Slate has an interesting article on why football, unlike baseball, has never embraced quantitative analysis. I have an alternative theory: because football isn't a real sport. (as Kevin quickly ducks for cover)
I come from a family of stat-heads. My father, and his father before him, are CPAs. My dad compulsively keeps stats on everything -- though I'm certainly not knocking him for this; he's made a reputation for himself in the California wine country by being able to accurately predict grape surpluses and shortfalls years in advance. I have the bug too -- when I wrote code for a living, I was always the guy poring over the bug stats looking for the patterns and trying to predict the end-game. About 5 years ago, my father and my brother asked me to join their rotisserie-league baseball game -- roto is the ultimate thrill for any stat-head. Since then I've developed a deep appreciation for the intricacies of the game (I disagree with Slate's opinion that football is more complex than baseball).
There are really two overlapping camps for baseball statistics: one tracks the players and teams (essentially the game itself), and the other tracks the business of baseball (how valuable a player is to a team vs. what they are paid, etc.) The first camp has been doing this for decades, almost back to the origins of professional baseball itself. The second is a relatively new phenomenon embraced and validated by the general manager of the Oakland A's, Billy Beane, and most recently documented in the book Moneyball.
Of course, as with so many other things the Web has changed baseball stats forever. All the stats are available (usually for a fee). Lots and lots of professional and amateur news and analysis too (the good stuff also for a fee). My favorite sites for the "game stats" are Roto Times, Baseball HQ, and Rotoworld. Even more significantly, the effort required to host a fantasy-league baseball tournament is very low. There are entire host sites which will do this for you for the entire baseball season for a very low fee, and they provide great service, including live updated stats every day as the games are being played. My league uses TQ Stats and I highly recommend them -- they are affiliated with Roto Times and do a great job of integrating player news in with the rest of the daily reports.
On the "business of baseball" side, the best site I know of is Baseball Prospectus. (disclaimer: this is a for-profit business, and both my brother and brother-in-law work for Baseball Prospectus, though I don't and I pay for all of the premium content I get from the site). They have some great writers with a real diversity of background and expertise - I like all of the columns, but one of my favorites is "Under the Knife" which discusses the medical side of baseball including in-depth discussions of all the different kinds of surgeries that are done as well as supplements. They do great financial analysis too -- some recent stuff on the A-Rod vs. Manny Ramirez trade that I blogged about before, and they have some older stuff looking at revenue-sharing and the overall profitability of baseball teams. Turns out in the process they've also accumulated some of the best "game of baseball" stats too -- they publish it in an annual book. The book is irreverent and just plain fun to read, and their focus on the business side shines through; they have conversion factors on most of their stats to compensate for the effects of different ballparks and a few other factors so that you can really do an apples-to-apples comparison of players. Makes it a bit harder to use their stats to plan your fantasy-league strategy, but it is incredibly insightful.
If you wade into this, keep in mind that you're trying to step aboard a locomotive going at full speed. There's a lot of terminology thrown around, and a constant tension between conventional wisdom about a player and what the statistics support. People have strong opinions in this space. But you will see a whole side to baseball that you never knew existed, and you'll never watch a baseball game the same way again.
And I still maintain that football isn't a real sport. (duck)
9:47:41 AM  ; ;
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Reading the BBC web site today I stumbled across 