Advanced statistics are something that have crept up in recent years in normal sports conversations. As the collection of stats in sports gets more and more advanced, so does the common sports fan.
The conversation, however, has now been shifted to whether or not advanced stats are the true barometers of a sport. Traditional sports fans view their favorite sport without a care for advanced stats, and see it as a human game. The new era of stats-based fans see games with graphs and charts in their eyes, hungry for the stats sheet to be printed at the end of the game.
So, who’s right here? The stats-hungry kid who can’t wait to tweet the latest numbers, or the seasoned fan who just wants to watch the game?
It’s a very tricky question to ask, because there’s plenty of validity on both sides. Sure, a game is impacted by several things—look at a baseball game. Any given game during the MLB season could be impacted by inclement weather, a pitcher who has a nagging injury or any number of external elements.
On the flipside, it’s absolutely possible to forecast games by breaking down every possible statistic on a graph or a spreadsheet.
Gregory Bull / AP Photo:
Yoenis Cespedes doubles in spring training on March 6, in Scottsdale, Ariz. Moneyball is a book on the A’s use of advanced stats that made the stats movement famous.
Every year, Massachusetts Institute of Technology hosts a conference dedicated to this very topic. The conference, called the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, aims to discuss the increasing role of advanced analytics in the sports world. The conference covers everything from stats in all major sports to betting analytics.
The panelists on the SSAC are not all pro-analytics, which make things very interesting. The prime suspect in the anti-analytic charge is Brian Burke, the President of Hockey Operations for the Calgary Flames.
The hockey portion of the event, titled, “Hockey Analytics: Out of the Ice Age,” focused on how the general managers of the NHL teams tend to disregard advanced stats.
According to an article from the Boston Globe about the SSAC, Burke’s resistance to analytics is massive. The Globe stated, “I think it’s still an eyeballs business,” Burke said. “We go watch players play. We watch for a lot of things in games that even video won’t show. How players respond when a coach yells at them. If they’re on the ice and they make a bad play and allow a goal to happen, their body English. How they rally their teammates. Things like that.”
The funny thing here is that, in the hockey world, the fans are the ones driving the analytic charge, not the front offices. The Boston Globe says at least one NHL GM is unaware of a fan-favorite stat called Corsi, which is a metric that measures puck possession.
Resistance to analytics is not all widespread, however. The world of baseball has been associated with advanced stats for a long, long time. The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), founded in 1971, is a group dedicated to the study and advancement of analytics in baseball. According to the SABR website, they have over 6,000 active members worldwide.
It’s not all external interest in baseball analytics, however. MLB front offices are in on it, too. Billy Beane was made famous in the 2003 book Moneyball, which chronicled his time as general manager of the then cash-strapped Oakland Athletics.
Beane’s methodology as a GM focused solely on analytics and trends. His methodology of acquiring players based on those stats and trends proved successful, and eventually served as a model for baseball GMs later.
And what makes all of this so interesting is that baseball fans are the ones who are really traditional and would tend to not be fans of advanced statistics.
So there is no clear answer here. You can have a front office who studies these (sometimes) confusing metrics and makes definite roster moves based off them, but have a fanbase that rejects them—or you can have GMs not even know what some stats are, while fans endlessly debate them in online discussion boards.
I fare on the side of studying advanced stats and analytics. Being cognizant of how analytics work and what advanced stats truly drive at makes fans so much more educated about the sport they love.
Do I sit there and think that hockey players are sitting in their locker rooms worrying about advanced stats like ‘5v4 Corsi for 60 Minutes’? Of course not. But the point of analytics is to help us as fans understand the game in a broader way and to become as deeply intertwined as we can with the games and sports that we love.
Ray Waldron can be contacted at rwaldron@keene-equinox.com