BY KEVIN FRIEDENBERG

In print | Published November 8, 2007

No one’s ever accused me of being a real whiz with numbers. Growing up to be a great statistician was never really one of my life goals. Maybe this is the reason why I constantly want to slam my head on a table whenever I see some of the stats on TV when I watch sports. I mean, sure, I like to know some of the numbers game, and things generally look really dramatic when a large number is juxtaposed next to a small number. Yet, aside from some of the generic stats that you see on TV, many of the things the broadcasters show in those sexy little graphics mean less to me than most of Heidi Montag and Spencer’s dialogue on “The Hills.” Do the guys sitting in the booth really have nothing at all to talk about that they need to drivel on and on about how one player does in some obscure condition? Also, how do these fools even come up with some of this garbage? Maybe they have a crew of joker interns from schools like Swarthmore frantically trying to impress the Man by researching the most insane little tidbits known to man.

Granted, some of the stuff is cool. I mean, when I see that Navy hasn’t beaten Notre Dame in a football game in 43 years, it makes me appreciate its win on Saturday even more. I find the worst cases of this ridiculous numbers mumbo jumbo in baseball, where almost anything a player does can be calculated into some statistic. Sure I care what Manny Ramirez’s batting average is with runners in scoring position, but what I really don’t care about is, say, Manny’s batting average with runners in scoring position when the right fielder scratches his ass on the pitch. Maybe I was curious how many times Coco Crisp strikes out when he sees Josh Beckett throw in a monster lip of Skoal before the inning. Sure I’m exaggerating here, but I literally could not believe my ears when the ALCS sportscasters, Joe Buck and Tim McCarver, made some comment regarding the likelihood of a multi-run inning when the first batter hits a homerun instead of drawing a walk. No freakin’ way: are these clowns serious? If my year and a half at this school has taught me anything about logic, I think I can piece that stat together.

The Boston Globe even has someone dubbed “The Maniacal One” who calculates some truly out-of-this-world statistics about the Red Sox. Here is one example from the Sox midseason report: “Opponents are batting only .200 against Boston with two outs and runners in scoring position.” Oh thank God! All we need to do is get two outs then walk a few batters and we’ll be in great shape! Honestly, who has the time to figure out stuff like that? That really grinds my gears. The sheer effort and meticulousness that must go into figuring a stat like that out must be off the charts. It takes a real specific type of person to undertake such a Herculean task. Here’s a guess — I’m willing to bet that the Red Sox win more than 50 percent of their games when their starting pitcher lasts longer than the other team’s pitcher (actually they went 41-5 at the midpoint). Seems pretty self-explanatory, no? Thank God the bullpen didn’t suck or else this stat would really be nuts.

Maybe I just don’t appreciate the plethora of knowledge that sportscasters have, or the effort that a production crew undergoes to dig up something as historic as the last time a player in the NFL used a drop kick to score (first in 65 years by the Patriots’ Doug Flutie in 2006, a real BC product). Stats like that are pretty cool and impress me to no end. John Madden repeatedly asking us to take a look at the time-out chart (neither team had any) in the final few minutes of Superbowl XXXVI, not so much. I guess as long as sports will continue to exist then so will extreme stats, not just the cool ones, but the really, really useless and ludicrous ones. I just hope that the next time I watch any baseball on FOX I don’t feel like Jessica Simpson trying to do multiplication tables. Wait, those things are actually hard.

Kevin is a sophomore. You can reach him at kfriede1@swarthmore.edu.

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