With the World Series underway and my Red Sox winning the opening game 13-1 after coming back from a three mobile games to one deficit against the Cleveland Indians, I thought I’d write a post that tries to outline some of the parallels between the benefits of good web analytics and the principles of the Red Sox organization. A stretch? Maybe. But I couldn’t resist making the attempt.

When John Henry bought the Red Sox in 2002 he hired a young Theo Epstein as his general manager and they began to orchestrate an organizational shift in the philosophy of how to build a baseball team. Henry quickly moved to hire a man named Bill James as a “statistical advisor.” No, James was not being hired into a front office position to help forecast future cash flow, but rather he was hired as part of the baseball operations team. The hire made perfect sense when you look at Henry’s background as a commodity trading advisor manager, but to the casual fan it was probably quite perplexing. Why would a baseball team hire a statistician in the baseball operations department that has typically consisted of the general manager down to the video coordinator? The simple answer is that in the same way that good web analytics can move a company from making decisions based on gut feelings to one that is a data driven company, so too can the plethora of data within baseball be used to transform an organization into a data driven team.

Bill James has brought revolutionary ideas into the baseball world that have often been applied to how the Red Sox build their minor league system and the types of players they go after in free agency. Among some of the ideas he has stressed are:

• Individual ballparks have a profound effect on a ballplayer’s production
• The largest variable determining how many runs a team will score is how many times the leadoff hitter gets on base
• Much of what we perceive as pitching is actually defense

He has also developed numerous metrics that allows the decision makers to evaluate players on a deeper level than just numbers such as their batting average, home runs, stolen bases, or fielding percentage. Some of the metrics he has developed include runs created, range factor, defensive efficiency record, Pythagorean winning percentage, major league equivalency, and secondary average. He has also stressed the importance of on base percentage as a more valuable metric than a player’s batting average.

Many of his ideas have been incorporated into the Red Sox organization from the types of players they draft all the way up through the minor league system to the major league club and free agency. The results are quite astounding. From the time the Boston Red Sox came into existence in 1908 through 2002 when John Henry purchased the team they had won 4 world series titles and made the playoffs 13 times. In the five years since, the Red Sox have made the playoffs 4 times won 1 World Series and are now looking to win a second World Series in the past five years.

Bill James has helped turn the Red Sox into an organization that made decisions in large part on gut feelings into a data driven organization. While he can’t be given the credit for all the recent success, he can be credited with helping to change the fundamental philosophies of how the Red Sox build their organization. The real credit has to go to the many extremely talented individuals who work for the Red Sox and have built the organization into what they are today.

These same philosophies of being a data driven organization hold true in the world of web analytics. As we all know, there is a plethora of useful data that can help drive meaningful change and begin to build your site up as an industry leader. Unless your company has made a conscious decision, however, to become a data driven company then the money that has been poured into your web analytics package will go to waste. In order to make the shift to a data driven company you must have the talented individuals in place that can make sense of the data and who have the ability to bring to the surface the metrics that will drive data driven decisions.

Just as the Red Sox have gone from the team that hadn’t won a championship in 86 years to one that is now a perennial World Series contender, so too can you transform your site. All you need to do is follow the Red Sox model of changing to a data driven organization and hiring exceptionally talented employees that can make sense and use the data to drive meaningful change.

GO RED SOX!!

Filed under: Analytics on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 by Nate Linnell | 1 Comment
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