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By BILL FREEHLING
The average sports fan's analysis of teams and players tends to be fairly simplistic.
We watch a basketball game and decide that the guy who scored the most points is the best player. We see quarterbacks go head to head and assume the one whose team wins is superior. And the baseball player who leads the league in batting average is clearly the most talented in the game.
Wrong, wrong and wrong, say the authors of a wonderful new book that uses advanced statistics to debunk many conventional wisdoms in sports. The book, "The Wages of Wins," is the work of economics professors David Berri, Martin Schmidt and Stacey Brook.
The growth of fantasy leagues is turning more sports fans into numbers freaks, as they seek ways to gain insight into individual player performances. But few of these fantasy geeks are trained in advanced statistical methods.
The authors of "The Wages of Wins" are so trained, and they use this to debunk some popular assumptions in sports. The professors mostly leave the statistical methods out of the main text and focus on the conclusions.
Even though they attempted to keep the book simple, it's still not an easy read. A fair amount of math remains. But dedicated sports fan would be well advised to put in the effort to read it.
The theme uniting the book is that sports executives seem to have many wrong ideas about how to evaluate talent. This leads to executives paying too much for the wrong attributes. The authors focus much of their study on the National Basketball Association, but they also touch on professional baseball and football.
Here are some of their findings:
People assume that Major League Baseball teams cannot compete unless they're willing to shell out an exorbitant payroll. In reality, the authors find, payroll explains only a small percentage of team wins.
Competitive balance in MLB is better than it used to be 50 years ago, and better than the balance of the NBA. A fascinating finding is that the biggest determinant of a sport's competitive balance is how many people out there play the game.
The authors determine that competitive balance in baseball has improved as African-Americans and international players have been welcomed into the game. The NBA remains unbalanced, however, because there are only so many tall people in the world.
Fans may come to NBA games to see the opposing team's stars, but the biggest factor affecting their attendance is whether the home team is winning games.
It's assumed that fans will lose interest in their teams after a player strike. But the authors find that fans keep coming back even after a strike.
Basketball players who score the most are paid the best. But the authors use a statistical formula to figure out which players produce the most wins. Some of the league's top scorers--including Allen Iverson--aren't among the players who produce the most wins for their teams.
The best basketball players do not typically raise their performance level in the playoffs. In fact, they typically play slightly worse than they did in the regular season, although still considerably better than lesser players.
The performance of even the best quarterbacks is hugely inconsistent from year to year, as their success is based on numerous team factors. The authors also determine that the quarterback passer rating is a lousy way to evaluate talent.
The authors present ample evidence and examples to support their conclusions on these and other questions. They also show which players they think are the best.
Sports fans with an analytical bent shouldn't skip this book. And come to think of it, perhaps sports executives should be reading it as well.
To reach BILL FREEHLING:
Email: bfreehling@freelancestar.com
The Wages of Wins By David Berri, Martin Schmidt and Stacey Brook (Stanford University Press, 304 pages, $29.95) |
