We would be remiss, would we not, if we failed to note the departure of Nate Silver (statistician / prognosticator extraordinaire) from The New York Times (my hometown paper of record!) to ABC / ESPN?
For Mr. Silver -- in the intense bidding war for his services -- his love of sports apparently trumped his enjoyment of providing eerily precise political prognostications. In the last Presidential election, he was within a fraction of a fraction in his pinpoint accuracy.
But, he loves baseball, where he first earned his chops.
(Amusing aside … in acknowledging how statistical analyses are ever more refined, it has been widely acknowledged how the science of weather forecasting has become more and more exact. Yet … there is always the human factor: when Kansas City weather weenies intoned a ‘100% chance of rain,’ they were wrong 50% of the time!)
Pool connect?
Wouldn’t it be super if Mr. Silver applied his prodigious talents to the evaluation of our sport’s statistics?
(Also ... in the ‘dream on’ category, he is now affiliated with ESPN. There was, once upon a time, some Disney interest in pool ... ESPN / POOL. Hey, fantasies can be fun!)
Back to pure statistics:
Think: Accu-Stats on steroids. Numbers drilled down deeper than ever. Unexplored categories explored.
Consider: All major tournament results reevaluated. Such as: the talent of the participating competitors, depth of field, length of contests, sizes of tables and pockets, purses, inflation and a thousand other factors which go beyond the obvious (yet absolutely critical!) final results.
Imagine: International and domestic player rankings forged from data that are unprecedented in depth and complexity. In every discipline from 10-ball to one-pocket to tri-cushion.
Contemplate: There might well be analytical sweet spots where surprisingly accurate answers surface from the murky lagoon of memory and myth.
Okay, okay … I agree that so many factors in cue-sports match-ups do seem to be imponderable. Yet, yet … Mr. Silver has correctly assimilated even more nebulous ingredients into successful political appraisals that turned out to be astonishingly accurate.
In essence, he has been instrumental in clarifying how many of us look at the reality of reality.
Q: Bottom line (no, not avatar bikinis! Gomers!), wouldn’t it be special to have world-class appraisals applied to our sport?
A: Yes.
Answering my own questions is my life,
Sunny
P. S. Of course we all realize that having even such a personage as Mr. Silver involved would never end those delicious and eternal ‘who’s the best ever?’ questions. And who would want it to? (Answer … only we diehard Efren fans!)
For Mr. Silver -- in the intense bidding war for his services -- his love of sports apparently trumped his enjoyment of providing eerily precise political prognostications. In the last Presidential election, he was within a fraction of a fraction in his pinpoint accuracy.
But, he loves baseball, where he first earned his chops.
(Amusing aside … in acknowledging how statistical analyses are ever more refined, it has been widely acknowledged how the science of weather forecasting has become more and more exact. Yet … there is always the human factor: when Kansas City weather weenies intoned a ‘100% chance of rain,’ they were wrong 50% of the time!)
Pool connect?
Wouldn’t it be super if Mr. Silver applied his prodigious talents to the evaluation of our sport’s statistics?
(Also ... in the ‘dream on’ category, he is now affiliated with ESPN. There was, once upon a time, some Disney interest in pool ... ESPN / POOL. Hey, fantasies can be fun!)
Back to pure statistics:
Think: Accu-Stats on steroids. Numbers drilled down deeper than ever. Unexplored categories explored.
Consider: All major tournament results reevaluated. Such as: the talent of the participating competitors, depth of field, length of contests, sizes of tables and pockets, purses, inflation and a thousand other factors which go beyond the obvious (yet absolutely critical!) final results.
Imagine: International and domestic player rankings forged from data that are unprecedented in depth and complexity. In every discipline from 10-ball to one-pocket to tri-cushion.
Contemplate: There might well be analytical sweet spots where surprisingly accurate answers surface from the murky lagoon of memory and myth.
Okay, okay … I agree that so many factors in cue-sports match-ups do seem to be imponderable. Yet, yet … Mr. Silver has correctly assimilated even more nebulous ingredients into successful political appraisals that turned out to be astonishingly accurate.
In essence, he has been instrumental in clarifying how many of us look at the reality of reality.
Q: Bottom line (no, not avatar bikinis! Gomers!), wouldn’t it be special to have world-class appraisals applied to our sport?
A: Yes.
Answering my own questions is my life,
Sunny
P. S. Of course we all realize that having even such a personage as Mr. Silver involved would never end those delicious and eternal ‘who’s the best ever?’ questions. And who would want it to? (Answer … only we diehard Efren fans!)
