DePodesta had become fascinated with building a better system for evaluating players, and he thought of A.V.M. as a tool to measure—and a metaphor for—the market’s glaring inefficiencies. In 1998 he was hired as the chief assistant to Billy Beane, the new general manager of the Oakland A’s. Once installed, he set about adapting A.V.M., helping the A’s become by far the most cost-efficient team in baseball. DePodesta has since moved on—first to become the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers and then the San Diego Padres’ special assistant for baseball operations—and so has the process he worked to kick-start. Thanks to DePodesta’s model, every step Oakland A’s management now takes is in the direction of abstraction, complexity, and data gathering, to increase its precision in valuing baseball players. Oakland tracks every major league at bat, to measure how hard the ball is hit.

Four years ago, I used the Oakland story to frame a book, Moneyball, but the A’s were really just the subplot of another story: the intellectualization of professional sports. The trend in pro sports—away from the intuition of insiders and toward a more objective, data-driven valuation of assets—resembles the shift that transformed global financial markets in the 1980s and early 1990s. There’s never been a better time for the guy with no muscle definition, Coke-bottle glasses, and a laptop to influence the value of a professional athlete. In the past three years, at least a dozen baseball teams have hired the type of young statisticians you’d more commonly find working in risk arbitrage at Bear Stearns. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has a team of nerds trying to create new and more useful basketball statistics. (“The problem,” he tells me, “is that we’re not even measuring the right things on the court.”) The Houston Rockets’ Morey may never have played pro basketball, but he studied computer science and statistics at Northwestern and taught at M.I.T. (“Econometrics is a very good background for what we do,” he says, “because we’re dealing with messy data.”) The Denver Nuggets employ Dean Oliver, who has written a book, Basketball on Paper, about how statistics might be used to better understand the game. The San Francisco 49ers have Paraag Marathe, formerly of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the consulting firm Bain & Co. And he’s not selling ads on the JumboTron; he’s working up ideas for the head coach on how to better manage football games.

This trend naturally leads to the creation of a public financial market trading in jocks, in which every quant on and off Wall Street will have a shot at solving what is now commonly referred to as the sports problem. The only question about this market is where it will open and what, exactly, it will trade in. Not very long ago, when Wall Street considered making individual human beings into securities, it looked to the bond market; for example, in 1998, when SPP Hambro & Co. tried to sell stakes in Frank Thomas, then the Chicago White Sox’s first baseman, they were going to take the form of $20 million in bonds backed by Thomas’ baseball salary. But it’s hard to see the fun in lending Frank Thomas money in the hope that he lives long enough to pay you back. Owning a piece of Frank Thomas—that would be different. For every investor who might consider lending Thomas money, there are thousands who’d like to buy Thomas outright—and thousands more who’d short-sell him.