How Data is Transforming Sports

Basketball and Data background

The Houston Rockets made an interesting discovery several years ago:   data can transform when and where his players decided to take shots, and what type of players to recruit for the team.  Historically, however, data was gathered based on reported player statistics and performance.  Now data is being gathered in real-time from visual imagery on the field of play.

A Bit of Background

In the late 1990s, the Oakland Athletics General Manager, Sandy Alderson, had to do something as the owners decided to slash their payroll. To field a competitive roster on a limited budget, Alderson began focusing on a form of data analysis they called “sabermetric” to obtain undervalued players (“sabermetrics” is the empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity.). The metric he found to be the most successful: on-base percentage among hitters. Later, the famed general manager Billy Beane would be profiled in Michael Lewis’s 2003 best-selling book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.”

Over 15 years ago, Lewis discussed Beane’s methods as the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics and how Beane — along with Harvard-educated statistician Paul DePodesta — used sabermetric principles to run his team in a cost-effective way. The book and Beane’s methods have influenced the way many think about the game of baseball, and as importantly to sports data in general.