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overcome ailure, he languished in the

minor leagues or years.

Beanes personal history inormed

his views as general manager o theundernanced As baseball team

some years later. The reedom o

players to sell their services to the

highest bidder, combined with a

shit to a more thrity set o own-

ers made it imperative or Beane to

do more with less. Faced with this

reality, Beane was given carte blanche

to shake-up the As organisation.

His rst act was to hire Harvard

economics graduate Paul Depodesta

as his right-hand man. Armed with

his trademark laptop, Depodesta

was mocked and resented by the

As grizzled scouts who trampedthe byways, motels and high school

ballparks o provincial America.

Moneyball: Can Sports Statistics

Save Political Studies?

M

oneyball, starring Brad Pitt,

and based on Michael Lewis

masterul 2003 book, pre-

miered recently in Britain. The lmpresents a classic David and Goliath

tale o how the tiny, cash-strapped

Oakland As baseball team used sta-

tistical analysis to deeat much richer

opponents. Though it may be hard

to conceive, the lm is particularly

apposite or all who study politics.

Moneyballs star is Billy Beane, the

As real-lie whizz-kid general manag-

er. Beane began his baseball career as

a prodigy whose hitting, running and

throwing prowess were matched by

an athletic physique and square-jawed

looks. His physical presence wowed

proessional scouts. But behind theskills and visage, Beane was a paper

tiger: lacking the mental disposition to

From Major League Baseball to the English Premiership, the ield o sports statistics has

blossomed over the last decade. Drawing analogies rom the sporting world, Eric Kaufman

argues that the sudden embrace o all things quantitative could have interesting lessons or

students o politics.

Sabermetrics

Using multiple regression analysis,

Depodesta arrived at a stunninginsight. When it came to winning,

only two oensive statistics really

mattered: on-base percentage and

slugging percentage. Beginning in

1999, Beane and Depodesta deed

the As scouting sta and cleaned

house on the basis o their stats.

When one scout drated a high

school pitcher simply because o his

awesome astball, Beane exploded,

launching his chair through the wall.

The old order was over.

Under Beane, drat picks were

cheap no-names. They included gems

such as the ungainly double-jointedpitcher David Beck, nicknamed the

Creature, and a at but dependable

Alabamian hitter, Jeremy Brown.

When the As called Brown to inorm

him hed been selected as their rst

rounder, he thought it was a crank

call rom his roommates. Statistical

analysis enabled the As, with their

tiny budget, to rack up one o the

best winning percentages in baseball.

Between 2000 and 2006, they broke

into the nal six in the playos ve

times. Beane understood that the

knockout nature o the playos

meant that chance rather thanscience would decide the outcome

o these contests. However, over a

162-game regular season, signicant

patterns assert themselves. Statistical

rigour yielded season ater season o

success or the As ans and owners.

Beanes methods, coined Saber-

metrics ater the Society or

American Baseball Research (SABR),

Statistical

analysis

enabled the

unfashionable

Oakland As

to rack up

one of the

best winningpercentages

in baseball

Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger deploys statistics to overcome his fscal disability

Reuters

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spread rapidly in baseball and began to colonise other

sports. European ootball suers rom the same inequal-

ity as Major League Baseball, with the rich teams buying

their way to victory. In this climate, Arsenal, not known

or the size o its payroll, has been unusually successul.

Much o the credit is due the cerebral rst team manager

Arsne Wenger, a maverick who deploys statistics eec-

tively to overcome his scal disability. Damien Comolli,ormerly o Tottenham Hotspur and now at Liverpool,

and Mike Forde o Chelsea, are two high-prole riends

o Billy Beane who learned their mathematical arts rom

the master. As journalist Simon Kuper relates, statistical

analysis now shapes decisions about how much a player

is worth, and has recongured aspects o strategy such as

penalty shoot-outs and corner kicks. But canMoneyball

inorm the study o politics? Well, consider the ollowing:

ImpactIn an age o austerity, all publicly-unded institutions

must justiy their existence in monetary terms. While

the so-called STEM (Science, Technology, Engineer-

ing, Management) subjects have had their unding

largely protected, the social sciences have not. Surelyknowledge about human beings, while interesting and

perhaps upliting or a ew cognoscenti, is a will o the

wisp that cannot match the rigour o the hard sciences?

