.
  11. ↑ "84th Annual Academy Awards Nominees".
  12. ↑ Cohn, Nate (2013-02-01). "4th Down? We're Going For It!". New Republic.
  13. ↑ "General Football Terms Glossary". Football Outsiders.
  14. ↑ "History of ProFootballFocus".
  15. ↑ Barnwell, Bill (2008). "Pro Football Prospectus". Football Outsiders.
  16. ↑ Siegele, Shawn (2012). "Dominator Rating, Height-adjusted Speed Score, and WR Draft Rankings". Money In The Banana Stand.
  17. ↑ DuPont, Frank (2012). "Game Plan".
  18. ↑ Hribar, Rich (2013). "Fantasy Football 2013 WR Review". XN Sports.
  19. ↑ Smith, Scott (2014). "The Catch Radius Project: In Search of Better TD Production". RotoViz.
  20. ↑ "Glossary". NumberFire.
  21. 1 2 "Terms Glossary". PlayerProfiler. 2014.
  22. ↑ Lewis, Michael M. (2003). Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-05765-8.
  23. ↑ Kipen, D. (June 1, 2003). "Billy Beane's brand-new ballgame". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved November 2, 2007.
  24. 1 2 Neyer, Rob (November 5, 2002). "Red Sox hire James in advisory capacity". ESPN.com. Retrieved March 7, 2009.
  25. ↑ Shanahan, M. (May 23, 2005). Retrieved November 2, 2007 His numbers are in the ballpark The Boston Globe
  26. ↑ "Bill James, Beyond Baseball". Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg. PBS. June 28, 2005. Retrieved November 2, 2007.
  27. ↑ Ackman, D. (May 20, 2007). "Sultan of Stats". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved November 2, 2007.
  28. ↑ Jaffe, C. (October 22, 2007). "Rob Neyer Interview". The Hardball Times. Retrieved November 2, 2007.
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