“Why trust instinct when there is science?”
– Homer Kelley, author of “The Golfing Machine.”
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The sports kids are all into science. It started in baseball, of course, because baseball is a wonderful little laboratory where just about everything that happens on the field is logged in. For a long while, baseball’s compulsive scorekeeping inspired nothing more than quirky statistics and great trivia questions. Then came Bill James and sabermetrics and computers, and then there were all these advanced statistics, and then there were more analytics, and before long Ivy League educated economists were running Major League Baseball teams.