Are We Ruled by Superstition Here in the United States?

This past Sunday, April 13th, this story was reported on Yahoo! News:

A construction worker’s bid to curse the New York Yankees by planting a Boston Red Sox jersey in their new stadium was foiled Sunday when the home team removed the offending shirt from its burial spot.

After locating the shirt in a service corridor behind what will be a restaurant in the new Yankee Stadium, construction workers jackhammered through the concrete Sunday and pulled it out.

Yankees President Randy Levine described the Red Sox fan as “…somebody who had really bad motives and was trying to do a really bad thing…”
Now, Levine and Yankees CEO Lonn Trost have begun to “[discuss] possible criminal charges against [the culprit] with the district attorney’s office.”

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What if you managed your own real life baseball team? Draft your own players, decide the batting order, and make play by play decisions during games. Would you have your players stealing bases? Would you spend big bucks on a strong closing pitcher? Bill James would not advise you to do any of these things. In fact he has shown that a number of common decisions made in baseball do not make statistical sense. Why should you listen to him, you ask?

Bill James has been studying baseball statistics for years and started publishing his findings in 1977 ^[1]. He coined the term sabermetrics, which can be defined as the mathematical and statistical analysis of baseball. Baseball, like many sports, is driven by statistics. traditional thinking often puts an emphasis on stats that everyone believes to be important, such as batting average and earned runs average. But sabermetrics takes statistics one step further.

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