As any child with a baseball card intuitively knows, sports and statistics go hand-in-hand. Yet, the general media disdain the flood of sports statistics available today: sports are pure and analytic tools are not. Well, if the so-called purists find tools like baseball's sabermetrics upsetting, then they’d better brace themselves for the new wave of data analytics.
In this O'Reilly report, Janine Barlow examines how advanced predictive analytics are impacting the world of sports—from the rise of tools such as Major League Baseball’s Statcast, which collects data on the movement of balls and players, to SportVU, which the National Basketball Association uses to collect spatial analysis data.