24th
Sports And The Economists
The interesting thing about athletic competition is that it’s often put into context with statistics, but the data are usually inadequate to explain truly why things happened the way they did. You can’t crunch the numbers and build models that describe what happened on a court or a field or predict some sort of an outcome.
But where would we be without those statlines and almanacs? Would sports be nearly as exciting without a way to compare teams and players? If two random groups of people with no history met on a diamond only to play nine innings on a nondescript lot somewhere before disbanding and never coming back, would it be as rewarding? As a spectator, probably not.
Can we enjoy the games as much without the boxscores? That’s a question The Courant is asking now as we push toward a Tribune-mandated restructuring of the paper. Our managing editor has announced that we’ll be streamlining the paper into just three daily sections. (That has all sorts of implications for me and my colleagues, but I’ll try to avoid any tangents). One of those three sections will be Sports, but we’re “moving much of the agate and national coverage online, with bold web refers in print.”
Few are reflecting about the death of daily printed agate, but it’s in its final stages of existence at the moment. Without an entire page of printed baseball boxscores, what separates us from the well-financed cable sports networks or the Web? Hopefully an increase in local coverage, but you can’t just write about UConn all the time. (Or can you? We certainly don’t have the resources available to go hard at the woefully underreported high school sports market. And can you call coverage of the Sox and Yankees “local”?) Fact is, sports fans love statistics. A glance at a small boxscore is often much more valuable than reading 12 inches of copy about the same game. Putting all that information on one easy page is a service no other media outlet can provide right now. It’s a shame we’re throwing that away.
Anyhow, despite my promise to avoid tangents, this post is a big one in itself. Its original purpose was to share some links with you about how economists are blogging more often about sports.
At Bloomberg, Kevin Hassett does a fairly cursory and ultimately unsatisfying study of NBA referees in the wake of disgraced former ref Tim Donaghy’s accusations of playoff games being fixed.
Not surprisingly, the Freakonomics blog by the New York Times has done a much better job with recent columns on NBA “rebound rates” and in-house statistical analysis by NBA franchises. (Yeah, I’m sneaking in a bit more Celtics love.)
So where does this kind of analysis leave us? Not much further forward than where we started, I think. There’s an unspoken balance between a sports fan’s appreciation and understanding of the game and the need for statistics to put that into context. That data needs to be tangible for the average fan. That’s why the PER rating system by ESPN’s John Hollinger isn’t widely quoted. The same goes for sabermetric stats in baseball, like OPS. But a hit is a hit. Yards are yards. A board is a board. And without sports agate in a newspaper, the conversation we can have about athletics loses out just a little bit. That’s something no extra analysis by an economist can replace.
