About What Wins

Sports pretends to be an even playing field. At least on the field. But there are deep institutional inequalities that shape the way the action on the field takes place.

Every MLB team enters the draft with roughly ten lottery tickets per year. A team like the Yankees has the resources to wait and see which tickets win, then buy them from the teams that can't afford to hold them. It's a win win. The Yankees get a proven winner. The small market team gets more tickets. But for a team that can't play that game they have to do something harder and more interesting. They have to get better at turning losers into hits. If the average team develops 1.5 viable players per draft class, improving that to 1.8 has a measurable impact on that team's ability to compete over a five year period. That gap is not an accident. It is a system.

What Wins is not interested in whether player A scored two more points than player B in a given situation and is therefore better. It is interested in what structural context around that player allowed that difference in the first place.

The approach is simple. A question, a hypothesis, and then data gathered to inform it. Not to serve it. The data does not exist to confirm what I already think. It exists to show me what I am missing.

The playing field is never even. What Wins is about understanding exactly how uneven it is and why.