Editor’s Note: In the spirit of seeking sunshine during a gray winter, and to help usher in the upcoming baseball season we will be counting down our favorite baseball movies for the next three weeks. Today we travel to the land of sabermetrics.

In the Dr. Seuss classic Green Eggs and Ham,  one of the characters goes into great poetic details on the many ways that he does not like eating green eggs and ham.

While I will spare you the poetic prose on the topic I will say that the way that character felt about green eggs and ham is very much like how I fell about sabermetrics, or the heart of over-analyzing baseball to the point where players become merely plots on a spreadsheet.

Few people can argue that the game of baseball was forever changed when the sabermetrics element of the game was moved from the back rooms, and fantasy baseball leagues to the general manager’s office.

Like it or not the advanced analytics are here to stay and are featured in the movie Moneyball which is the true story of how one team’s front office broke with tradition by using charts and graphs to build a team in a way that changed the game of baseball.

The film is based on Michael Lewis’s 2003 book, Moneyball, which follows the Oakland Athletics 2002 season and general manager Billy Beane’s (Played by Brad Pitt in the movie) attempts to assemble a competitive team through non-conventional means.

Instead of relying on the eyes and ears of baseball scouts on the road, the new analytical baseball method relied on computer programs showing where certain players excelled based on historical averages and on base percentage.

The idea behind this new approach was that small market teams could spend more wisely on players who got on base more often instead of trying to go dollar to dollar with big market teams who spent more on a single player than many teams spent on their entire rosters.

While a new concept when it was introduced by the Athletics in the 1980’s, almost every team today using sabermetrics to one degree or another to build their rosters each year.

Whether sabermetrics is good for baseball in the long run is still up for debate. It has certainly allowed many smaller market teams the ability to be competitive and stand toe to toe with the big spenders in baseball for the past few decades.

The big spending teams are still around but through Moneyball inspired roster building a few smaller teams have found ways to crash the playoff party now and then.

Of course even the big spending teams have adapted some of the sabermetric philosophies including the Boston Red Sox who used a variation of the Oakland formula to compile the roster that won the 2004 World Series.

While the past few decades have certainly proven that sabermetrics is certainly not going away any time soon, for those wanting to see how it all began Moneyball is the way to go.

Now if you’ll excuse me, all this talk about statistics and math has me feeling a bit queasy.

Copyright 2016 R. Anderson