This project was inspired by the examples of baseball and basketball. In those sports, the first statistical insights came not from employees of professional clubs but from amateur outsiders. Baseball’s pioneering statistician Bill James was a janitor in a pork-and-beans factory in Kansas. He and other hobbyists worked out that time-honoured baseball strategies such as stealing bases made no sense. Crucially, too, the Jamesians developed new metrics to identify players who were undervalued by clubs. The clubs learned from the hobbyists, not vice versa.
