“Nope, what’s the problem?!” Billy Beane(cast by Brad Pitt) continues to ask his scouts after rejecting answer after answer while looking down at a pile of paper with his apathetic sight. He wasn’t expecting any correct answer from the scouts. Then comes his famous line:
“The problem is, there are rich teams, and there are poor teams, and there’s fifty feet of crap, and then there’s us.”—which is the Oakland Athletics.
Rich teams signed Giambi, Damon, and Isinghausen; as these three stars leave Oakland and head east, the A’s have entered their rebuild process. That same movie scene would be recreated and I get to see it in real life.
“No… What’s the prawblem?” Professor Abraham Wyner rejects answer after answer as he asks this to the class on the first day. Well, what is the problem? The problem we were trying to answer was, first and foremost, we are 77 sports-savvy high school students from across the planet—collectively both the smartest and the most passionate group of teenagers on the subject of sports analytics that I’ve ever seen—and we were trying to figure out the main message that Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball and it’s thereafter film was trying to convey, we all read the book. It was easy to see, the problem is that teams needed a new way to evaluate players and discover values that haven’t been placed a price tag already. Surprising that this took us so long. Anyway, this was Billy Beane and Paul Depodesta’s Moneyball dogma, which later revolutionised baseball and all of sports, now inspiring the next generation of sports business.
Here’s what happened before I flew to Philadelphia, a little detour. Before Moneyball, I was in Xinjiang. I can go on for pages about my hometown but the moral of the story was, I was in a rurality that wasn’t even on the map, living my life like a retired grandpa. A regular day went like this, I got awoken by the roaming of fighter jets slashing through the sky as they performed their morning training, I went to empty bottles of water while treating my lips to some moisturiser—it’s dry there. I’d find myself a little hill over the grasslands and read. I’d read until eventually the view couldn’t please my eye anymore, I’d go walk south to the horse camp, starting my horse riding schedule for the day. Eventually, the UV radiation would drive me to go home, waiting for me was the traditional Uyghur lamb dishes that I could never have enough of. Oh boy are people missing out big time by not coming to try Xinjiang food. Comes evening, being the most west province in China, Xinjiang have sunsets at 9pm, sometime later during the summer. Nevertheless, I’d describe it as a “salubrious disconnection”, just releasing rowdy thoughts to nature, in return for her peace.
Application for Moneyball was full of doubt, my interest was already married to journalism. As an extension to what SDSN did, I planned to go to USC’s sports journalism camp. End of April, the day that the results came out, I was tapping into an NBA game. Was it not for receiving the verification code sent by the pirated sports streaming website, I wouldn’t have opened my email to check the application decision. I was ready to spend three weeks under the Cali sunshine in the city with the highest inflation in all of America. “Moneyball? Moneyball! ************” I shouted at my screen while my pupils dilated at the sight of the word “congratulations”. After consideration, I figured that I wanted to extend my competitive nature, and now I have the chance to learn with 80 smartest sports students from the world, I couldn’t step down. No matter how this went against my interests, in retrospect, it was the best option that I could’ve chosen.
We had a home area drawn on the map at Upenn, down south Spruce Street and up north till Chestnut Street, outside those areas are not properties of Upenn, but quite literally, them “blocks”. During the orientation on the day we arrived, the program director addressed the long-time rivalry and comparison between Wharton and Harvard’s business school. Wharton was founded 27 years earlier than HBS, and Wharton provides business education for the entirety of a person’s working career from teenage to retirement age. The only institute to do so in the world.
Professor Wyner is a diehard Yankees fan, and a bigger sports statistics savant(Go google his accomplishments and research). What stood out to me was his outstanding ability to output information and arguments; he is always going somewhere with his speech and it really gets you contemplating, like reading a book.
The course used examples and case studies from all realms of sports, predominately baseball, basketball and American football. Using actual numbers and past studies, these case studies we talked about during class were great at both giving us insight towards specific sports and explaining statistical principles. However different in the background that we all came from, everyone in the room is a like-minded individual. I find it very comfortable to communicate without having to explain certain antecedents, everyone in Moneyball knows their sport.
The lecture in the morning ends at 12, then we would come back at 1:30 to listen and talk to guest speakers, at 2:30, we would begin our R coding sessions. Learning to program in R made sure that we could apply theory learned in class to the colossal amount of data out there, for a coding novice like me, R is friendly because it is designated to deal with data, a whole lot easier to comprehend its coding operons comparing to programming for a toy car(I barely passed Scratch). R wasn’t just relatively easier to code, but it is the only coding language that I found purpose in learning. I loaded in the boxscores from the past 5 games SDSN recorded and outputted a new boxscore table with advanced metrics like True shooting percentages(TSP) and effective field goal percentages(eFGP).
