Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Batting Average

Via a fascinating post on sports records at Political Animal (of all places), I came across this engrossing Wikipedia article on batting averages in cricket and baseball. I'm going to have to read up on cricket tonight, as I know nothing about the game (despite Bob Harris' constant commentary on it), but despite that ignorance, I thought this was a great bit of trivia:
Henry Chadwick, an English statistician raised on cricket, was an influential figure in the early history of baseball. In the late 19th century he adapted the concept behind the cricket batting average to devise a similar statistic for baseball. Rather than take the naive approach and simply copy cricket's formulation of runs scored divided by outs, he realised that hits divided by at bats would provide a better measure of individual batting ability. This is because of an intrinsic difference between the two sports; scoring runs in cricket is dependent almost only on one's own batting skill, whereas in baseball it is largely dependent on having other good hitters in your team. Chadwick noted that hits are independent of team mates' skills, so used this as the basis for the baseball batting average. His reason for using at bats rather than outs is less obvious, but it leads to the intuitive idea of the batting average being a percentage reflecting how often a batter gets on base, whereas hits divided by outs is not as simple to interpret in real terms.
The historical connection between cricket and baseball is neat: unexpected links are the historian's manna. Beyond that, though, I'm impressed by Chadwick's careful and influential consideration of the differences between accomplishments in the two games. The timing of his innovations is the best part, though. He - and cricket and baseball - were active participants in the 19th-century "statistical revolution" pioneered by luminaries like Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. Now, if only I knew a chi square from Red Square, I could do something with this knowledge.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home