Advanced metrics


Advanced metrics is the term for the empirical analysis of sports, particularly statistics that measure in-game productivity and efficiency. Advanced metrics were first employed in baseball by Bill James, a pioneer in the field who is considered the father and public face of the practice.

General principles

The basic principles of advanced metrics were outlined in The Sabermetric Manifesto by David Grabiner. In the piece, Grabiner explains that Bill James defined sabermetrics, the first advanced metric, as the search for objective knowledge about sports.
To glean objective knowledge, advanced metrics practitioners gather and synthesize thousands of situational game data points from a wide variety of sources beyond high level box score information. A large volume of situational data is then distilled into sophisticated statistics that help sports enthusiasts better understand, compare, and appreciate the on-field performances by athletes. Advanced metrics provide more objective answers to questions such as "which player on the Red Sox contributed the most to the team's offense?" or "who is the best wing player in the NBA?" or "how many touchdowns is Dez Bryant likely to score for the Cowboys?". By removing the subjective observations of sports media members and the emotional opinions of fans, advanced metrics offer a more clinical, rational prism from which to enjoy sporting events and consume sports media coverage.

Early history

Advanced metrics were first posited in the mid-20th century, and Earnshaw Cook was one its earliest practitioners. Cook's research for his 1964 work, Percentage Baseball was the first publication citing advanced metrics to garner national media attention. Despite the competitive advantage offered by advanced metrics, the practice was unanimously dismissed by major sports organizations for most of the twentieth century.
In the late 1970s, Bill James helped bring SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research, and the empirical analysis of athletic performance, to national prominence. The analytical perspective on sports championed by James and SABR developed a wider following after Sports Illustrated featured James in the article He Does It By The Numbers by Daniel Okrent.

Advanced metrics in baseball

Former Major League Baseball second baseman Davey Johnson was the first known member of a major sports organization to advocate for the use of advanced metrics. During his time with the Baltimore Orioles, he used an IBM System/360 to write a FORTRAN baseball computer simulation to determine the team's optimal starting lineup. When he proposed his findings to Orioles manager Earl Weaver, Johnson's proposal was summarily dismissed. A decade later, after becoming the New York Mets' manager in 1984, Johnson tasked a team employee with writing a dBASE II application to run sophisticated statistical models in order to better understand the capabilities and tendencies of the team's opponents. At the close of the twentieth century, advanced metrics had gained significant acceptance by the management of many Major League Baseball clubs, notably the Oakland A's, Boston Red Sox and Cleveland Indians.
The adoption of advanced metrics by professional baseball franchises has been largely outpaced by sports fans and sports media. Bill James' first published his Baseball Abstract in the early 1980s. In 1996, Baseball Prospectus sought to build upon Bill James' work when it launched the website in order to present sabermetric research and related findings as well as publish advanced metrics such as EqA, the Davenport Translations, and VORP. Baseball Prospectus has grown into a multi-channel sports media organization employing a team of statisticians and writers who publish New York Times Best Selling books and host weekly radio shows and podcasts.

Advanced metrics in basketball

, under coach Frank McGuire, was the first known basketball organization to utilize advanced possession metrics to gain a competitive advantage. Since then, advanced metrics enthusiasts in basketball have borrowed aspects of Bill James' philosophy in order to create weighted statistics that measure each player and each team's on-court efficiency. Most basketball-specific advanced metrics feature a per-minute measurement to ensure that a player's incremental team contributions are measured irrespective of usage volume.
Beginning in the 1990s, statistician Dean Oliver and ESPN sports writer John Hollinger first popularized the use of advanced metrics in basketball. Oliver's book Basketball On Paper and Hollinger's Pro Basketball Forecast are credited with the advancement of basketball analytics. Major sports media proponents, such as Hollinger, have helped basketball evolve more quickly from rudimentary statistics to advanced metrics than some other major American sports.
Houston Rockets' Daryl Morey was the first NBA general manager to implement advanced metrics as a key aspect of player evaluation. In the years that followed Morey's hiring, the NBA moved quickly to adopt advanced metrics-based player evaluation practices. In 2012, John Holliger left ESPN to become VP of Basketball Operations for the Memphis Grizzlies.
Beyond professional basketball front offices, major sports media websites such as and are now dedicated to the collection, synthesis, and dissemination of advanced metrics to pro and college basketball organizations, sports media members, and fans.

Advanced metrics in American football

The adoption of advanced metrics by college and professional football organizations has been a gradual evolution. While the sabermetrics revolution in baseball inspired a bestselling book, Moneyball by Michael Lewis, which also became a critically acclaimed film, the advanced metrics movement in football has had no such prominence.
In 2003, the advanced metrics-focused website pioneered football's first comprehensive advanced metric, DVOA, which compares a player's success on each play to the league average based on a number of variables including down, distance, location on field, current score gap, quarter, and strength of opponent. Football Outsiders' work has since been widely cited by analytical members the sports media establishment. A few years later, Pro Football Focus launched a comprehensive statistical database, which soon featured a sophisticated player grading system. Advanced Football Analytics has its EPA and WPA for NFL players.
Grantland lead football writer Bill Barnwell created the first advanced metrics focused on predicting the future performance of an individual player, the Speed Score, which he referenced in a piece written for Pro Football Prospectus. After analyzing data pertaining to running back success, Barnwell discovered that the most successful running backs at the NFL level were both fast and heavy, therefore, Speed Score weights 40-yard dash times by assigning a premium to bigger, often stronger, running backs.
The fantasy football community has been one of the driving forces in the evolution of advanced metrics in American football. Fantasy sports writer, and author of How To Think Like A Fantasy Football Winner, C.D. Carter is a leading advocate for the use of advanced metrics in fantasy football analysis. He and peers at , , and the long-form fantasy football analysis site, , have established an informal subculture of fantasy football sports writers who refer to themselves as "degens." The degen movement is responsible for the creation of numerous American football efficiency metrics that better explain past football performances and attempt to predict future player production. Height-adjusted Speed Score, College Dominator Rating, Target Premium, Catch Radius, Net Expected Points, and Production Premium were recently created and disseminated by degen writers and mathematicians. Building on the work of these writers, sites such as distill a wide variety of established advanced metrics into a single player snapshot designed to be palatable to the casual sports fan.

Advanced metrics in ice hockey

In ice hockey, analytics is the analysis of the characteristics of hockey players and teams through the use of statistics and other tools to gain a greater understanding of the effects of their performance. Three commonly used statistics in ice hockey analytics are Corsi and Fenwick—both of which use shot attempts to approximate puck possession—and PDO, which is often considered a measure of luck.

Examples