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Sports analytics

Sports analytics are collections of relevant historical statistics that can provide a competitive advantage to a team or individual by helping to inform players, coaches and other staff and help facilitate decision-making both during and prior to sporting events. The term "sports analytics" was popularized in mainstream sports culture following the release of the 2011 film Moneyball. In this film, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) relies heavily on the use of baseball analytics to build a competitive team on a minimal budget, building upon and extending the established practice of Sabermetrics.

There are two key aspects of sports analytics—on-field and off-field analytics. On-field analytics deals with improving the on-field performance of teams and players, including questions such as "which player on the Red Sox contributed most to the team's offense?" or "who is the best wing player in the NBA?", etc. Off-field analytics deals with the business side of sports. Off-field analytics focuses on helping a sport organization or body surface patterns and insights through data that would help increase ticket and merchandise sales, improve fan engagement, etc. Off-field analytics essentially uses data to help rights-holders make decisions that would lead to higher growth and increased profitability.

As technology has advanced over the last number of years, data collection has become more in-depth and can be conducted with relative ease. Advancements in data collection have allowed for sports analytics to grow as well, leading to the development of advanced statistics and machine learning, as well as sport specific technologies that allow for things like game simulations to be conducted by teams prior to play, improve fan acquisition and marketing strategies, and even understand the impact of sponsorship on each team as well as its fans.

Another significant impact sports analytics has had on professional sports is in relation to sports betting. In-depth sports analytics has taken sports gambling to new levels; whether it be fantasy sports leagues or nightly wagers, bettors now have more information at their disposal to help aid decision making than ever before. A number of companies and webpages have been developed to help provide fans with up-to-date information for their betting needs.

Baseball was one of the first sports to embrace sports analytics with Earnshaw Cook publishing Percentage Baseball in 1964. This was the first publication citing sports analytics to garner national media attention. In 1981, Bill James helped bring SABR (Society for American Baseball Research), one of the leading sports analytical organizations for baseball, into national prominence when Sports Illustrated featured James in the article He Does It By The Numbers by Daniel Okrent (1981).

In 1984, New York Mets manager Davey Johnson became the first known member of a known sports organization to advocate for the use of sports analytics. During his time with the Baltimore Orioles, Johnson had tried to convince the organization to use his FORTRAN baseball computer simulation to determine the team's optimal starting lineup. As manager of the Mets, 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. By the close of the twentieth century, sports analytics had gained significant acceptance by the management of many Major League Baseball clubs, notably the Oakland A's, Boston Red Sox and Cleveland Indians.

At the same time, baseball fans and sports media had begun to adopt sports analytics as a way to understand and report the game. In 1996, Baseball Prospectus sought to build upon Bill James' work when it launched the Baseball Prospectus website 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. 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.

The MLB has set the benchmark in sports analytics for a number of years, with some of the game's brightest minds having never set foot into the heat of a major or minor league baseball game. Theo Epstein of the Chicago Cubs is one of those minds who has never suited up in a professional baseball game; instead, Epstein relies on his Yale University education and the numbers behind the game to make many of his decisions. Epstein, known for his role in ending two of baseball's most famous streaks (the Boston Red Sox curse of the Great Bambino in 2004, and as recently as the 2016 World Series, helping end the 108-year drought between World Series wins for the Chicago Cubs), is a member of a growing community in major league baseball who do not rely on years of major league playing experience. This community has been able to grow thanks to the in-depth collection of statistics that has existed in baseball for decades. With analytics being relatively common in MLB, there is a breadth of statistics that have become vital in the analysis of the game, which include:

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