Decoding hurling’s Moneyball moment
As Castleisland man Con Houlihan often wrote: read on.
The star of films like Oceans 11 — whose allegiance in the Kingdom’s senior hurling championship is sadly yet unknown, though in Fight Club he had the thighs of someone who trains regularly on the dunes of Banna Strand — is currently filming the movie Moneyball, a big-budget production based on the best-selling and extremely-influential book by Michael Lewis.
In the film, Mr Jolie will play Billy Beane, the charismatic manager of the Oakland A’s baseball franchise who ushered in — by achieving unlikely success at the modest franchise — a new, modern era in the uber-traditional sport.
Beane essentially applied statistics — or the science of sabermetrics as it is known — to building his teams.
Where the conventional wisdom in the game insisted one needed athletic, strong-jawed pitchers, Beane studied the numbers, trusted them and bought soft-waisted, jowly men. But they threw as fast.
As one of his former teammates remarked in the book, Beane ‘could talk a dog off a meat wagon’ and so he is cast comfortably as an irresistible underdog hero. ‘At its centre,’ we’re told ‘is a man whose life was turned upside down by professional baseball, and who, miraculously, found a way to return the favour.’ But while the sport was spun upside down by Beane, it revolved on another’s axis.
Over the quarter of a century one man named Bill James worked away in his home — for the love of it really — on player evaluation, player development, and baseball strategy, giving birth to sabermetrics.
For years a prophet in the wilderness, James was essentially ignored by the Greek chorus of the game’s elite. Until that is Beane applied his work and won championships because of it.
The famous Boston Red Sox eventually invited James up out of his basement office and hired him as a senior adviser. Depending on what twists the Merseyside drama takes in the next day or so, Liverpool fans may well see him sitting next to new owners soon — as well as Boston wunderkind general manager Theo Epstein, a disciple of James who brought the Red Sox their first World Series win in decades in 2004.
Beane on the other hand has spoken of his deep respect for Arsene Wenger — Moneyball’s natural heir in European football, perhaps.
But where is its application in Gaelic games, if any? Liam Sheedy stepped down recently after two seasons of exhaustive work — including, we’re told, use of statistics. But even if he isn’t to fill the Beane role of introducing the game to another way of thinking from the sideline, we already have a man filling the Bill James part at home.
Kevin Deely is a software engineer based in Galway who runs the wonderful hurling stats website. A treasure trove of rare information, the blog is a treat for hurling nerds and those out to settle a pub argument.
Started in 2003, Deely offers detailed analysis mined from hurling’s championship action from the number of pointed sideline cuts in a given year to the best rookies of the 2010 season. It’s obviously a labour of love.
“There’s a reasonable amount of work goes into it. I’ve tried to make it easier by taking some of the drudgery out of it,” he said this week, ” When I started it off — I was doing it manually, going through newspapers and imputing the information into a database I set up and the website reads that from the database.
“Then to make it a little bit easier I wrote a programme that does the same thing but programmatically. So for one match it takes about five-10 minutes, I’d say.”
What prompted such devotion to the figures? “You know yourself; you’d often have arguments about who scored what or whatever. I really think that this information should be on the web. And apart from Wikipedia — where guys have filled in a lot of gaps themselves — that info isn’t there. And the GAA website should have everything as they’re the keepers of the archive,” says the 37-year-old, who grew up swinging a hurley in the picturesque Ballyheigue.
“So I decided to it for myself. I thought that this will be a fun project to do and that’s how I started. I got it going in 2003 and I had great intentions of going through archive to pull out the stats but I just haven’t had the time unfortunately. The fact that it only goes back so far is always nagging at me; like this year Henry Shefflin became the top scorer of all time – and ideally you should be able to have all that data at your finger tips; when he scored, against whom, how does it compare to Ring.”
So can a binary code be useful to the poets on the hurling sideline next summer? “Stats only tell a certain part of the story but it’s another way at looking at things. I know the US sports are very focused on stats and they have a very standard way of comparing and contrasting players’ performances going back over the years. And as soon as someone breaks a record you have it all there. I wish the GAA was alike that. But it’s probably in its infancy.”
Visit: hurlingstats.com/blog for more
