It goes into how Battier gets to see the charts and statistics for the players on the opposing team, so that he'll have better odds when defending against their jump shots.
fed to an ibm computer, capable of making 50k calculations per _minute_
I agree with you in general, but that's not the best example you could have used there.
Maradona spent most of the tournament boasting about not needing a gameplan, and saying things things like: "Nobody ever told me where to play. So I shouldn't have to tell Messi where to play, either".
[1] The entire England squad, for example.
They specialize in providing data and analytics on financial data. Clearly they didn't think it was too much of a leap to go from analyzing securities to analyzing baseball players.
As far as specific links, the Red Sox employ Bill James (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_James), who is a fairly famous statistician, to help them run the team. He invented Sabermetrics, "the analysis of baseball through objective evidence". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabermetrics)
Bill Simmons (http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/simmons/index ) has interviewed his friend Daryl Morey of the Houston Rockets about this.
One interesting point is that there is no "salary cap" for sports statisticians, so rich teams are not restricted about what they spend on numerical analysis. Morey hinted that several (most?) NBA teams spend in the 7-figures on it.
The video at the following link discusses it briefly. At the moment I can't find any more detailed discussion of it.
It's pronounced: Ka-NOOTH
