My good buddy Mike recently wrote about stats in baseball and hockey and I found it a worthy topic to discuss. One of the things about me is that I am very quantitative, I love statistics and going through data. To many, numbers look jumbled and confusing, which can be the case if what you’re looking at is raw, but there is a clarity in numbers that I naturally gravitate towards. And when you make sense of a number puzzle, there is no better feeling of satisfaction.
So couple my interest with my long-time sports fandom and I bring data analysis to athletics. Baseball has been the best sport at doing this in my lifetime, mostly led by Bill James and his sabermetric revolution. The “Sports Guy” Bill Simmons wrote a really good introduction to baseball sabermetrics last year that’s definitely worth a quick read. Basically, baseball had been overvaluing the wrong statistics for far too long. The ironic part about baseball being the first major sport to adopt more reflective stats is that baseball has long been considered the aging dinosaur of American sport, as football and basketball have become more popular events. The stat school of thought has even left the front office and entered into play for managers. The best indication of this movement really having significant traction in the baseball community was when Seattle Mariners’ pitcher Felix Rodriguez won the AL Cy Young award last year on a team that was very bad. Traditionally, MLB awards go to players on teams that finish well. The writers who voted recognized, through more indicative statistics, that Rodriguez was the best pitcher in the American League last year (and he was), and justly awarded him with the honor. For more stat porn, check out Baseball Prospectus.
But now that baseball is playing ball, why aren’t other sports utilizing their data more effectively? I know that baseball has a greater sample size and is largely a 1-on-1 game of statistical probability, but there are indicative figures that give you reasonable assumptions in other sports. Take for example the +/- stat (originated in hockey) in basketball. It’s really simple- if a player’s team outscores the other team while they are playing, whatever the differential in the game’s score while they are on the court is that player’s +/-. This is accumulated all season long, and ultimately tells a very strong story of what happened that season and who were the most valuable players. It’s widely believed that the Chicago Bulls’ Derrick Rose is going to win the NBA MVP award this year for leading his team to 1st place in the tough Eastern conference, but I believe the true most valuable player is either LeBron James or Dwight Howard. If you look at the NBA’s +/- for this season, you see that Miami’s Big Three take up three of the first four spots, likely because they’re so much stronger than the rest of their team. If LeBron is able to make his team that much better through his passing and defense, that should make him the most valuable. Rose is arguably the best PG in the NBA, but LeBron took the Cavaliers to the #1 seed and look at them now. The Bulls would very likely still be a playoff team without Rose.
Additionally, the NFL needs to better recognize and develop some more quantitative stats, especially for QB’s. For example, incorporating completions:attempts for routes within certain yards down field, some kind of production-per-play metric for defensive players, and better analyzing the success rate of offensive lineman. There are so many eyes and ears plugged into NFL games on Sundays that this wouldn’t be hard to initialize. As a society, we are getting smarter, so there is no reason why other professional sports leagues can’t begin to give their fans a clearer view of what’s actually going on during the course of play, besides the mundane figures that we are used to.
Before you say that it’s too complicated and that fans won’t want better statistical data, remember that it was also said about stats in baseball. And the stat revolution brought the Red Sox a long-awaited World Series (still haunts me) and a SP on a terrible team, the recognition that he certainly deserved. So just keep an open mind about advancing athletic statistics, and let one stats nerd dream for more in the future.
