Bringing Moneyball to Cricket
Michael Lewis’ Moneyball thrust sabermetrics into the baseball mainstream. The story of Moneyball revolves around Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane, who used objective analysis to better manage his baseball team. Under his leadership, Oakland used statistics to understand which traits (like on-base percentage) and which players were undervalued by the market. Beane would buy these undervalued players for cheap, and watch the rest of baseball discover their value as they scored runs and made plays for Oakland. Then, when they became sought-after stars, he’d sell them to other teams for a profit (see Jason Giambi).
Cricket is perhaps a decade or two behind baseball in its use of objective analysis to better understand players, and better manage teams. I’d speculate that the big reason for that is the lack of money in cricket, until the IPL. No matter how good Stuart MacGill was, he couldn’t play Tests for any team but Australia. Now, if one IPL team doesn’t select a player, another team will — there is now a competitive market for talent. And the IPL is making this Moneyball scenario possible in cricket as well. Check out this quote from Amrit Mathur, COO of the Dehli Daredevils (article from Cricinfo):
