Sabermetrics basically came out of the observation that a team that used the metrics to make hiring decisions outcompetes teams that don’t. It’s the same as universities using citation count metrics for their tenure decisions. In both cases metrics get used to make decisisions about which individual is supposed to be hired.
The problem is that the metrics for athletics are better for their usages then the metrics the universities have available for their tenure decisions.
Part of the standards we have for professional atheletes is that we have a lot of rules that cap their performance. Having rules that cap performance by engaging in some non-standard behavior is useful if you want to rank people by a fair metric but not useful if you care about the quality of the output.
Sabermetrics basically came out of the observation that a team that used the metrics to make hiring decisions outcompetes teams that don’t. It’s the same as universities using citation count metrics for their tenure decisions. In both cases metrics get used to make decisisions about which individual is supposed to be hired.
The problem is that the metrics for athletics are better for their usages then the metrics the universities have available for their tenure decisions.
Part of the standards we have for professional atheletes is that we have a lot of rules that cap their performance. Having rules that cap performance by engaging in some non-standard behavior is useful if you want to rank people by a fair metric but not useful if you care about the quality of the output.