A Brief History: How Baseball Stats Steered Modern Sports
Stats are a pillar of modern sports. First, they’re a metric that teams and players can use to gauge their own performance. This makes it easier for them to benchmark and push for improvements. Second, stats are a simplified way for fans and analysts to also understand how a series is unfolding, how a team is stacking up at a certain part of the season, and who may come out on top.
In fact, stats are often used by bettors who want to glean important information about a player, team, or league. In fact, when it comes to online betting, many oddsmakers offer stats breakdowns that make matchup analysis easy. These pages let visitors quickly review the most important stats related to their market, which not only influence their picks but also how oddsmakers set lines, to begin with.
In other words, modern betting is backed by hard data—and much of this is thanks to baseball stats. But how did baseball, compared to other major league sports, lead this charge? And how have baseball stats steered the modern era of sports data?
Hardcore Fans Invent ‘Roto’
Compared to hockey, basketball, and football, baseball moves a bit slower. Given its specialized positions and the nature of the game, fans would often ‘keep track’ of the game for themselves. In the 1950s and 60s, this meant tallying stats as a game unfolded. In fact, these hardcore fans were the first to invent fantasy sports—and they were scribbling stats on baseball cards as early as 1930.
But by 1960, this interest in numbers (officially known in baseball as ‘sabermetrics’) had turned into fledgling fantasy pursuits with the Baseball Summer League to a computerized fantasy league on an IBM 1620. This culminated in 1980 with the very first ‘roto’ league, which laid the foundation for modern fantasy sports. This roto league would follow the entire baseball season and lead to one winner based solely on the statistical results of live league action.
The Stats Craze Spreads as Part of Fantasy Sports
Throughout the 1980s, fantasy baseball took off. Its impact was quickly felt in similar leagues, as many sports fans realized they could turn their love of the sport into a long-term fantasy game. During this time, stats publications gained huge numbers of subscribers who would then pore over the numbers in order to craft a perfect lineup.
Though fantasy sports began with baseball, it quickly became a huge part of hockey, basketball, and, in particular, football culture. Today, this impact can still be felt. In the early 2000s, a new type of fantasy league began with Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS). This shortened format has proved incredibly popular for fans of all four major leagues.
The Moneyball Effect
Fantasy leagues weren’t the end-all of stats obsession in baseball. In fact, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, GM for the Oakland Athletics’ was toiling with a new approach to stats. Rather than use them to create an entertaining fantasy league, he wanted to see how the numbers could give his team an edge.
Relying on stats only, Beane devised a way to recruit players, determining which players would be worth a certain investment and how their skills would develop over time. The hunch proved incredibly viable, leading to a book by Michael Lewis in 2003 and even a Hollywood hit later on in 2011.
Beane’s theories and obsession with stats, once again, proved incredibly influential far beyond the realm of baseball. In fact, this was the final push that helped start the modern sports craze that focuses on stats.
NBA Case Study: Moreyball
Modern sports revolve around stats from just about every perspective. But Beane’s theories have had particular relevance in basketball. In the mid-2010s, GM of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey, decided to adapt the Moneyball theory. He pored over stats in the NBA and realized that teams that scored more three-pointers were statistically more likely to win.
From there, Morey’s new approach (dubbed ‘Moreyball’) shifted the entire NBA away from creative drives to the basket toward an emphasis on three-pointers. In fact, this is a huge contributor to the success of not only the Houston Rockets but also the Golden State Warriors.
