Definition of "sabermetrics"

By the early 1990s it was clear that “sabermetrics,” the search for new baseball knowledge, was an activity that would take place mainly outside of baseball.

2003, Michael Lewis, Moneyball, Thorndike Press, page 164

More recently, specialists like him have had to fend off a new threat: sabermetrics. Baseball has always been a game obsessed with numbers. But sabermetrics, a term coined in 1980 by statistician Bill James in honor of the Society for American Baseball Research, strives to use every available technology to study baseball empirically—its players, its strategies, the statistics themselves.

2014 October 1, Randy Leonard, “Baseball’s Long and Complicated Relationship With the Bunt”, in The Atlantic‎