(Or “Funbers!” if you will. You won’t? Fish that. I’m calling it that anyway.)
Without doing any mental arithmetic, how impressed would you be with the following achievements?
A shortstop hits 1 HR in a week.
A wide receiver has 3 catches for 40 yards in a half.
A center has 5 points in a quarter.
Got your answers? No arithmetic, right? Good!
If I were to hear a sportscaster offer those or similarly structured stats in a negative way (as I often do), I would tend to conclude that they are indeed indicative of less-than-stellar performance. But let’s extrapolate those numbers out to view them in meaningful units…
The baseball season is approximately 26 weeks long. One HR a week by your starting SS is 26 for the season, a typically fantastic number.
The football season has 32 halves in it. Three catches and 40 yards per half becomes 96 catches and 1280 yards for the year, numbers that might earn your WR a Pro Bowl nod.
A basketball game has 4 quarters. Your hypothetical center is averaging 20 points a game, something no true center is doing this year.
(Now, before we go on, let me first say to our sabremetricians in the audience that I realize these raw stats offered without context are meaningless. But the Joe FBucks of the world aren’t talking to you or me.)
For whatever reason, our collective mathematical illiteracy (i.e., innumeracy to teachers and math nerds) is sometimes at its most galling when discussing or analyzing stats (and polls (Ghost of Jaybirditor: No politics!)). Which is kinda sorta okay for lay people. But can’t the professionals, the announcers and analysts and journalists, who trot out numbers with reduced denominators and then express disapproval with the seemingly paltry numerators be expected to know better?
No?
They can’t?
Fine.
Wait… What’s that sound? Sounds… Mechanical… OH NO! Joe Buck* has activated Cletus’s “destoy blogger” mode! Run!!!!!!!!!!
* I was tempted to use Tim McCarver’s name here but he likely doesn’t believe robots, blogs, or other people even exist.
Ah, Tim McCarver. What was it that Deion Sanders did to him in the Braves locker room after the Braves won the series? I don’t remember the details, but I do remember how happy it made me!
My favorite of these is qualitative, not quantitative: Dusty Baker complaining that when slow guys get on base, they “clog up the basepaths”. Check the stats, run simulations, think through the possible outcomes, etc, it’s pretty obvious that being on base is a lot more valuable than making an out.
Well, yea. My point here is that even reasonably intelligent people can suffer from real innumeracy.
Eh, I immediately got the idea the first one was really impressive. The second one was meaningless to me because I don’t do football, and it took me a bit to figure out the second was basketball.
…Yeah, I don’t really do sports (aside from the Olympics and hockey during playoffs).
The third was basketball, I mean.
Hmmm…..good post, but…..
There is always a but isn’t there? Just because we can take some data for one given period of time does not mean that we should extrapolate that said players are going to do as well or better over a certain given time frame. Most players are streaky, that is why streaks are such a big deal in sports. Players go through slumps, then they get a hot hand, put up a lot of yards, points or whatever you are tracking. That is why most announcer’s or those in the know often give stats such as these in a negative way. They know they are not usually repeated day after day or week after week. Now if a player is on an run and has shown that they can maintain a decent average over time announcers are less negative when speaking about such stats.
Anyways sports announcers are too busy explaining how the team I don’t want to win should play in order to beat the team I do want to win. Has anyone else ever noticed that….it never seems to fail, they are always talking about ways to beat MY team…what’s up with that?
But this illustrates my point perfectly.
Is 26 HRs in a season by a SS good? Yes? Well then why wouldn’t that EXACT SAME LEVEL OF PERFORMANCE over a shorter time period be viewed as bad? You are absolutely correct that we can not and should not extrapolate from small sample sizes… we should not consider a Center a 20 PPG guy based on one quarter. But announcers often chide these guys for what are actually quality accomplishments. “So-and-so is really struggling… just 1 HR in the past week.” “So-and-so was shut down in the first half… just 3 catches for 40 yards.” “So-and-so couldn’t get it going in the 4th quarter, scoring only 5 points.” Those would be legitimate criticisms if and only if guys regularly achieved a level of play significantly higher than that. I think the announcers lack an understanding of basic math, of perspective. Also, they indulge in schadenfraude far too much, which connects to your second point; that and confirmation bias, of course. 🙂
Yeah, your right. Why would someone averaging over 13 yards a catch be considered not great? It only takes 10 yards to make a first down, unless your team is penalty prone. Then the guy averaging 13 yard per catch really isn’t doing much for you if you don’t get first downs from it. Is it really fair to take away from his accomplishments because some numskulls on his team keep putting them in the hole. But then does the defenses play off the ball knowing that they can give up the bigger yardage and still accomplish their goal of getting the other teams offense off the field? Ugh, so many ifs and is’s. (BTW what is the plural of is? lol)
I don’t think you can take the stats and separate them from the greater picture of wins and loses though. Did the guy get 40 yards, but he got 20 on a 3rd and 30? What real good did his 20 yard catch do? More than likely the defense gave up the yardage knowing it was for the greater good. Now if he is catching 5 yard passes, running for another 15 and getting a first down, don’t diss him because he “only” got 40 in the half. Otherwise I would say don’t celebrate an accomplishment that is only a stat not a result. I would also think that announcer’s become a little jaded towards accomplishments, just like anyone who follows anything closely does. It might take more to prompt a “wow, this guy is on fire, he deserves to be praised above all others.”
Granted that takes you back to your point, why then deride the accomplishment just because it doesn’t impress them, when the number themselves don’t back up their “unimpressed attitude “.
