Week 10
Nov 6th, 2012 by Maria Burns Ortiz
Week 10 – More than just words: The impact of Moneyball. The role of stats and numbers.
Reading:
“The Great Debate.” Alan Schwartz, Baseball America.
“The No-Stats All-Star.” Michael Lewis, New York Times Magazine.
“Moneyball opened our eyes, but it wasn’t a game-changer.” Sky Andrecheck, SI.com.
““Beyond Moneyball: The future of sports analytics.” Benjamin Alamar and Vijay Mehrotra, Analytics Magazine.
Choose two (available for download via logging into Tufts Libraries site and/or linked to in this post – if you’re having an issue finding and/or downloading any of these articles, please email me for a PDF version.):
“Differentiating the Top English Premier League Football Clubs from the Rest of the Pack: Identifying the Keys to Success.” Joel Oberstone, Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. Vol. 5, Issue 3.
“From One-and-Done to Seasoned Veterans: A Demographic Analysis of Individual Career Length in Major League Soccer.” Nathaniel Boyden and James Carey, Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. Vol. 6, Issue 4.
To Tank or Not to Tank? Evidence from the NBA.” Christopher Walters and Tyler Williams, Presented at MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.
“Salary distribution and team performance in Major League Baseball” Christopher N. Annala and Jason Winfreeb, Sport Management Review. Vol. 14, Issue 2.
“Deconstructing the Rebound with Optical Tracking Data” Rajiv Maheswaran, Yu-Han Chang, Aaron Henehan and Samantha Danesis, Presented at MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.
“Effort vs. Concentration: The Asymmetric Impact of Pressure on
NBA Performance.” Matt Goldman and Justin M. Rao, Presented at MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.
If there’s a different sports analytics academic paper or journal article that you would like to read for this assignment, please let me know.
You’re more than welcome to tailor this assignment to your interest. The above journals have plenty of sports analytics articles and MIT’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference has archives of dozens of papers that you can access by going here. Under “Past Conferences” choose “History,” select a year, scroll down to where it says “Research Papers” (right under “Panels”).
Additional Web resources to review:
The Harvard Sport Analysis Collective Blog. (Read a couple of posts. Come prepared to discuss what you read.)
Where the Heat and the Thunder Hit Their Shots
Blog Assignment 1: Write a post using analytics data.
Blog Assignment 2: What role should analytic data play in sports? Is too much emphasis put on analytics? Is not enough? Should sports reporters use it more? Less?
Blog Assignment 3: Storify (From in-class on 11/6)
This page has the following sub pages.