Tracy: Which sport is the most immune to Moneyball?

It ain’t baseball.  It’s probably soccer.

Each year, as ESPN’s Kevin Arnovitz has noted, more and more people are coming to Sloan. That’s literally true, but could be said figuratively of sports analytics in general. The days are long gone when seemingly unremarkable players could be signed on the cheap by the few teams smart enough to understand the value of, say, a high on-base percentage. “You used to know how other teams operated,” complained stats-friendly Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban at the opening panel. “Now you have to reverse-engineer what they did to see how they do it.”

Or, as Nate Silver put it on the same panel, “There’s not the low-hanging fruit anymore of having some teams that are totally stupid.”

Over the course of the two-day conference, I asked many people which sport—out of the four major U.S. team sports (baseball, basketball, football, hockey) and soccer—is least amenable to an advanced analytical interpretation, where little is to be gained by looking at the game from a new, maverick angle. In short: Which sport can’t be Moneyball-ed?