What football had not witnessed, Anderson and Sally felt, was an analytics revolution. Plenty of people were reading the numbers and taking note of what they said: these are the players who have sprinted the most, these are the number of shots we have taken and the rest. But nobody – as far as they could tell, at least – was trying to find out what

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.