I need to get two things out of the way right up front.
- I haven’t followed baseball in years, so I carry no part of this blame.
- I’m not commenting on the state of the pandemic, only the statistical reporting of it.
Baseball fans know better than some that reporting on an isolated stat with no context is completely useless. Here’s an example.
Let’s say someone was talking about a ball player in this context. He hopped out of the gate with a solid 36 hits, then tailing off significantly to 9 hits. Then doubling that with 17, 16, and 12 hits respectively. Then a volcanic eruption of 74 hits followed by 68 and a very respectable 53 hits.
Now let’s say someone was talking about a different ball player in this context. He had 1 hit. He had 1 hit. He had 1 hit. He had 2 hits. He had 2 hits. He had 1 hit.
Who is the better hitter? You’ve already sussed out the setup here, but we’ll get back to it in a minute.
Back in the day before tweets, ‘gram postings, and fakebook. Even before connecting with Myspace Tom, I remember snagging a newspaper and heading over to Hardee’s for some biscuits and gravy. With paper on table and deliciousness on fork, a jump to the sports page would commence. During baseball season, the most beautiful sight was a page filled with boxes scores and standings. 10 game streaks, games back, winning percentage of teams in the next series. Starting pitchers, ERA, Win/Loss records, saves, IP, WHIP, and all the rest were wonderful. Comparing games back to games remaining, figuring out win rate for a team in 3rd place to have a shot at taking over 1st by the end of the season, listening to sport talk radio where people arguing over who was the better player and if a power hitter with a high average making more money than a starting pitcher who only throws once every 5 games was a correct allocation of dollars was solid entertainment; the equivalent of a fakebook argument these days.
Back to the example. Without context, you could very easily make the argument the first player is way better because, more hits. The second player sucks because, less hits. Stats are so easily manipulated and can be very simply and effectively used to support a story when the listener is looking for someone to tell them what they should believe about this or that. This idea of a search for conformation bias is explored in depth in #thesocialdilemma. It’s worth your time.
Simply seeing an out of context number go up could be of value, but without context it’s impossible to actually know what’s going on. Example number 1 was Mario Mendoza’s yearly hit total. The textual representation of a .200 BA. A sort of the threshold of where a bad hitter crosses into miserable. Example number 2 was the last 6 games of the 56-game hitting streak owned by the Yankee Clipper Joe DiMaggio. A record that will never be broken.
Yet almost every headline speaks of total cases with precious little context. This coming from a pro-mask guy. The thing about double-edged swords is…
Throne Time 