The Numbers Guy at the Wall Street Journal talks about how the stats revolution in baseball was driven by stathead fans, whereas what’s happening in football is really top-down:
This all stands in stark contrast to baseball, where fans with a mathematical bent sparked a reformation in how to value players. As chronicled last year in the Michael Lewis bestseller Moneyball, over the last 30 years advanced stats spread from mimeographed newsletters to baseball front offices, where a few smart general managers embraced them and used them to get more bang for their buck in player acquisition.
In football, though, the teams have driven most of the improvements. Kansas City Chiefs coach Dick Vermeil, a stats guru, suggests new numbers for Stats Inc. to track, says Pete Moris, who helps manage advanced stats for the team. The league’s salary cap equalizes teams’ budgets, which has made factors like statistical analysis more important for teams’ fortunes.
One of the sad parts of this ‘proletarian’ development of baseball stats is that some of the stat gurus have been hired to work for baseball organisations - for instance, Mitchel Lichtman aka MGL, developer of the UZR system of measuring defense, is now thought to be working for the Cardinals. So previously public stats end up becoming private.