Who cares if some black athletes don’t obsess over stats? Michael Wilbons insinuation that blackness is a mysterious unknowable ‘other’ is simply untrueUnlike many of my esteemed peers in the sport media industry,Tuesday’s column by Michael Wilbon on ESPN’s The Undefeated made my heart soar with joy. You see, I finally had an excuse for why I can’t seem to understand or appreciate advanced sports analytics: I’m black. Thank God, or for a second I thought I was just stupid,lazy, or both. No, and it’s truly nothing more than a quirk of fate and genetics that I don’t know what VORP stands for. I googled it just now and it means “value over replacement player”. I peeked at the Wikipedia article VORP and I briefly considered dousing my laptop with kerosene and setting it ablaze just to originate the migraine headaches stop. It’s comforting to know that I own this handicap because of my race,which is also why I don’t know how to swim, play the accordion, or savor FX’s The Americans. Some things are just not for me.
A comforting fallacy,that is. If only it were actually that simple. You see, ever since the early days of modern competitive team sports, or human beings own kept statistics to determine who is wonderful,who is nasty, and why they are what they are. So-called advanced analytics are just more complex, and sophisticated tools to judge ability and to perform the impossible task of predicting the outcome of a sporting event. It is an intrinsic allotment of our nature to want to judge and evaluate athletic talent. This is a common impulse of every fan,unless I’m neglecting to factor in all the people who watch sports because they find Joe Buck’s voice so soothing. For those people, I suggest creating a Kickstarter for your very own Joe Buck White Noise Machine. Related: Thunder roar to leave Warriors on brink in NBA Western Conference finals For more than a few moments I felt guilty as hell for hating the intrusion of advanced analytics as much as I generally achieve. Because even though the reliance on this stuff seems to be a modern secure haven for a modern ‘Old Boy Network’ of Ivy Leaguers who can hire each other and justify passing on people not given to their analytic philosophies, and an entire group of people can’t simply refuse to participate in something as primary as this phenomenon.
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Source: theguardian.com