Number-numbing

Posted by admin on Oct 21, 2008 in Sports | 0 comments

Watching the Canucks play always involves hearing endless comments about past statistics: from the 63 per cent of home games won versus teams from cities that start with ‘S’ to the 763rd career icing call for one of the refs. I will never understand this. This is because pure irrationality transcends comprehension. Everyone in the hierarchy of being from banana slug on up realizes that the announcers are just filling space while they wait, usually in vain, for the guys to put one in the net. I hope the announcers realize this too, if only for poetic justice and a vindication of their place on the hierarchy.

The truth is that such commentary does not deserve any name but noise. It demonstrates complete absence of thought and meaning. The computer spits out the numbers and the vapid flow of words continues.

The good, bizarre, and rather obvious news is that sports commentators really have no clue about the statistics themselves. If they actually used statistics correctly, they would destroy every sport they touched. Sports and statistics together is the marriage of Persephone and Hades, the joy of existence paired with the futility of fate and death. For Athletics is a heroic quest – a hard-fought struggle for glory and victory, while statistics are a destroyer of dreams. That is, unless you’re actually enrolled in a morning stats class.

Can you imagine the terrible day the commentators learn what they’re doing? Picture this: you and some friends are watching the game, with chips, burgers, and beverages at the ready. You turn on the TV and hear “The Canucks and the Rangers are just warming up. Naslund leads the NHL in goals, two point one standard deviations away from the mean. The Rangers’ head coach expressed his gratitude on signing a player in the first percentile, while all Vancouver, with flashbacks of Messier, marvels his the increase in goals-per-shot of an entire standard deviation. We can say, within a 95 per cent confidence margin, he’ll score two goals this game. As for the future, the rest of the Rangers’ forwards are all in the tenth percentile, with significant positive variance during upper-round playoffs, so their chances of winning the Cup are 64.5, 19 times out of 20.”

Ahh, do you feel the dull ache? It gets you right in the heart. This is the antithesis of what sports ought to be. Statistics of this sort only feed a strange modern fatalism. It’s one thing to predict the election results or the likelihood of contracting toe fungus. It’s quite another thing to predict who’s going to win the game.

Neither athletes nor teams belong on a bell-curve. If either truly obeyed mathematical modeling, who could jump on the bandwagon again? The bandwagon requires hope, a blind trust in the whims of providence and a foundationless belief in the inner strength of the team. Namely, it requires the complete absence of statistics. Sports is about the triumph of the moment and the selective remembrance of the past. Without that, who would cheer for Vancouver? I’ll leave you to answer that one. It is only in the absence of statistics that there is life: a divinely simple lack of analysis is human, is innately good and is what keeps us cheering like mad for the home team, year after year.