Sabermetrics In Baseball

Baseball has always been a sport of numbers. Baseball has always had the most known and most prestigious records of all sports, Hank Aaron’s homerun record, Pete Rose’s hit record, and Nolan Ryan’s strikeout total just to name a few. However, there is a growing sector of executives and analysts that argue for the game to be looked at from a different point of view. They argue from the shift from “Who will hit us the most homeruns?” to “Who can produce the most runs for us?” Baseball is arguably the most interesting sport for mathematics, and it is definitely the most interesting sport for the particular field of statistics. From the traditional gravity problems with hit and thrown balls to other force and motion problems resulting from pitches, the sport has found a way into the textbooks of many middle and high school math courses. These same people who have grown up fans of the game and students in the classroom are now the ones lobbying for the shift of perspective by the managers and executives across the major leagues towards the use of sabermetrics in their player analysis.
Sabermetrics, as defined by Bill James, one of the founding fathers of sabermetric analysis of statistics, in his interview on Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg, is “the search for objective knowledge about baseball.” The general principles of the statistical analysis philosophy revolve around the goals of the hitters and the team to produce runs and win games respectively. The rise of sabermetrics has come around fairly recently after Michael Lewis’s 2003 book, Moneyball, and the subsequent movie of the same name, starring Brad Pitt, which told the story of the Oakland A’s and general manager Billy Beane’s quest for postseason success with a relat...

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It is these kinds of metrics by which executives and managers have been able to field better teams in recent years across the board than ever before. By going beyond the basic box score of a game and analyzing the players and their contributions much closer than ever before, teams are better suited to sign and play the players that will do the best job to produce wins for the team even if old school baseball minds wouldn’t initially agree. The proof is in the pudding as they say, as Bill James, one of the most well-known pioneers for sabermetrics, joined the Boston Red Sox in 2003 as a Senior Advisor. Prior to the 2003 season, the Red Sox had not won a single World Series Championship since 1918. Since 2003, the Red Sox have become one of the most dominate teams in the league, winning three championships, the most in that time frame in 2004, 2007, and 2013.