Sport: Stats obscure human factors and luck

There were too many fine ingredients for the outcome to be anything other than tasty. Bill James was the amateur statistician who got frustrated with inaccurate baseball analysis and created sabermetrics. Billy Beane was the former player who’d never fulfilled his potential but became a general manager who thought those sabermetrics could be a cost-effective way of plucking players from the market. Michael Lewis was a superb author who in 2003 via Moneyball turned the story of Beane and the Oakland A’s unlikely rise from a good story into a revolutionary read. But ask any atheist: just because there’s an engaging theme doesn’t mean you should follow it religiously.