Our very first guest speaker was Neil Paine, who worked for ESPN and 538 Sports, he is the Adrian Wojnarowski of the sports analytics world, and an amazing writer as well. The day after, was Brian Burke, a guy who transitioned from firing missiles in an F-18 to creating statistic models for ESPN. Find the win probability trend graph on every NFL game page, and that was Brian’s first project. We had guest speakers joining us either online or offline every afternoon, they were either current team analysts or front office decision makers. Listening to the guest speakers’ job behind the scenes unveils the mystique that I always had about the sports business. Sports business covers a wide field of different professions and expertise, and so much of this industry feeds on statistics; like the subtitle of the book Moneyball, baseball is an unfair game, so are most competitive sports today, and statistics is a craft that can get you ahead of the game. It takes a lot more to win in today’s world.
The first week ended with a blast as we got an exclusive tour at the Wells Fargo Center on Thursday (the fifth largest NBA arena by seating capacity), and a day tour to DC on Saturday.
21962 steps, multiplied by my approximate stride length which is 0.7 meters, that is 15.4 kilometres walked by me in a single day. I was walking from memorial to memorial to try to get the most out of that trip. My leg were so sore that I had to sign off the Sunday’s trip to the Phillies vs Athletics game, great choice by me since the Phillies got destroyed 18 to 3.
Coming into the second week, we went through most of the thick coursebook, and lots of very interesting sports examples, I can’t share pictures because of copyright, but I can brief them. The 2000 Olympic diving judging case was what we spent the most time on. When Mexican diver Fernando Platas lost the gold to Chinese diver Ni Xiong, people accused one of the Chinese judges, Judge Wang, to have integrated nationality biases in his scoring. Using permutation, controlling for nationality matches, and looking at different discrepancies, Professor Wyner proved why Judge Wang wasn’t cheating. A really interest dive into the case with logical thinking and numbers, also proving just how little the public thinks when making subjective judgements. Also, the Simpson’s paradox is explained by the FG% of the Wizard’s guard John Wall and Raptors guard Kyle Lowry. Lowry despite having higher percentages in both two points and three points, was 3.3 percentage points short in aggregate FG% when comparing Wall. Obviously, there are a ton more examples and I can’t explain them all, so let me name some of the most memorable topics we did: the inflate-Gate incident, NFL combine running back data, Beane vs Cashman, Kyle Korver’s regression of 3PT%, the 1973 Secretariat Belmont Stakes horse racing record and more.
“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good”— Prof. Wyner.
The Philadelphia 76ers just signed Paul George and drafted Duke Freshman Jared McCain this summer, they’ve now elevated themselves to a position where they can compete with the best teams in the East. We were very lucky to have the chance to tour their practice facility in Camden, New Jersey. The training complex was decorated with pieces of history to remind people of the Sixer’s legacy: All of their front door desks were using pieces of the basketball court that Will Chamberlain scored 100 points on, and their Legends Walk has dozens of Hall of farmers statues, and they have their 1983 Larry O’Brien trophy placed right outside the player’s dining lounge. Legends say, after every loss, Joel Embiid comes to play the piano outside the dining lounge.
The Final project
Moneyball Academy isn’t a college credit course, but its value is no less than many that are. Instead of orthodox lecturing, Moneyball Academy was more about inspiring and empowering us to think analytically, based on knowledge from many fields like economics, statistics, psychology, and some calculus. Now, referencing back to the movie, a player with an ugly girlfriend was being projected to be an inconsistent batter, and scouts assumed he was unconfident. People’s judgements are largely based on peripheral information and lack of context, some weaknesses of man that favour the modern media. Statistics provide us with objective numerical evidence, and there are always ways to manipulate the presentation of the data.
Welcome to read through our final project, which was done using the G-Score metric to find the biggest playoff risers and chokers in the past 20 NBA seasons(I’m not repeating the presentation again so read it on your own).
The best three projects get to be published in the Wharton Moneyball journal. Ours didn’t make it. But we were by no means working on our project with expectations that we wouldn’t win, we were heading for the top spots and obviously so did everyone else. This was not your average class presentation, there were 17 groups, so I thought to myself, if I think we were the savants and we were ahead of the game, then we are competing against 16 other groups of me—if not better me. In the end, my roommate’s group was the first. Siddharth Krishnan, I called him Sid, he’s an Indian American rising junior, and he’s from New York. Sid loves tennis and running but their project was baseball: Devers versus Cole.
There’s a common similarity between everyone, we all think we bring something special to the table, and that is true. Because much of the final judging process by Prof. Wyner and the TAs had subjective elements to it, all of our projects were different in many ways and all presented insightful research results. One of the groups even chose snooker. In fact, everyone’s project was just as valuable as anyone else, and obviously so did ours; for the winning groups to win it among everyone, was a testament to their own excellence because they had competed with the best of us. Nonetheless, despite the disputes about the winners, I conceived that there were many competent and deserving groups(including mine), and we all had a game. The opportunity to work with these amazing people and to compete against them was, per se, the best prize that I could get.
If you made it this far, then huge thank you from the bottom of my heart, hopefully that was an interesting read. I started this draft during my flight back, in this article I hope to share to those who wants to study statistics, sports buisness, likes Wharton, and coding, insights into this program. Now this is he end of the Moneyball, there’s still many afterschool life that I didn’t include, but I made sure in this essay to highlight what might be the most interesting.
cool