MoneyBall

[PeterLe]

I'm a bit of a movie fan and eagerly waiting for the release of "MoneyBall" later this month, which is based on a true story.
I believe it about how a coach took a radical approach to choosing a baseball team by using computer generated analysis to pick his squad.

I expect I will be watching this with Betfair in the back of my mind!
I wondered whether anyone had read the book and had any thoughts on it??
Regards
Peter

[Euler]

I did an interview with a magazine once and talked about the depth I am interested in when looking at a football match. They said, hey you are like the guy in Moneyball. I nodded but wasn't sure what it was about so went and read the book. Looking forward to watching the film.

[steven1976]

Is the book a good read or should I just skip straight to the movie?

[gutuami]

I'm a bit of movie fan too. That's a way to fish out good movies.

http://www.imdb.com/search/title?genres ... 00,1000000

just change the genres,user_rating & year figures

[goran2k1]

I just started reading it and it seems very interesting. The main innovation that Billy Beane seemed to bring to talent scouting for new players was figuring out which metrics actually predicted success for ball players, as opposed to the 'conventional wisdom' of the older generation of talent scouts who went with their gut a lot.

A good example is the use of the batting % metric - a lot of coaches focused on this but Beane looked for high-school / college players to draft who had a strong 'on-base' %...as he had determined that was a better predictor of success than batting %. As he described it - this metric was undervalued in the marketplace so by buying players with a strong on-base % he was paying fewer dollars per run. That's what I've taken from it so far...keen to hear if anyone else found the same interpretation?!

[Westerner]

Moneyball is a must read - very nearly gives the keys away to the safe.

[andyfuller]

Money Ball on BBC 5 Live tonight at 9pm:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b017j74c

[Euler]

It was an interesting chat. Anybody else listen in, I tweeted the link.

In my experinance the problem has always been, not knowing what to do, but actually getting it done.

I actually met a few characters at the leaders in football conferance that they mentioned. I wasn't invited but zipped in and out during the evening to meet some of the attendees.

I think where I have gone wrong in life is I could have started up Opta. I analysed inplay sequences in football back in the early 80's but never really found a use for it until Betfair started up. I submitted a couple of articles to some magazines on the stats but they were all rejected. Maybe it's time to dust it all off again, but not from a betting perspective.

[PeterLe]

Peter - Why dont you put in for the Chelsea job when it comes up!

[Ferru123]

This site tells you the win. lose and draw probabilities of upcoming football matches, based on a statistical analysis of previous results:

http://www.dectech.org/football_sites/f ... index2.php

Jeff