Read Part One and Part Two of this series here.
Analytics broke in through baseball before invading every other sport, but the concept has taken a very different path in football. While the actual questions being answered were largely the same — those questions being what statistics are important to winning and which players possess traits to drive those statistics — analytics entered baseball front offices primarily as a method of player acquisition. Baseball teams shied away from the many obvious on-field strategic uses of analytics for a long time, and while it’s now common to discuss shifts and the “times through the order penalty” during the course of a game, it took a while to get there.