sabermetrics isn't as glamorous as it sounds... :)

excellent article on what the guy that founded the groundbreaking FIPs metric is up to, for those that are into those kind of geeky baseball stuff.

Fielding-independent pitching

I've been into sabermetrics for a long time (1989, when I bought a book called "Superstats"), so it was fun to see Billy Beane and the A's exploit it. I've heard about the move to "statify" european soccer, though don't know much of the specifics.

As a former college soccer coach, paint me a skeptic. That's a very hard game to quantify, and I don't even know if that's desirable. But then maybe I am just a soccer blowhard in the same way baseball had its baseball blowhards?