This winter, the New York Mets hired Ben Zaumzer away from his previous job with the Dodgers — a maneuver considered by many to be a boost to the Mets’ data analytics capabilities. There’s another facet to the hiring of Zaumzer that could play a significant role in his new job — if the Amazins have an office Oscar pool, Zaumzer is likely to utterly dominate at it.
A recent article by Stephanie Apstein at Sports Illustrated explains why. Years ago, Zaumzer came up with a system for predicting the Academy Award winners in a given year — and it’s been impressively accurate ever since.
In his first year of college, Zaumzer came up with the system. That was in 2012; seven years later saw the publication of his book Oscarmetrics: The Math Behind the Biggest Night in Hollywood. And, as the article points out, he generally keeps his baseball analysis separate from his awards-season analysis.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t some exceptions. “I stick to the data-only side on the Oscars because that’s my gimmick, that’s my shtick, and I enjoy it and it’s fun, but at the same time, I fully recognize that movies are an art form and therefore, predicting them is an art form,” he told Sports Illustrated. “I think the exact same thing is true in baseball, and so it’s important when making predictions in either domain to have a certain degree of humility.”
Zaumzer’s analysis of film history makes for fascinating reading. How close will his own predictions be to this year’s winners? We’ll know later this weekend.
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