Sports Analytics

There's been some great articles and videos on espn.com from Nate Silver and the boys over at fivethirtyeight.com, especially this one and this one ranking all the teams from the four major sports.. They've got some great research on what teams are the best in crunching sports data and which teams, like the Jim Leyland Tigers, just throw the advanced research in the trash. They rank all the teams from the four major sports and break them down into categories.

In our last two years of coaching varsity baseball, we decided to use a mom to do all of our score booking duties in the dugout. She had done it the past two years on JV since her son was on the team. I was obviously a little reluctant to give up my old-fashioned scorebook for an app called GameChanger, not to mention a mom sitting in our dugout as we made fun of our players (and occasionally drank shots of hard liquor to get us through the bad nights).

I don't have the time or patience on an iPad to fully explain how I utilized the GameChanger app to gain research and information on our opponents, especially in our post-season successes, but I made it very clear to our scorebook mom that she will NEVER make our team site accessible to ANYONE but her and I. Only two people was going to have access! Again, without getting into a lot of details, knowing what I was able to do with other teams stats, I did not want other coaches to do to me what I was doing to them. It was all legal, they were just idiots for making it public information for anyone who had a GameChanger account. Now, not all teams used GameChanger...well, I don't want to give too many secrets away. Just believe me when I say I'm a big believer in sabermetrics. We without a doubt won baseball games because I put the time into combing through as many stats as possible to gain an advantage.

It also helped that I had a post-season, night-before-tournament ritual of watching "Moneyball" before going to bed. Actually, I just couldn't sleep.