Living in a Rational World:
What it means to be a sports fan in an age of statistics
By J.p. Lawrence
There are few loves more fervent than that between a young boy and his sports teams. I know – I first became a sports fan at the age of 13. I was a sucker for the local underdogs: the plucky Minnesota Twins, the scrappy Minnesota Timberwolves, and the karmically cursed Minnesota Vikings; as for the traditional powerhouses – the Los Angeles Lakers, the Dallas Cowboys, and especially the New York Yankees – I detested them.
I wanted to learn everything I could about my teams and the world of sports, so I devoured books, watched the games, and above all, fell in love with statistics. I don’t mean common stats, like home runs or touchdowns – I mean advanced stats like Player Evaluation Rating, Value Over Replacement Player Rating, Advanced Plus Minus. It was a new language, and it showed me a whole new side of sports. My understanding grew by leaps and bounds.
I was lucky to become a sports fan in an era where almost everything related to winning can be quantified, evaluated, analyzed. Today, a quarter of the way into the season, statisticians can predict with accuracy what a team’s record will be when the playoffs start. They can project a player’s entire career. They can fine-tune everything from the mechanics of a pitcher’s throwing motion to a point guard’s shooting tendencies to an offensive lineman’s pulling ability.
The fact that this knowledge exists is undoubtedly good. There are fewer mysteries, fewer myths now, and more people have access to more information than ever before. The discoveries of the statistical revolution, born out of an intense desire to understand, have brought immense benefit to the sports community, acting as a lens that allows us to see the games as we always have, only with greater accuracy and depth.
But despite all of my newfound knowledge, I felt as if I was missing some visceral aspect of my identity as a sports fan. I noticed that more and more I began to ignore the actual games in favor of the box scores. I also noticed that I began to see players not as humans, but as sets of numbers. Lastly, I noticed that the more I learned, the more detached I became. In the words of William Blake in The Crystal Cabinet, “I strove to seize the inmost Form / With ardor fierce and hands of flame, / But burst the Crystal Cabinet, / And like a Weeping Babe became – ”
The questions that I am interested in are not whether statistics are good or bad, or whether we should continue to explore the world of sports analytically. Instead, I want to know if it possible to have too much information, if we lose something when we look at the world of sports without mystery, without bias, through clinical, rational eyes. I want to know: what does it mean to be a sports fan in this new age of overwhelming information?
To find out, I revisited the source of my initial interest in statistics: a book titled Moneyball: the Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis, the Paul Revere of the statistical revolution. In Moneyball, Lewis profiled how the financially-limited Oakland A’s were able to remain competitive with rich teams like the Yankees through the use of statistical analysis to unearth talented players who, for some reason or another, were ignored or overlooked by traditional scouting methods. By rejecting old, outdating premises about the game of baseball and researching what truly wins games, the A’s were able to embarrass richer teams for half a decade. As Lewis writes, “at the bottom of the Oakland experiment was a willingness to rethink baseball: how it is managed, how it is played, who is best suited to play it, and why” (14). In effect, the A’s were asking themselves whether the language of baseball was truly complete, whether the terms and jargon the baseball community had been using for so long were sufficient. My young mind was exhilarated in the new language they were creating in the search for knowledge and wins; it was as if to read the book is to become privy to some great revolution.
Because this revolutionary aim, the central thread throughout the book is the tension between the old scouts, who trusted their experience and instincts, and the new statisticians, who advocated the use of statistics and tracking, illustrated by this anecdote in the beginning of the book, where an Oakland A’s scout is threatened by the sight of a computer in his workspace.
“What do you need that for?” Grady asked Paul after the meeting, as if he sensed the machine somehow challenged his authority. “You’re sitting over there with your computer and I don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I’m just looking at stats,” said Paul. “It’s easier than printing them out.
To Grady, the old scout, the computer represented a new paradigm within the entrenched baseball community, a sign that change was coming. The man with the laptop, Paul DePodesta, wasn’t even a baseball man – he was one of those economics majors seemingly destined for Wall Street – what did he know about baseball? Behind his spreadsheets, DePodesta saw the opposite – he saw the scout as knowing too much of baseball dogma, and not enough of economics and psychology. It was interesting, he said, how “the human mind played tricks on itself when it relied exclusively on what it saw, and every trick it played was a financial opportunity for someone who saw through the illusion to reality. There was a lot you didn’t see when you watched a ball game.” Under this philosophy, the Oakland A’s understood that a single human can only understand moments through the limitations of their biases and intelligences, where a powerful computer can sort, without strain or prejudice toward flukes and meaningless individual moments, through vast amounts of data gathered by many, many humans. In essence, DePodesta and his bosses created a winning team by using rational principals and statistics to remove the weakness of human biases by removing the human element as much as possible.
This would have terrified philosopher Hannah Arendt. In the prologue of The Human Condition, Arendt outlines a world in which mankind used the gift of science to divorce themselves from the reality of the world. Science, she writes, has taught us not to trust our senses, but to devise a testable formula apart from our own perceptions. Thus to the biologist, a man is nothing but a bag of chemicals; to an economist, a man is nothing but a rational variable on a demand curve; to a sports fan, a man is nothing more than the sum of the production of wins and the stats he provides. In short, science can teach us that we are not special – our senses lie.
In sports, once we analyze “without bias,” we find many of the beliefs sports fans take as gospel are illusionary. For instance, all the Kobe Bryant game-winning shots we remember are actually outnumbered by his many, many when the game hangs in the balance. Imagine learning some number cruncher is telling you that your own memories are erroneous, misleading and biased; that angst is channeled and then shouted in this piece by NBA.com writer Vince Thomas.
