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“So I gave the presentation, and a guy raises his hand and
says, ‘Hi, I’m the owner of the Baltimore Orioles, and I’d like to
hire you.’ My response was, ‘I don’t know who you are. Thank
you so much, and to the people in the back of the room, don’t let
that man walk out the door until I talk to him!’
“We met after the talk, and he said he was serious. Then we
had a formal interview, and he hired me.”
Kaplan showed that with a little initiative, he was able to
turn an interest into his life’s work. His story of how he made
sports analytics—the use of advanced stats and data to create new
ways of looking at sports performance—has been repeated over
and over in the years since by experts in a wide range of fields.
Sports is not just for heavy-lifting, hard-throwing, superstar
athletes. The business of sports needs new ideas—ideas that are
being created in the field of sports analytics.
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ntroduction