Well, as noted, these numbers are really not great. They’re the traditional stats, the raw data that, with the proper context, inform us of their value. Advanced stats, particularly in baseball and increasingly so in football and basketball, take into account a lot of what you get at. I still think it is hard to make a clear connection to Ws for an individual player, as their is only so much they can control, but context is hugely important.
A 20 yard run on 3rd and 30 when you’re team is down 25 and the defense is playing prevent is less valuable than a 2 yard run on 4th and 1 when you’re down by 1 in the waning minutes. But that 2 yard run does not become LESS valuable if your stupid kicker botches the kick. Does that follow?
Oh as a Packer fan I know all about the kicker botching the kick…..hope that streak is over!
I agree that the 2 yard run doesn’t become less valuable if later in the drive the kicker botches it. Now if the fullback is the one getting the 2 yards and he only had say 10 yards all game, should his numbers be looked down upon because he had so few yards. His job is to block and get first downs on short yardage. But if you look at his stats outside the context of his position and responsibilities you would think he is the worst running back on the team. So if an announcer says that Adrian Peterson only got 40 yards in the first half and said so with disapproval in his voice then said that John Kuhn had 10 yards for 3 first downs he can be forgiven for sounding like Kuhn had a better game than AP. This is even though just looking at the numbers one would think that AP should get the approval not Kuhn.
Precisely. Great point about the importance of understanding role.
You do sometimes see announcers overstate this in baseball… “His job isn’t to score runs… it’s too make outs by bunting” or some nonsense. But in football, guys have much more clearly defined roles that matter. Like, a lot.
That’s why baseball is much better on the radio than on tv. Especially when the radio announcers drink a little. None of that silliness.
Dman, bless his heart, tried to explain the football running game to me a couple of years ago.
If your running back averages 4 yards per carry, he’s someone to keep forever.
If your running back averages 3 yards per carry, dump him.
I’d say it is closer to 5 yards per carry is elite, 4 yards per carry is average, perhaps even replacement level, and 3 yard per carry is pathetic.
Again, these numbers are fairly crude and without context and far from ideal. But they are the numbers typically trotted out by announcers which somehow they still don’t understand.
You can make the same point about baseball. Consider batting average (even thought it’s overrated as a stat):
.300 is terrific. .260 is mediocre. The difference is roughly one hit a week.
I’ve had a question for a while about batting averages:
Two batters.
One always gets a hit the first pitch at bat. Crack, first base. His batting average would be 1.000, right?
Second always has a strike, a couple of foul balls, and then, when the count is 2 and 3, crack, first base.
From my perspective, the second guy is just as good as the first (if not better because of the weird “you want to tire out the pitcher” thing that helps define having a good “at bat”)… but wouldn’t his batting average be significantly lower?
They’d both be 1.000. Batting average is based only on the outcome of the at-bat, not how many pitches it took at arrive at it.
Ah, cool. Thanks.
Depends on the running back, whether he is the halfback or the fullback. We always think halfback when we are talking running backs. The poor unsung heroes of the running back core are the fullbacks, if they averages 3 yards per carry, you are a lucky team.
Not to mention that many fullback duties don’t translate into easily communicable stats. Priest Holmes dominated running backs for a few seasons with Kansas City, but he owes much of his success to key blocks throw by his fullback, Tony Richardson. It’s notable that many of Larry Johnson’s on-the-field problems began when Richardson left KC and signed with Minnesota.
So maybe in the end, all individual stats in team sport are skewed being that they are dependent on their fellow players abilities too. I am thinking that baseball should be taken out of the team sport category though, at least for this purpose. Individual players in baseball rely less on their team mates than say football player do.
Great point. Baseball, at least offensively, is much more of an individual sports. Pitching is far more of a team sport than traditional stats indicate. Pitchers don’t win games… teams do.
Forgot about those pitchers. Truer words never spoken.
Funny what random words will make one think of. Immediately after reading your post I thought about Rollie Fingers, now there was a mustache….I mean pitcher.
There’s a theory (invented by a guy named, and I am not making this up, Voros McCracken), that pitchers are responsible for strikeouts, walks, and home runs, while what happens to balls put in play is up to the defense. The best evidence is that what happens to the latter, as measured by a stat called BABIP (Batting average on balls in play), seems to vary wildly across seasons for any particular pitcher. That is, you might think a pitcher is good at inducing batters to pop up or hit weak grounders to second, but the numbers don’t reflect that.
Mike,
I agree with that generally, but think that pitchers do have SOME control over BABIP. Mariano Rivera’s cutter is harder to hit than Jose Lima’s meatball pitch, even if both balls stay in the ballpark. I don’t think it is wholly out of their control. I can’t necessarily back this up with numbers (the numbers may exist, but I can’t find them/don’t have access to them). But, generally speaking, much of what we ascribe to pitchers is often largely out of their control.
Something else I have a theory on that greatly impacts pitchers (or, more accurately, deflates offense)… foul ground. Look at the parks that tend to be pitchers park and you’ll often see above-average foul territories. This turns a lot of balls that would be in the stands in other parks into outs, with no corresponding counter since if they fall, they remain foul. You rarely see this mentioned, but I think it is a real factor, amongst many others.
And, I should say, not because of any magical ability the pitchers have to control the batted ball. Just some pitches are harder to hit well than others. A pitch with late movement is often going to result in less solid contact than one that is flat and straight.
Except for Jamie Moyer. Dude’s a warlock.
You’re absolutely right about foul ground being an important part of park effect. Here is an article giving some numbers.