Being analytical isn’t as easy as it used to be

In 2002 Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane brought the idea of analytics-driven decisions in major league baseball in a whole new way. Of course, analytics have been a part of baseball for as long as the sport has existed. Teams (and fans) have known about batting average and earned run average as statistics and used them to try to determine a player’s value for more than a century. But nobody called it analytics.

You’re almost certainly familiar with the story, now, of how Beane and his front office identified a market inefficiency when it came to on-base percentage. Specifically, they noticed that teams drastically undervalued the stat and preferred players who got more hits. They…