Sports Analytics Weekly by kubeia.io - 41/2026
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📝 Sports Analytics
How Sports Learned to Count
jacobg.co - Jacob Goldstein
There is a moment in the history of sports that every analytics story eventually points back to. In 2002, the Oakland Athletics, a team with one of the smallest payrolls in baseball, won 103 games and pushed the sport’s giants to the brink of the playoffs. They did it by ignoring what scouts saw with their eyes and trusting what the numbers said instead.1
The story became a book, then a movie, and the phrase Moneyball entered the language as shorthand for the moment quantification stopped being a hobby and became the way sports are run.
More than two decades later, every major American sport has had its own Moneyball moment, and then some. MLB has Statcast and expected batting statistics. The NBA has a three-point revolution built on shot math. The NFL has expected points and player tracking on every play. The NHL has expected goals and sensors inside the puck. None of this happened by accident. It happened because quantification solves real problems that the eyeball test cannot, and every league that embraced it gained an edge that the others were forced to match.
The argument for quantification in sports comes down to four claims, and they hold across all four leagues. The methods differ, but the underlying logic is the same. And the payoff, from finding undervalued players to changing how the game itself is played, has been enormous.
What is a point worth? Understanding the early season table and what it means for Arsenal and Manchester City
expectinggoals.com - Michael Caley
The table is telling the truth in some specific and important ways.
🧮 Statistics
Things that Apparently Cause Cancer
breakthroughjournal.org - Deric Tilson
It would shock you to know that Costco, according to a new Harvard School of Public Health methodology, caused 120,687 cases of cancer mortality nationally every year, simply due to living in close proximity to their warehouses. Private colleges accounted for 83,782 more. Harvard itself is responsible for 5,842 cancer deaths. Living near a Major League Baseball field causes almost 19 times as many cancer deaths as living near a Major League Soccer pitch. These conclusions are obviously absurd, but they come from the exact same methodology that researchers at Harvard use to “prove” that nuclear power plants cause cancer in nearby communities.
Earlier this year, Adam Stein and I called out a series of Harvard studies showing that nuclear power plants were associated with higher rates of cancer incidence and cancer mortality as nonsense. Now that we’ve spent the last few months replicating the analysis and expanding it, we are able to show that no matter what landmark you use, their methodology will show an increased cancer risk and mortality. The studies simply do not prove anything about cancer incidence.