It was a two-hour sports show on the radio every Sunday morning. Anybody who has worked in radio knows Sunday morning is typically a wasteland of listeners… unless the station is way down south and features a televangelist.
After almost a year of being responsible for “Sunday Morning Sports Page” I had a visit from the station manager, who said:
“We’re going to cancel it.”
Why?
“Ratings aren’t good enough.”
When I protested and diplomatically told him they were good enough, he simply said: “Show me.”
That was my introduction to the Board of Broadcast Measurements, then known simply as the BBMs. Ballots were mailed to listeners (or non-listeners) who mailed back their preferences. The results were tabulated, twice a year. Good ratings meant better advertising rates. Bad ratings meant good-bye.
It took several days, maybe weeks, for these uneducated eyes to analyze the ratings, in an age when the only “technical” tool was a typewriter. It meant studying all kinds of demographics — how many men, how many women, their ages, what time they had breakfast (just kidding), and everything was broken into 15-minute segments. Then, comparing all that to the same figures from rival stations and time-slots.
The station manager relented. The show morphed into Monday Morning Sports Page, Tuesday Morning Sports… and so on, every day but Saturday. On weekdays from 5:30 to 6 a.m., it tripled the listeners for the start of the morning show, where stations make the big money.
That’s when I discovered that, sometimes, you can make statistics do what you want.
Fast forward to now.
In reading about National Hockey League players who were or weren’t going to be traded, once again I discovered today’s talent is analyzed to death by statistics or, in today’s vernacular, analytics. The most popular trade prospect was Vancouver’s Kiefer Sherwood, who leads the league in hits and goals scored by undrafted 30-year-olds born in Columbus, Ohio, with curly hair and undrafted brothers. Based on its typical analytics assessments The Athletic determined Sherwood — traded to the San Jose Sharks this week — was either a player “every team wants” or a risk because “still doesn’t have enough consistency or substance to his game” compared to similar players, some long retired. This was explained (?) in a graphic that could only be understood by an architect or a mathematical genius, and I am neither.
The point is, all sports have become stats-crazy. There is no greater example than baseball, which has always been stats-crazy. The 2011 movie Moneyball was probably responsible, with its sabermetrics. Where hitters were once assessed by batting average, home runs and runs batted in, now they have categories like OPS (combining on-base ability and power) for hitters, and against pitchers. There’s WAR — Wins Against Replacement — a comparison between a current hitter and his imaginary (average) friend, a mythical pinch-hitter so to speak. And here’s the catch: it’s all retroactive. So even Babe Ruth had a WAR, and didn’t know it. The only WAR he’d have known about was World War I, on the battlefields of Europe as his career began.
Ruth had his share of run-ins with baseball writers. Imagine if he’d had been confronted with writers armed with algorithms.
