Most of the readers are familiar with the growth in statistical thinking in baseball. When one describes this growth, one has to mention the people such as Harry Chadwick, Bill James, Pete Palmer and Tom Tango who revolutionized how one thinks about baseball performance and strategy. Certainly, Billy Beane’s approach to building a baseball game was highlighted in the book and movie Moneyball. In fact, (using my AI friend) to “Moneyball” something means to use data and advanced analytics to make better decisions, maximize efficiency, and achieve great outcomes on a strict budget.

Bill James was an outsider, that is, somewhat outside of the professional baseball world, who loved baseball and made fundamental contributions to how one can improve measures of baseball performance. But there are many other stories of people who made remarkable contributions to analytics in a wide variety of sports. The goal of Out of Left Field is to honor those who had a passion for sports and applied their mathematical and statistical training to make important breakthroughs that change how we currently view the sport.

Out of Left Field is divided into nine chapters, each devoted to a description of how a person developed a technical idea in a particular sport. The chapter “A Method for All Ratings” describes how Arpad Elo developed the famous Elo method for calculating the relative skill levels in a zero-sum game such as chess. The chapter “The Man to First Measure the Match” describes the remarkable efforts of Bruce Old to measure a tennis match — Old’s efforts led to one of the first books to describe strategies of tennis doubles. The chapter “The Model that Made Cricket Fair” describes the collaboration of Frank Duckworth and Tony Lewis to develop a method for ending a cricket match that is delayed due to weather. (At a statistics meeting I attended, it was said that perhaps Duckworth and Lewis were the most famous statisticians due to this cricket method.). The chapter “Bornn’s Supremacy and the XY Research Boom” is a detailed look of Luke Bornn’s research and how it eventually was applied to explore the spatial patterns of player movement in basketball and soccer. Indeed, I believe that much of the growth in sports analytics will be in soccer and these spatial modeling efforts will be a big part of this graph.

I found this book interesting and very well-written. The author has written extensively on tennis analytics and is currently a manager of data science at Teamworks. The book is a great illustration of how people from varying backgrounds can make important contributions in sports analytics. These people all had great passions for a particular sport, they all saw particular problems that need to be addressed, and they used their mathematical and statistical sills to make these contributions.

Unlike many statistics books, Out of Left Field was written for a general reader who is curious about these innovators and how they changed particular sports. The biographies are fascinating and one also gets insight into the statistical methods that were developed. Given the wide range of sports covered, I believe this book should be of interest to many sports-minded readers. The book should be of particular interest to all of the students who want to get a position within the sports statistics industry.

For more information on Out of Left Field you can visit the author’s site at https://leftfieldanalytics.com/