An aside to the main point: the author claims that one can do a similar analysis to other sports. My intuition is that you can't do quite as accurate an analysis of, say, soccer, than you can baseball. As a sport, baseball is unusually discretized when compared to a much more continuous sport like soccer or hockey. Being discrete, it makes it much easier to represent as a state machine, which makes it easier to simulate, and easier to suss out cause and effect. American football, I think, may be somewhere inbetween. I know, of course, that other sports do significant statistical analysis, but my intuition is that it is harder to attribute cause and effect at the fine-grain level that one can with baseball.