Sabermetrics

Sabermetrics is the search for objective knowledge about baseball through the statistical analysis of play, named after SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research, and popularized by writer and analyst Bill James starting in the late 1970s. It grew out of dissatisfaction with traditional counting stats, like batting average or RBIs, that are shaped heavily by teammates and context rather than an individual player's own contribution.

Sabermetric work favors rate and context-adjusted measures, such as on-base percentage over batting average, and composite metrics such as wins above replacement that combine hitting, fielding and baserunning into one comparable number. Modern sabermetrics increasingly draws on player tracking data, pitch-by-pitch and ball-flight data, rather than only the traditional box score, to measure things like exit velocity and defensive positioning directly instead of inferring them.

The field matters because it reshaped how teams evaluate players, draft, and set lineups, a shift popularized outside baseball by the book and film "Moneyball." Its methods and mindset, valuing what is measurable and predictive over what is traditionally prized, have since spread to other sports, inspiring metrics such as expected goals in soccer. A common pitfall within sabermetrics itself is over-trusting a new metric before it has been tested for how well it actually predicts future performance rather than just describing the past.