AVM got a mention in Moneyball as the stats company providing information to Paul DePodesta. Ben Lindbergh at Grantland digs into its history and profiles its founders, a couple of finance-industry guys named Ken Mauriello and Jack Armbruster. AVM applied outcome-independent principles long before anybody else did so.

“They’d always say, ‘Well, it comes out in a wash,’” Armbruster says. “The hard liner that’s caught, but then a soft hit. We were showing them it usually does, but it doesn’t always come out in a wash. There’s always going to be that one player out of 20 who’s going to be pretty far off from what the numbers are showing. And there’s going to be one guy in the league who’s just off the charts. You need mathematics to understand that. To understand that if you flip a coin 20 times, it could come up heads 16 times. It doesn’t mean it’s a very talented coin. It’s the randomness of life.”