In the 21st century, data is widely used in sports in pursuit of performance and profit. Professional sports teams use predictive analytics to forecast the value of their prospects and optimize their lineups, television broadcasts use AI to calculate real-time win probabilities, fantasy leagues and sports betting markets monetize statistical compilations of historical data, and individual athletes wear biometric sensors to track their performance. Much of this so-called “data revolution” has been credited to the spread of the “moneyball” approach to sports management, which emerged at the turn of the 21st century as a new method of computerized statistical analysis to calculate the hidden value of players whose efficient performance could help them defeat teams with bigger payrolls and bigger stars.
But what if we consider moneyball as not the start of the datafication of sports but rather a culmination and acceleration of that historical process? This seminar reaches back centuries before moneyball to uncover a longer history of data in sports and, in so doing, challenges the common assumption that data analytics in sports is a 21st-century “revolution” powered by electronic digital computing. As this course will reveal, there is a much longer and more complicated relationship between data, sports, technology and science, capitalism, and culture.
This seminar will combine readings from the history of science and technology, the history of quantification and data, and science and technology studies (STS) with historical and present-day case studies to explore a series of big questions: What is the relationship between objective calculation and subjective judgment in the datafication of sports? How have data practices been central to the codification of rules and the organization of professional sports leagues? How has the materiality of sports data—from the first baseball scorecards to CD-ROMs to algorithms— changed over time? How has sports data been produced, formatted, circulated, and sold? How has sports data been commercialized and commodified in the contexts of fantasy leagues and sports betting? How does data capitalism, a system of oppression critiqued by Data for Black Lives and other activist groups, relate to a global sports industry with annual revenue approaching 500 billion USD as of 2022? How have new technologies changed the measurement and standardization of athletic performance, and how have biometric technologies and data been shaped by inequities of race, gender, and power while also perpetuating those inequities? And, most broadly, how has the process of datafication changed sports over time, at both the industry and individual levels?
Specific topics will include the following:
• Data analytics expertise in professional baseball and soccer and its relationship to scouting and talent development from Sabermetrics to the introduction of videotape to Moneyball
• Record-keeping technologies like scorecards, stat sheets, and statistical handbooks and their relationship to the computerization of sports data
• The introduction of the 3-point line in basketball in 1979 and how it transformed shot distribution, marketability of player skills, and the flow of the game itself from the late 20th century to the era of Steph Curry and Caitlin Clark
• Legal and ethical disputes over labor and equity in contexts including the Negro Major Leagues, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, US Olympic soccer, the WNBA, and college athletics
• Policing and regulation of sports gambling and point shaving scandals
• The popularity of sports simulation games from the introduction of Strat-O-Matic in the early 1960s to 21st-century fantasy leagues
• The growing prominence of data in sports collectibles and entertainment, from trading cards to video games to stadium concession sales
• Timekeeping technologies and biometric data from the first instrumental measurement of a tenth of a second in the 1850s to 21st-century wearable fitness self-tracking technologies like FitBit and Apple Watch
• Precision measurement of the human body in contexts including the rise of bodybuilding and popular science in the early 20th century and the origin of Pilates during WWI—and its relationship to ideologies of efficiency, purity, and eugenics.