Saved by Alex Wittenberg and
The Limits of Optimization
Baseball started it, but then Daryl Morey and the basketball world quickly took the baton and beat the living hell out of a dead horse. There’s a famous boxing quote that says “styles make fights”. Well, the NBA used to have a bunch of different stylistic ways to play the game and everyone leaned into the specific strengths of their roster. But... See more
Cultural Moneyballism, in this light, sacrifices exuberance for the sake of formulaic symmetry. It sacrifices diversity for the sake of familiarity. It solves finite games at the expense of infinite games. Its genius dulls the rough edges of entertainment.
Derek Thompson • What Moneyball-for-Everything Has Done to American Culture
Baseball offers perhaps the world’s richest data set: pretty much everything that has happened on a major-league playing field in the past 140 years has been dutifully and accurately recorded, and hundreds of players play in the big leagues every year.