The powers that be might prot rom meeting Billy

Beane or Arsne Wenger. In proessional sports, there

is a very clear bottom line: winning. Team sports neces-

sarily involve humans, thus sabermetricians are social

scientists. The numbers geeks hired by leading ootball

and baseball clubs draw a salary because they are able to,

in Auguste Comtes words, know, predict and control.

As with the quants, whose models revolutionised the

nancial sector in the 1980s, they prove that the social

sciences can be every bit as hard as natural science. It

doesnt take too much imagination to extend the para-

digm to political science: psephologists have been usingBilly Beanes methods to predict electoral contests or

decades. Besides the obvious benets to political parties,

this activity contributes to two key drivers o the British

economy: the gaming industry and the media.

Value for MoneyAh, a minister might respond, but surely political sci-

ence provides no concrete benet to society that can be

compared to a hospital bed? Hmm. Billy Beane didnt

emerge in a vacuum. In the 1970s, an obscure baseball

hobby statistician rom small-town Kansas, Billy James,

began to question the received statistics that baseball had

inherited rom early statisticians, some o whom were

infuenced by cricket, or only counted what was easiest

to count. He was the rst to tie independent variables likehits, stolen bases and walks to a teams winning percent-

age. His rst almanac o baseball statistics sold a paltry

75 copies, but, over time, a small group o spare-timers

blossomed into a large network. This public knowledge

base, rather than that o private teams, established the

know-how which ed the sabermetrics movement.

However, the progress o this science was impeded as

soon as it went private. One o the striking acts about

sabermetrics is that each team must generate most o its

numbers rom scratch. This is hugely wasteul. Football

analysts are the most proprietary in their approach and

Arsne Wenger is notoriously cagey about which numbers

he looks at. Bleary eyes water over thousands o hours o

ootage to calculate the amount o time each player pos-

sesses the ball, their acceleration rate, tackles, completed

passes, dangerous passes and so orth. Teams cant share

key statistical data, nor can they relay inormation aboutwhich statistics are signicantly associated with winning.

Although there is some movement o personnel between

organisations, this proprietary model o science impedes

the advancement o social scientic knowledge.

I this were only a matter or private sports teams, the

damage would be minimal ater all, most o the benet

o sports science accrues to individual teams rather than

the game as a whole. But the questions that political

scientists ask tend to lean in the other direction, benet-

ting society more than individual parties. Without, or

instance, understanding how to get the institutions o

government right, minimise corruption and empower

stakeholders, economic development in Aghanistan or

Somalia could not take place. Let to the private sector,

this learning would remain proprietary or would not beundertaken at all, stunting the progress o knowledge.

This imperils British security and the survival o millions

o people.

Qualitative or Quantitive MethodsPolitical scientists, in the main, divide over methodol-

ogy. Beyond a ew obligatory political theory pieces,

most o the highly cited journals in the discipline are

heavily quantitative. In the United States, quantitative

methods have largely triumphed at the large research

universities. In Britain, by contrast, only Essex exempli-

es this approach, although it has a committed minority

o adherents in departments up and down the country.

Political science quants in this country might nd

an exemplar in Billy Beane. His reliance on quantitativemethods using representative samples to nd generalis-

able statistical relationships overturned what had been

a largely qualitative eld. The qualitative methodology o

scouts who watched high school games and were struck

by obvious talent generated a conventional wisdom that

did not properly value players. It led teams to drat poorly

and engage in sel-deeating tactics like the sacrice bunt,

in which the hitter advances runners on base but gets out.

It ignored the importance o walks. More than others in

the league, Beane sought to assign a precise dollar value

to every player, grounded in the hidden relationships

that only quantitative methods could reveal.

Might the study o politics in Britain be ripe or its

sabermetric moment, with, say, the University o Essex

playing the role o the Oakland As? Leaving questionsabout budget to one side, this is precisely the kind o

change that occurred in the United States. The behav-

iouralist pioneers in postwar American political science

have been joined by advocates o ormal theory and

rational choice in their quest to reinvent the discipline.

Might they be the nerds that overturn the hegemony o

the qualitative scouts? The transormation o econom-

ics rom art to science is their model. As Paul Krugman

once opined, there is a battle between the essentially

Might the study

of politics in

Britain be

ripe for itssabermetric

moment?

