Advanced analytics had a place in baseball well before Bill James and batting average was the original advanced statistic.
History has a way of repeating itself. The modern era of sabermetrics has deep roots in the work of Bill James and his discovery of the close relationship between the number of wins a team accumulates over the course of a season and the ratio of runs scored to runs allowed. This discovery and the new statistics developed as a result of this work allowed the individual contributions of a player to be more accurately measured.