A grad school friend of mine has gradually become a bit of a big deal in the world of sabermetrics. While that sounds like a category of lifesaving surgical techniques, it's not, although surely more top brain-hours are devoted to sabermetrics than are devoted to the development of lifesaving surgical techniques.
Sabermetrics, named for the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR), is the the study of baseball through detailed empirical data. I was thinking about sabermetrics when I read Joe Posnanski, a proponent of 'advanced baseball stats' himself, on the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Among the things that make visiting the museum such a moving experience, I infer from his account, is the room for imagination that exists because of the absense of 'record'.
Those who know me know I have a bit of a romantic side. I like thinking that things were charming and simple in the past. I'm even known to defend the imperial system against the metric system.*Through the years, I ... listened to stories from Buck O'Neil and Double Duty Radcliffe and Connie Johnson and the great Monte Irvin, who on his best days, before the war and before integration, might have been the best who ever lived.
We'll never know that about Irvin, of course, and this is the main thing I used to think about when I and looked through the wire at the statues on the field. We'll never know. We'll never know how good Oscar Charleston was ... and we'll never know how hard Smokey Joe Williams really threw ... and we'll never know how many home runs Turkey Stearnes hit ... and we'll never know what the Devil, Willie Wells, looked like fielding a ground ball ... and we'll never know just how fast Cool Papa Bell ran ...
... and we'll never know anything more than we can imagine.
That's why I loved the museum so much. When people asked Buck how fast Cool Papa Bell was, he would say: "Faster than that." In other words, Josh Gibson's home runs traveled exactly as far as your imagination allows. And the museum was a place for imagination. It did not have a lot of memorabilia -- too expensive and rare -- and it did not have a lot of interactive exhibits. It was more of a spiritual experience.
*For all its 'ease of conversion', the metric system is an imposition of a lab mentality on areas of life where it is inappropriate - areas of life where measurements should have real world referents like cups or feet. I don't need 'ease of conversion' when I'm baking muffins! It's a colonization of the lifeworld by the systemworld, to get all Jurgen Habermas-y.
I love sports stats. As a kid I used to grab the sports section and examine the stats page with an intensity that worried my parents. Even now I rarely watch baseball, but still spend a good deal of time at baseball-reference.com, looking at strange stats most people don't even know are kept or calculated. I still only understand a small fraction of them.
I suppose stats and records can serve the creation of myths, but even then they can remove their magic. Mythmaking adds to the enjoyment of things past as past, and good recordkeeping can cut the legs out from under local legends, or even support them too coldly. If all fishcatches were logged, we wouldn't be able to tell that story about the doozy of a fish we caught that day we didn't have the camera. And that one that we almost caught but didn't, it must have wieghted ___. If all homeruns are logged and searchable, it's hard to tell tales of that one I saw that afternoon when I was young: man, it must have been at least ___ feet (down with the metric system!). “[W]e'll never know how many home runs Turkey Stearnes hit", Posnanski writes. Well, everyone knows how many home runs Albert Pujols hit. We also know that they don't make nicknames like they used to.
I think that'd it'd be great to compose a symphony, after a single performance of which all scores are destroyed and of which no recordings are permitted. Oh, and it'd have to be great, which may be difficult for me, as I don't compose symphonies, let alone great ones. It'd become legendary. People would try to recreate it. People would talk about its sublime this and its soaring that. A lot of my friends are musicians, and I often hear about jam sessions in living rooms or long-closed bars, where a sort of magic was created that will never be created again. It's a tragedy that there aren't tapes. But it's also an amazing blessing.
I think that'd it'd be great to compose a symphony, after a single performance of which all scores are destroyed and of which no recordings are permitted. Oh, and it'd have to be great, which may be difficult for me, as I don't compose symphonies, let alone great ones. It'd become legendary. People would try to recreate it. People would talk about its sublime this and its soaring that. A lot of my friends are musicians, and I often hear about jam sessions in living rooms or long-closed bars, where a sort of magic was created that will never be created again. It's a tragedy that there aren't tapes. But it's also an amazing blessing.
Complaining about bureaucratic modernity gets old quickly, but that's not going to stop me! Good record keeping is bad for hagiography, and the absense of hagiography is bad for people. Oh, and that TV show Mythbusters is run by killjoys.
Jesus, Plato and Confucious all left no records. They're known from the accounts of witnesses. Great leaders certainly aren't hurt by some ambigiuity about authorship (and a few unscrutinable passages). Great athletes need to be able to he remembered as giants. A good cache of stats and records is good fun. A good fish story might be even better.
This has been a statement of ambivalence. It is more a declaration of fogeyness than a denunciation of recordkeeping or statistical analysis. I'll end this with the same F. Scott Fitzgerald statement of fogeyness that Matt Labash uses to close his fogey essay/rant about Facebook in Fly Fishing with Darth Vader: "It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory."
I'm not sure that's quite what I'm saying here, but it sure reads pretty.
True and well said, but you've missed out on one of great satisfactions that is at least commensurate with the satisfaction of myth... the smug contentness that comes with being the one who explodes the myth. I love the myth of Josh Gibson's homeruns and am please that sabermetrics cannot destroy it... but i would equally love to be the one to prove that his homeruns were no better than jose canseco's.
ReplyDeleteThe advantage of the myth is that it is a public good (my enjoyment of it does not prevent anyone else from enjoying it), but the satisfaction of myth-busting is a private good. Is the problem with myth-busters (and perhaps sabermetricians generally) essentially that they are the nasty capitalists or enclosers of the "commons" of myth?
But that creates one heck of an incentive to be a mythbuster.
I wonder if sabermetricians equally enjoy the "myth" of baseball or if they are annoyed that will never really know how far josh gibson hit.
For those of keen on myth there will always be Ken Burn's "Baseball"... do sabermetricians like that?
I think sabermetricians would say that their project serves baseball lore by clarifying it. Clarifying myth and debunking myth are satisfying, as you point out, but so is sticking up for myth against debunkers. My opposition to the metric system's use in most domains gives me joy as a contrarian. Defending lore in all its mythicness is satisfying.
ReplyDeleteThe social psychology of busters of myth, including some in the sabermetrics world, relates to something you pointed out when I offered you excuses for not responding to your comment: "You need to feed my ego by responding. I won't keep commenting on your posts unless you indulge my narcisism by writing something about what I wrote." I paraphrase.
People like to have their contributions recognized, positively, but negatively will do. Hence the glee of trolling, as you noted in that conversation. The fact that sabermetrics is a whole lot newer than baseball writing generally, there is a lot more space for contribution. There are a lot of graphs to put together, and a lot of new ways of analyzing this or that. Save for finding some strange story in an old newspaper somewhere and selling it as fascinating or epic or what have you, there is little to contribute NOW to the creation of myth, and thereby get that affirmation. Debunking and clarifying is what we're left with.
Perhaps this could be explored in regards to religion. If there's little space for innovation, energy will be put into debunking. Maybe Dawkins of 350AD would have been a zealous theologian...