CH 31: Quantifying the Physical
One of the major obsessions for many people is sport. The actual games vary depending on cultural roots and personal preference but regardless of choice, there is an innate interest to understand and interpret games of physicality. Generally speaking, sports are considered to be a physical activity that are competitive in nature and are based on a set of clearly defined rules. Given these rules, as a game is played, the generation of statistics occurs. These statistics are the numerical results that occur from the playing of the game, for example when a basketball player makes 4/5 of his free throw shots; we now have data in the form of a percentage for this player. These statistics are critical to determining which athletes are performing well and which are not. The analysis of sports requires these statistics as objective measures to ascertain performance. With the modern reliance on all things mathematics, it is not surprising that some of those original measures would be challenged as truly objective and effective. This reevaluation of what metrics are best used to determine a player’s future performance is starting to challenge traditional measures. The stakes are high because if indeed these new metrics are able to better predict a player and/or teams performance, then that can make the difference between a winning and losing team.
The most dramatic example of this shift to new measures is found in baseball, which is perhaps not coincidentally also the most statistic heavy sport. It is called Sabermetrics and has been argued to having lead to one of the biggest curses in Professional Sports to be broken, the Boston Red Sox 86 year losing streak. New metrics are also beginning to change the interpretation in the NBA, APBRMetrics, and they are also starting to seep into the NFL and the NHL as well. The reality is that the more we can use sophisticated math in conjunction with analyzing games, the more we can distill what the true measures of success are. It is safe to expect the Metric business to only continue to reshape the way sports are interpreted.
These guys are very good at spatial calculations