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A similar challenge of prediction plagues another service industry – Major League Baseball. In spite of a rich database of performance statistics, managers have a poor record of choosing future all-stars, even in the game’s comparatively well-controlled conditions. “The draft has never been anything but a.. crapshoot,” said Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane, in Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2004), 17. “We take fifty guys and we celebrate if two of them make it. In what other business is two for fifty a success? If you did that in the stock market, you’d go broke.” After 2002, however, the intensive application of sabermetrics statistical analysis transformed baseball to a somewhat more disciplined business. (Sabermetrics is the empirical study of in-game baseball statistics, and takes its name from the Society for American Baseball Research.)
