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Quantitative Analysis of Sports

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Behavioral Sport Psychology

Abstract

In 2003, Michael C. Lewis published the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, detailing Billy Beane’s (the general manager of the Oakland Athletics Major League Baseball [MLB] team) contemporary use of advanced statistical methods to draft or select players and to devise strategic approaches to game play in hope of launching the team into the competitive echelon of the MLB, despite the numerous odds against them. To the novice reader or sports enthusiast, this simple description seems an endearing tale of an underdog’s success, and rightly so – the Oakland Athletic’s, with a salary budget of only $41 million, competed against teams with much higher salaries, such as the New York Yankees with $200 million to spend on its players. Transcending beyond this “triumph over adversity” tale, however, Lewis’s Moneyball has become a panacea for analytically maximizing outcomes from an economic approach.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The application of advanced statistical analyses in basketball has been termed APBRmetrics, after the Association for Professional Basketball Researcher (see http://www.apbr.org). In football, analysts simply borrow the term sabermetrics (e.g., Campos & Chait, 2004), despite its origin from baseball.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Behavioral Science, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 66045, USA

    Derek D. Reed

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  1. Derek D. Reed
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Correspondence to Derek D. Reed .

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  1. May Institute, Pacella Park Drive 41, Randolph, 02368, Massachusetts, USA

    James K. Luiselli

  2. , Dept. Applied Behavioral Science, University of Kansas, Sunnyside Avenue 1000, Lawrence, 66045, Kansas, USA

    Derek D. Reed

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Reed, D.D. (2011). Quantitative Analysis of Sports. In: Luiselli, J., Reed, D. (eds) Behavioral Sport Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0070-7_3

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