Oh wait [...] I forgot, some of these newfangled stats will tell you that Kobe isn't actually all that clutch. My bad […] John Schuhmann (our numbers expert here at NBA.com) wrote this column at the beginning of the season, which included a list that ranked Kobe 38th in "clutch situations." Give Schuhmann a break though, it wasn't his fault. It's math and science's fault.
While Thomas’s distain for scientific methodology is almost desperate in its ignorance, it’s easy to see how such an attitude might develop. As humans, we remember the outliers and forget the uninteresting; for every lottery winner, there are thousands of losers, and yet we remember the winners; for every highlight reel Kobe Bryant jumper, there are many missed shots. The man shoots 29% on clutch shots, and yet we remember the 29 times out of a hundred he succeeds, and forget the 71 times he fails. In our minds, anecdotes constitute evidence, and a moment is representative of the whole. Our eyes and memories deceive us from true empiricism.
This, too, was part of Arendt’s dystopia: as humans become more and more automated, they learn to distrust their own senses. In this system, humans are biased, illogical, innumerate animals. Computers are inherently rational and emotionless beings – they can think in the way rational humans do, only on a greater scale. A single moment means nothing. Hundreds and thousands of correlated moments? That could be something. Could a day come where we realize watching a single game gives us a more distorted perception of reality than watching no games?
To me, the scariest proposition is a world where we are not qualified to competently find things out ourselves. Before, fans could look at the box score and pay attention to the games and think that they had a good grasp of what was going on. Now, stats are often so complicated that fans feel as though they must rely on professionals to do their thinking for them, to take these moments and turn them into facts. When this happens, do we as fans become further disconnected from the games? As Bill Simmons, ESPN.com’s resident voice of the fan writes:
Does it not bother anyone else that certain teams meticulously keep track of and hoard those moments? It's valuable data that would give us all a better understanding of what we're watching … NBA teams need to stop acting like they're protecting nuclear info during the Cold War. Aren't we in this together?
Would this have scared Ardent, who argued that so much of our modern world is technical to the point of incomprehensibility? I think so. We drive cars without understanding internal combustion, we send emails without a basic concept of programming, we flush without knowing how plumbing works, and now we’re not even qualified to comment on what we see at a baseball game, trusting instead a statistical priesthood to make sense of it all.
Overall, however, I believe the base humanity of sports will always be present, no matter how much we try to remove the human element. When the anthropologist Clifford Geertz analyzed cockfighting in “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” he focused not on the rules or outcomes of the games, but on how the games worked as a social construct, as “a focused gathering” – a set of persons engrossed in a common flow of activity and relating to one another in terms of that flow.” Amid the bloodlust and brutality of these games, he saw in the cockfight a cultural theater, one that appeals because of its connections to a shared experience:
“We go to see Macbeth to learn what a man feels like after he has gained a kingdom and lost his soul, Balinese go to cockfights to find out what a man, usually composed, aloof, almost obsessively self-absorbed, a kind of moral autocsom, feels like when, attacked, tormented, challenged, insulted, and driven in result to the extremes of fury, he has totally triumphed or been brought totally low.”
Perhaps we search wrongly when we examine sports for the nuts and bolts mechanics in what we see; instead, perhaps we should treasure those individual moments, despite our knowledge of their mathematical meaningless, because those moments are what keep us human.
These moments are seminal, ever-lasting. I remember when I first got into sports, during the fall of 2003, when my football heroes, the Minnesota Vikings seemed destined for immortality. Undefeated for their first six games, they abruptly lost six of their next nine games, their playoff hopes wilting with my spirits. And yet, in the last game of the season, they still had a chance: With seven seconds left in the game, they were up 17-12, only needing to hold the lead for seven more seconds, just seven more seconds, they go to the playoffs as division champions – but then the unthinkable happened. With the season on the brink, my Vikings let some nobody quarterback, Josh McCown, complete a desperation touchdown pass - under duress, on the run, and with no time left on the clock - to nobody wide receiver Nate Poole in the corner of the end zone. In the words of Paul Allen, Vikings announcer: “TOUCHDOWN! NOOOO! NOOOO! THE CARDINALS HAVE KNOCKED THE VIKINGS OUT OF THE PLAYOFFS!”
I was devastated. I remember my shock. I remember my favorite Viking, Chris Hovan, on his hands and knees, prostrate in disbelief, his wild barbarian hair limp and his face in the shape of agony. My rational mind knows it was just a game, a spectacle, a vehicle of harmless entertainment and commercial enterprise. But for the 13-year-old boy inside of me, there was something beyond speech in that moment. Talk to any Vikings fan about that moment, and they’ll remember, and they’ll remember the shock, and when you look into their eyes, you’ll see a flicker of understanding, a sense of connection through the weight of shared experiences. Perhaps it’s irrational to think that a game can have such significance, but I believe that the world of sports is inherently irrational; that the world of sports is like the world in miniature, the ultimate simulation of the human condition, a vessel into which we pour our love, our hate, our pride, our shame and everything else; we sports fans delude ourselves into thinking these meaningless moments of entertainment mean something because we share our delusion together.
If Arendt’s dystopia is an accurate portrait of society, our world is a solved puzzle, a world where we went out looking for the secret of life and found out the answer: we are not special. We’re just animals, short-lived flickers, pointless statistics in the flow of time. But I’d also like to think that the connections we make in spite of that notion are what make us human. As Ardent writes in the Human Condition, “Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.” Of course, we still ought to learn as much as we can about our world, but I believe as long as there are people who still believe that individual moments still matter, that our senses can still teach us, that one crushing, painful moment can connect millions of strangers, the humanity of sports will survive. In a way, I guess that’s the most human thing about sports: the delusion, which we share.