If you take a look at the early days of analytics, you have to look at sabermetrics. Sabermetrics is defined as the objective study of baseball through analysis, and it was first started by Bill James, who is now widely known as the “father of sabermetrics”. James, who has had a longtime affiliation with the Boston Red Sox, also has several World Series rings, which perhaps proves that his philosophies and theories have quite a bit of merit and value.
Back in the 1970s, when Bill James was just getting started, he began asking questions. And these were questions that challenged the age-old myths in baseball about how the game worked, how it functioned, and the value of certain strategies—such as the stolen base, the sacrifice bunt, and many other strategies on the field of play. As time passed, Bill mined data. And additionally, a group of people who joined Bill in his quest to build out sabermetrics began to assemble data and information that wasn’t previously being captured or talked about. They did this to address some of the thorny questions and age-old myths surrounding the game, and in some cases, to refute those myths.
Because of the work that they did, over the years, baseball was known historically as the birthplace of sports analytics. It was also the one sport that really lent itself to data collection, even when data collection devices were still nonexistent and data collection overall was still very primitive.
This was also partially because baseball has a very discrete nature to it. There’s the batter-pitcher confrontation, for example. The pitch is thrown, and then something happens to that pitch. It’s either put in play or not put in play, and if it is, the rest of the play develops from there. This is very different from continuous-flow sports, which are much more difficult to create data for. So, because baseball was the first sport to really dive into data collection and analysis, it was, in many ways, the forerunner to the sports analytics of today.
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