Economics
Baseball: Running the New Numbers
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On a Saturday morning in March, some 400 people crowd a conference room at the Boston Convention Center. Mostly men, and mostly paying customers, they are there to listen to six other guys talk about baseball statistics. It's day two of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, an annual gathering dubbed "Dorkapalooza" by ESPN's Bill Simmons. The buzz from the panel is about something called Fieldf/x.
"Do you feel like Fieldf/x will essentially make all other fielding stats irrelevant?" asks the moderator, the writer Rob Neyer.