Is Kris Russell valuable or terrible? Long after Moneyball, skeptics and ‘nerds’ are still fighting about analytics

Source: nationalpost.com --- Thursday, December 28, 2017
The Major League Baseball draft that was the basis for the book Moneyball took place in 2002. The book itself was published the following year, and a year after that came the paperback edition, in which author Michael Lewis wrote an afterword that focused on the surprising reaction it had touched off. The examination of how the Oakland A’s were challenging Baseball orthodoxy had been blasted by many writers, executives and players, from Joe Morgan to Pat Gillick, and a debate of sorts ensued. “It wasn’t as interesting as a real debate,” Lewis wrote, “in that there was no chance for an exchange of ideas. It was more like a religious war — or like the endless, fruitless dispute between creationists and evolutionary theorists.” Much like a religious war, that debate has proved to be stubborn and intractable. The last 15 years have included many moments in which the arguments over the use of analytics in sports decision-making should have been put to rest. Every kind of sports organization has come to understand the importance of data analysis when making front-office decisions, and while some have embraced it far more than others, there are enough examples of the successful application of the Moneyball effect — using data to create a competitive advantage — that the debate, such as it is, ought to be over. Spoiler alert: it isn’t. Rarely does a week go by when someone doesn’t take a shot at analytics, or when some kind of developme ...

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