Sabermetrics
The term is derived from the movement's progenitors, members of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), founded in 1971, and was coined by Bill James,[when?]
[1] The term moneyball is used for the practice of using metrics to identify "undervalued players" and sign them to what ideally will become "below market value" contracts, which debuted in the efforts of small-market teams to compete with the much greater resources of big-market organizations.
Thus, a good measure of a player's worth would be his ability to help his team score runs, which was observed to be highly correlated with his number of times on base – leading to the development of a new stat, "on-base percentage".
In 2011, a film based on Lewis' book – also called Moneyball – was released and gave broad exposure to the techniques used in the Oakland Athletics' front office.
Sabermetrics reflected a desire by a handful of baseball enthusiasts to expand their understanding of the game by revealing new insights that may have been hidden in its traditional statistics.
Their early efforts ultimately evolved into evaluating players in every aspect of the game, including batting, pitching, baserunning, and fielding.
[13] Even though slugging percentage and an early form of on-base percentage (OBP) – which takes into accounts base on balls ("walks") and hit-by-pitches – date to at least 1941,[14] pre-dating both Bill James (born 1949) and SABR (formed 1971),[13] enhanced focus was put on the relationship of times on base and run scoring by early SABR-era baseball statistical pioneers.
[17] Through his research, McCracken was able to show that there is little to no difference between pitchers in the number of hits they allow on balls put into play – regardless of their skill level.
This measure of a pitcher's performance takes hits, walks, home runs allowed, and strikeouts while adjusting for ballpark factors.
[21]: 189–198 Advanced metrics are increasingly developed and targeted to addressing in-game activities (such as when a team should attempt to steal a base,[22] and when to bring closers in).
Sabermetrics are commonly used for everything from sportswriting to baseball Hall of Fame consideration, selecting player match-ups and evaluating in-game strategic options.
Those which are most useful in evaluating past performance and predicting future outcomes are valuable in determining a player's contributions to his team,[15] potential trades, contract negotiations, and arbitration.
[15] Machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) can be applied to predicting future outcomes in baseball modeling, in-game strategy, personnel handling, and roster-building and contract negotiations.
[23] The work of his former assistant Rob Neyer, who later became a senior writer at ESPN.com and national baseball editor of SBNation, also contributed to popularizing sabermetrics since the mid-1980s.
This became known as the PITCHf/x system, which uses video cameras to record pitch speed at its release point and crossing the plate, location, and angle (if any) of a break.
