Sport for Statistics Fans · 10:21pm Sep 6th, 2016
I believe Buckball Abstract has the record among all my stories for the highest ratio of views-in-the-first-24-hours to time-taken-to-write. This was just a random idea I had after watching Buckball Season. When I started writing I thought it would make a new chapter in Codex Equestria, but it drifted just past the 1000 word mark, so it ended up as a new story.
This gives me an excuse to write a short blog post on sabermetrics and see how much I can bluff about baseball…
There is probably no sport which has so fully embraced, and been embraced by, nerd culture as baseball. Long ago, back in the 1970s, before home computers and the internet transformed the world, and well before being an egghead became fashionable, there existed a culture of mathematically minded baseball fans, who would labor through the nights compiling tables of batting averages and slugging percentages, and thinking about new ways to statistically test questions such as: do clutch hitters really exist? So the story goes, the guru of this movement, Bill James, had the deepest mathematical insights while working long nights as a security guard at a pork and beans cannery, and wrote them up into his famous Baseball Abstract. Thus the field of sabermetrics came to be.
While most sports fans are more than happy to argue about who the best players are, just based on their personal impressions, this group wanted the numbers and mathematical methods to properly assess this. For years the wisdom of this community was dismissed by the professional player and managers. Yet opinions would change in the 1990s, when, as documented in the book and film Moneyball, the manager of Oakland Athletics, Billy Beane, decided to use the rigorous application of sabermetrics as a tactic to get the best players on a heavily reduced budget, and saw his cut-price team rise to near the top of the league. To some baseball fans, this was the cold logic of capitalism killing the soul of the game, but to the statistics nerds it was vindication that they had been right all along.
This story then provided the inspiration for one of the best Simpsons episodes MoneyBART, where Lisa takes on the management of the Springfield Little League baseball team, and uses the power of statistics to take them to the state final.
While no expert, I have always had a certain liking to baseball as a sport, as unlike soccer, rugby and cricket, my enjoyment of it is not complicated by unpleasant childhood memories of being forced to play it. That said, I did throw in one cricket reference to Buckball Abstract—the story of reverse swing bowling, and how Pakistan came to win the 1992 world cup is a fascinating mix of sport and physics—but I’ll leave that for another time. I could also write something about buckyballs.
Ha. Nerds.