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literary sensibility that we expect o

a card-carrying intellectual and the

scientic/mathematical outlook thatis arguably the true glory o our

civilisation. That war goes on; and

economics is on the ront line The

literati truly cannot be satised unless

they get economics back rom the

nerds. But they cant have it, because

we nerds have the better claim.

A Silver Bullet?

The nerds case is not, however,

open and shut. Billy Beanes success

over the 200006 period has since

given way to losing seasons. Thiscould be because he was a victim

o his own success, or maybe saber-

metrics is no silver bullet ater all.

More damning is Beanes inability

to succeed in winning a World Se-

ries pennant. Subjective actors like

leadership and condence, which

elude ready quantication, may

have slipped through his ngers.

There is also a problem in moving

rom baseball, with its set piece

ormat, to more complex games like

ootball. The mutual dependence o

soccer players is much greater than

in baseball, and value in a player

is more dicult to capture statisti-

cally. It may even change dependingon which players the individual is

paired with and which position

he plays. This is not impossible or

statisticians to try to capture, but

it is a great deal more challeng-

ing. Sabermetrics has inormed

team strategy on penalty kicks and

corners, but despite Wengers eats

at Arsenal, cannot be said to have

revolutionised the game. Might

economics, which concerns a more

limited and regularised orm o

human activity price up, demand

down prove to be more amenable

to quantication than the chaos opolitics? Aside rom elections, roll-

call votes and a ew other set pieces,

this seems to be the case.

The quants have also got it spec-

tacularly wrong on occasions be-

cause generalisations do not always

hold. There is a connection between

tackles made and the contribution o

a deender to victory. But not always.

When Alex Ferguson at Manchester

United sold Jaap Stam to Lazio in

2001 on the basis o his declining

number o tackles, he surprised

many and made a terrible mistake.

Stams ability to control deensivespace meant he rarely needed to

tackle to be eective.

One could argue that as the sci-

ence improves, such gaes will

become less common. Yet the

thorniest problem or sabermetri-

cians is the persistent bias towards

the readily quantiable. Economics

is amous or ignoring the impact

o culture, psychology and institu-

tions on the economy because they

cant be readily measured. One o

the staples o neoclassical economic

theory that tastes dont change

says it all. These blind spots may beexcusable in normal times, but they

ail at unusual moments such as the

recent nancial crisis. As Krugman

belatedly recognised, the econom-

ics proession went astray because

economists, as a group, mistook

beauty, clad in impressive-looking

mathematics, or truth. Leadership,

condence, team culture and other

intangibles are sidelined in statistical

analyses, limiting the power o the

number crunchers to know, predict

and control.

Limits to Quants

Events may also move too rapidly to

be easily quantied. My own sport o

choice, ice hockey, rst experienced

a change with the expansion o the

proessional leagues in the 1960s

and 70s. This avoured oence

over deence. Then came a new set

o tactics that gave big, deensive

teams the edge. More recently, rule

changes have handcued deensive

teams, empowering reewheeling

scorers once more. Without a run

o statistics, it is impossible to gen-

eralise. Teams simply have to trust

old-ashioned qualitative insights,and even gut eel to make decisions

until the new paradigm settles down.

Politics is constantly being bu-

eted by new events and ideas that

are exceedingly tricky to pin down

and model in real time. Quantitative

analysis can continue to improve

our understanding o politics, but

the fow o events means there will

always be substantial demand or

more nimble qualitative research.

An exposition on methodol-

ogy would not be complete without

Max Webers notion o verstehen, or

understanding. The macho scoutswere wrong to deride the statisti-

cians, but by the same token, there

is something that those who never

see a pitcher throw or hitter con-

nect miss. Ater I had modelled the

membership patterns o the Orange

Order, I realised I had never at-

tended a Twelth o July parade. To

me, a study o the Orangemen could

not be complete without knowing

what it was all about. This experi-

ence in turn ed into my analyses.

So too in sports: Beanes experience

as a prodigy-turned-journeyman al-

lowed him to spot the deects in theold ways, generating hypotheses that

would crown him a sporting legend.

Eric Kaufmann is Proessor o Politics at

Birkbeck College, University o London. He

is the author oShall the Religious Inherit the

Earth: Demography and Politics in the 21st

Century(Profle Books, 2010).

Political science quants might fnd an exemplar in Billy Beane,

Brad Pitts character in Moneyball

PressAssociation

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