How Philly Sports Fans — and Teams — Finally Embraced Analytics

The new outfield wall in Citizens Bank Park shows advanced stats, as sports fans are more into analytics. / Photograph by Hunter Martin/Getty Images

When Citizens Bank Park opened its 20th season this year, it did so with shiny new LED screens where the old right-field out-of-town scoreboard used to be. So, instead of rudimentary updates from the rest of the league, fans can get in-game stats adjusted for each matchup for the game they’re watching. But these are not the stats your Richie Ashburn-lovin’ grandma grew up with. A new class of metrics like WAR (wins above replacement), wOBA (weighted on-base average), and OPS (on-base plus slugging) now better inform fans how well a batter may fare rather than mere batting average. Pitchers’ FIP (fielding-independent­ pitching), xwOBA (expected wOBA), and strike percentage stand in as superior predictors of success or failure than ERA.

A generation ago, oldheads would have exploded — baseball’s are among the most tradition-obsessed fans. Today’s fans (or at least a subset of them) crave all this information. Baseball was at the forefront of the Moneyball revolution within pro sports, with researchers and executives mining better ways to measure, quantify, and predict player performance. The Phillies were notably late to this mindset, but even they eventually got on board, and the fingerprints of this effort are all over the team’s thus far stellar season — particularly on the pitching staff.

Beat writers are now well-versed in the world of stats. TV broadcasts have added Statcast, offering fans a granular look at every pitch, from velocity to movement. The technology has advanced to allow this, sure, but fans’ demand has warranted it.

According to a 2023 Deloitte survey, 58 percent of fans (70 percent, when you isolate millennial and Gen Z fans) wish they had access to advanced statistics when attending a sporting event. They’re used to watching games at home on one screen while chatting on social media with like-minded fans, tracking their fantasy teams, betting on games, and looking up real-time stats on their phones. CBP’s outfield screens are a glowing manifestation of that demand.

The new outfield wall in Citizens Bank Park shows advanced stats. / Photograph by Laura Swartz

The wave of analytical, evidence-­based strategy has produced a new breed of fan. These plugged-in fans don’t boo when a pitcher leaves after 90 pitches. Because they’re also savvier about the game’s economics, they understand that Zack Wheeler pitches again in five days and is signed through 2027 at $42 million a year, and he’s useless if his arm falls off.

While baseball led the way (even if the Phillies didn’t), other major sports have followed in its footsteps. Sixers fans obsess about floor spacing and geek out over metrics like TS% (true shooting percentage, which gauges a player’s efficiency), VORP (value over replacement player, a concept lifted directly from baseball), and usage rate. They’ve got a kindred spirit in Sixers president of basketball operations Daryl Morey. The Eagles, run by numbers guru Howie Roseman, consistently rank toward the top of ESPN’s NFL analytics surveys for their use of advanced data in decision-making. Hockey and soccer employ stats like xG and xA (expected goals and expected assists, based on the location of shots and passes), and the Flyers and the Union are digging in on this to varying degrees.

It’s almost a cliché that Philly fans really know their sports, but it took us a while to warm up to data. Now that we have, we obsess about it the way we’ve always obsessed about grittiness (we’ll never not obsess about grittiness). The difference is that while the games will always be won on the field, now we believe that those wins can be engineered on a laptop.

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Published as “We’ve Embraced Analytics” in the September 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.