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Greetings!
Baseball, invented in 1869, has been watched and/or played by very nearly every American in some form or another for the past 140 plus years.
Strikeouts, base hits, homeruns are measures with which everyone is familiar. Baseball cards publish the key statistics for every major league player...hits, runs, at bats, batting average for fielders and wins, losses, strikeouts for pitchers.
What more can we ask for? Certainly that should paint a picture of exceptional players vs. average players giving a team a better chance of winning.
That approach held true as the big market teams with large payrolls to acquire hitters and pitchers were able to overpower the competition.
Moneyball® and the rules change.
Moneyball, now a hit movie, is the story of how the Oakland A's competed at the highest level with the lowest payroll among major league teams.They found that conventional baseball wisdom is often subjective, based on opinion or more generic measures of success.
"Statistics such as stolen bases, runs batted in, and batting average, typically used to gauge players, are relics of a 19th century view of the game and the statistics that were available at the time."[1]
Rather than rely on these measures, the Oakland A's developed more empirical gauges of player performance to field a team that could compete successfully against richer competitors. Their statistical analysis developed better indicators of success such as, runs created, slugging percentage and on-base percentage.The Oakland A's believed players with these qualities were a better bargain in the market.
Moneyball thinking ushered in Sabermetrics (Society for American Baseball Research, acronynm, SABR)
that questioned the old traditions, encouraged the common use and collection of data and strived for improved outcomes based on that data.
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Data Warehoused in the USA