Book excerpt: A PRACTICAL, REAL-WORLD GUIDE TO ANALYTICS FOR THE 5 MAJOR SPORTS: FOOTBALL, BASKETBALL, BASEBALL, SOCCER, AND TENNIS GAIN A COMPETITIVE EDGE! This is the first real-world guide to building and using analytical models for measuring and assessing performance in the five major sports: football, basketball, baseball, soccer, and tennis. Unlike books that focus strictly on theory, this book brings together sports measurement and statistical analyses, demonstrating how to examine differences across sports as well as between player positions. This book will provide you with the tools for cutting-edge approaches you can extend to the sport of your choice. Expert Northwestern University data scientist, UC San Diego researcher, and competitive athlete, Lorena Martin shows how to use measures and apply statistical models to evaluate players, reduce injuries, and improve sports performance. You’ll learn how to leverage a deep understanding of each sport’s principles, rules, attributes, measures, and performance outcomes. Sports Performance Measurement and Analytics will be an indispensable resource for anyone who wants to bring analytical rigor to athletic competition: students, professors, analysts, fans, physiologists, coaches, managers, and sports executives alike. All data sets, extensive code, and additional examples are available for download at http://www.ftpress.com/martin/ What are the qualities a person must have to become a world-class athlete? This question and many more can be answered through research, measurement, statistics, and analytics. This book gives athletes, trainers, coaches, and managers a better understanding of measurement and analytics as they relate to sports performance. To develop accurate measures, we need to know what we want to measure and why. There is great power in accurate measures and statistics. Research findings can show us how to prevent injuries, evaluate strengths and weaknesses, improve team cohesion, and optimize sports performance. This book serves many readers. People involved with sports will gain an appreciation for performance measures and analytics. People involved with analytics will gain new insights into quantified values representing physical, physiological, and psychological components of sports performance. And students eager to learn about sports analytics will have a practical introduction to the field. This is a thorough introduction to performance measurement and analytics for five of the world’s leading sports. The only book of its kind, it offers a complete overview of the most important concepts, rules, measurements, and statistics for each sport, while demonstrating applications of real-world analytics. You’ll find practical, state-of-the-art guidance on predicting future outcomes, evaluating an athlete’s market value, and more.