Sports analytics are a collection of relevant, historical, statistics that can provide a competitive advantage to a team or individual. Through the collection and analysis of these data, sports analytics inform players, coaches and other staff in order to 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 which Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) relies heavily on the use of baseball analytics, building upon and extending the established practice of Sabermetrics, to build a competitive team on a minimal budget.
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 rightsholders take 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 have had on professional sports is in relation to sport gambling. In depth sports analytics have 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. A number of companies and webpages have been developed to help provide fans with up to the minute information for their betting needs.
Sport-specific analytic tools and measurements
Major League Baseball (MLB)
Early history
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.
