Moneyball gets the little master

Moneyball the film is coming out soon, starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, and in a puff piece (£) on it for the FT I stumble across this little nugget which seemed worth sharing:

Andy Flower is a devotee of Moneyball. Before the series his statistician, Nathan “Numbers” Leamon, carried out a Moneyball-style analysis of India’s great batsman Sachin Tendulkar. “Numbers” discovered that Tendulkar struggles early in his innings to score runs on his “off side” – that is, when the ball is bowled on the side of his bat rather than his legs. In the 22 years that Tendulkar has played Test cricket, nobody had previously spotted this. England bowled to Tendulkar’s off side early in his innings, and repeatedly dismissed him cheaply.