We’ll be live tweeting @natnetboston from the hilarious and enlightening Ig Nobel awards tonight at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre. Which is good, because we need a distraction here in Red Sox Nation. Last night’s loss was harsh.
Back in the day, the Red Sox were one of the first teams to adopt sabermetrics, a way of using baseball statistics as empirical data to analyze the performance of player and teams. It’s described in the book and new movie Moneyball.
NPR recently interviewed Bill James, the man behind sabermetrics
NEAL CONAN, host: If there was one contribution that you look back on and say, this was what opened people’s eyes, what do you think it was?
JAMES: One thing that got a lot of attention was the Pythagorean theorem of baseball, which is that there’s a predictable relationship between the number of runs you score and the number of runs you allow and your won-loss record. At the time that I was first advocating that idea, people were really skeptical about it, but it’s one of those things you can easily check it out and turns out to be true. So I think that played a key role – it’s reflected in the movie – played a key role in opening people’s eyes to the fact that this kind of theories actually did connect to the real game.
CONAN: So observable reality did change people’s minds.
JAMES: I hope so.
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