One of my ongoing writing projects — one I hope to be able to tell you about soon — involves sports journalists using analytics as part of their sports coverage.
So it’s been really interesting, if not predictable, to see the general reaction to the Tampa Bay Rays’ decision to pull Blake Snell from Game 6, even though he was dealing, for reasons based in advanced analytics.
It’s not just that it was a single bad decision - it’s being used as an indictment of all analytics. I’ve never seen the word “nerd” used so many times on Twitter as I have this week - and I am a nerd.
The #Rays front office & computers may end up being the MVP for the #Dodgers. #WorldSeries
— Alex Rodriguez (@AROD) October 28, 2020
If there’s ever been an example of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” it’s this. It should be clear that the use of all analytics are not bad because one team made one bad decision. Especially the team that beat them also heavily uses analytics.
There are reasons for this, from journalists’ distaste of math in general, to sportswriters’ use of players and managers as sources and adopting their worldview as their own, to the idea that using analytics and math somehow takes away from the poetic joy of sports.
It’s also this: We live in a news culture now that demands the follow up story. News is so instant and so commoditized now, that there is no value in reporting what happened. Journalists are trained to look for the next story, the explainer story, the “What it all means” story. And so an event is not just an event anymore. A decision is not just a decision. A decision is a microcosm of a larger attitude, a bigger story. A decision has to tell us something about the larger culture, and about ourselves.
But sometimes, a bad decision is just a single bad decision.
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