Sports, math share stage at MIT event
The Celtics are selling more tickets than last season despite an abysmal record; the Toronto Blue Jays want Major League Baseball to expand its draft to include players from overseas; and the kids at MIT, well, they're into analyzing the numbers behind it all.
The Cambridge university's Sloan School of Management held its first sports-business conference yesterday, bringing in about 200 students and executives from pro sports franchises around North America. The event, organized by the Sloan School's student Entertainment, Media and Sports Club , was all about analytical sports management -- in layman's terms, using math to reduce the often seat-of-the-pants business of running a team to a science of cold calculations. It's an approach the Sloan School has embraced for years and now wants to show that it has mettle in sports.
"With private equity and investment bankers and venture capitalists buying teams, the debt that they take on requires them to be more rigorous, and they're going to look for management talent, and Sloan is the right place to teach it," said Daryl Morey , a former senior vice president of operations for the Celtics, who taught the first class in sports analytics at Sloan in 2004 .
Now general manager of the Houston Rockets , Morey said he's seen the uses of hard data in sports business multiply, to everything from how much to charge for a ticket to whether or not to draft players based on their performance as far back as high school -- and how much to pay them if they're signed.
Just how much the field of analytics is being used by sports franchises was a hot topic in some of the conference sessions. Blue Jays general manager J.P. Ricciardi said star prospects are increasingly evaluated by his scouts using a list of statistics that a decade ago were never considered. But not everything is determined by numbers.
"If we're going to pay $120 million to some player, he should be somebody who can be the face of the organization," he said.
Asked if that held true for the Red Sox, who paid $103 million to acquire Japanese pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka , Ricciardi said he thought it was a worthwhile move -- but lamented that teams in smaller markets like his can't afford to make similar moves.
"I really wish Major League Baseball would go to a worldwide draft," he said, instead of the current system, which limits draft picks to American players.
For other teams, though, the hard data crunching comes down to figuring out how to put fans in seats. Celtics chief operating officer Rich Gotham said the club used software to create more than 200 pricing levels for tickets, though it uses far fewer levels than that. Celtics attendance is up about 8 percent this season, despite a losing streak that has reached 17 games.
"We need to operate outside of winning percentage," said Gotham, and collecting data on what motivates fans to come to games helps the team do that. "You take a game like [Friday] night, we lost 16 going in but every seat that the Celtics controlled, we sold."
The NBA's Atlanta Hawks are concentrating more on data to market the team, said executive vice president and chief marketing officer Lou DePaoli . Before the current ownership took over the Hawks and the NHL's Thrashers, the organization believed Thrashers fans were more affluent than Hawks fans.
"Without the actual data, the assumption was that the Thrashers fans lived north and west of the city and were affluent and that the Hawks fans were coming from the south and west and were lower income," said DePaoli, and that led the team to advertise Hawks seats for as cheap as $10 each.
"The data actually pointed and showed us that the Hawks fans had a higher household income than the Thrashers fans."
Keith Reed can be reached at reed@globe.com. 
