Finance, politics—and sport? From the perspective of science and technology studies (STS), these industries are more similar than they might first appear; all are high-stakes sectors that produce masses of data but are often run as much by gut feeling as analysis. The rise of “quants” in each sector has pitted traditional punditry against new forms of expertise, with resultant disputes over meaning and authority that have been of great interest to STS scholars, at least when it comes to economics and politics. In the case of professional sport, sustained attention from STS scholars is only just emerging.1
While this lag may not be surprising, sport is actually the paradigm of the challenges posed by data analysts to traditional experts—a paradigm embodied in Moneyball, the book and subsequent film that put the power of statistics in general and “sabermetrics” in particular on the map for many.2 Of...