The 2011 film Moneyball was a critically acclaimed, Academy Award-nominated, box office success. This is quite something, given that the movie centres on debates over baseball strategy and statistics.
This article explores sport after Moneyball, meaning sport at a time when Moneyball’s disruptive ideas are widely accepted, and often celebrated. It’s true that the statistical revolution of the early 2000s was years in the making (for example, see Millington & Millington, 2015) but the Oakland Athletics’ then-unorthodox approach helped popularize the idea that advanced statistical analyses can improve sport performance “at the margins,” meaning in slight but still significant ways.