For Those Not In The US (or even if you are)
I’d like to wish US readers a happy Thanksgiving. For those outside of the US, I thought this would be a nice little post for today: A pointer to an article in the Financial Times,
“Baseball’s love of statistics is taking over football“
Those who indulge my passion for analysis and for sport know that I love baseball and love how the “Moneyball” approach challenged decades of dogma in the national pastime with scientific analysis. Today’s financial times discusses how Chelsea (“The Blues” – UK football team) collaborates with the Boston Red Sox (the most superficial bandwagon team ever in baseball) on decision making and analytics.
Best lines:
“Mike Forde, Chelsea’s performance director, visits the US often. “The first time I went to the Red Sox,” he says of the Boston baseball team, “I sat there for eight hours, in a room with no windows, only flipcharts. I walked out of there saying, ‘Wow, that is one of the most insightful conversations on sport I have ever had.’ It was not: ‘What are you doing here? You do not know anything about our sport.’ That was totally irrelevant. It was: ‘How do you make decisions on players? What information do you use? How do we approach the same problems?’”
and:
“Forde sees his task as “risk management”.
Huh.