Blog posts in October 2011

Last week the movie Moneyball was released, starring Brad Pitt.  I have not yet seen the movie, but I did read the book, and believe me, it tells an extremely compelling story.  In the late 1980's/early 1990's the manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team chose to throw away the old manuals as to how teams are run and seek to find the answers in data - statistics about player's performance.  So he set out to hire analysts and statisticians  - with very little background in pro baseball - to study the game from the ground up.