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“book” — 2013/6/21 — 16:18
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4 A Functional Start to Computing with Python
artist T-Pain used Auto-Tune c ontinuously in performances. Used heavily, Auto-Tune gives
the voice clipped sound, with instant transition between notes that c an resemble yodeling.
The hip-hop group Black Eyed Peas has cultivated this sound, selectively. Other performers
came under the influence of the “new sound” of Auto-Tune, to the extent that it beca me
something to emulate even without using Auto-Tune itself. Thus, we have a strange circle
of de velopment intertwining technology and popular culture, which appears to be a theme
in other areas of modern life.
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Tracking athletic performance and ranking athletes in different ways has become an industry.
It is not just the records of times for track athletes and swimmers, nor are sports fans content
with counting strings of victories. Now fantasy sports leagues are million dollar business
communities, which track the numbers, events, and achievements of players in new ways.
Where did all of this originate? Perhaps the roo ts go to the motivations of conversation.
There is an old saying that all conversation is either bragging, complaining, or gossip (who
did what to whom). Whatever the reason, fans of sports follow the tabulations of the teams
and their players with enthusiasm.
In America we can credit base ball for the earliest, large scale publication of numbers
and records. As early as 1859 journalists started counting va rious events on the playing
field, r ecording the number of errors, the batting averag e over the course of a season, and
RBI (r uns batted in). The event counts, averages, and other numbers became part of the
sp orts news stream, which fans followed, making it easy for them to identify rising star s in
baseball. Players with the best reco rds draw an audience. Teams compete to get the best
players—team managers also read the papers. The rich teams have sufficient budgets to
buy talent from the poo rer teams, leading to fame and fortune for players with the best
individual statistics. Another way that teams obtain talent is by shrewdly selecting talent,
by dr afting the right combination of players and cultivating their skills in mino r leagues.
The colorful history of baseball and the lore of draft picks, trades, rule changes, and
scheduling was for many decades a guild where wisdom was passed down through sto-
rytelling. Somewhere during the 1970s, the question of baseball statistics was revisited,
questioning w he ther the right sort of events were being counted. Trade publications began
tracking more numbers. Out of the numbers people tried to find correlations between player
and team statistics and winning games. The thinking is that if a model can be fo und which
accurately pre dic ts winning on the basis of event counts, like number of walks, number of
hits, and so on, then players and managers will k now what counts most toward winning
games. Even if this prediction is only accurate to a reasonable percentage, it might still win
out over the cour se of a long sea son.
Two decades later, in the 1990s, a few general managers with some training in sci-
entific methodology proposed taking the sta tistics further. The conjecture was that the
stories passed down among coaches, scouts, and players about talent and strategy were not
grounded in statistical knowledge. To test this hypothesis, the manager of the Oak land A’s
based the selectio n of players more rigorously and with finer levels of statistics than any
team had done before. They were up against a major disadvantage: the budget they had
for players was less than a third of the New York Yankees. In spite of being a poo r team,
the team followed decisions based on a s cientific understanding of statistics. The result was
surprising. During the 2000–2002 seasons one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oak-
land A’s, had one of the most successful winning records.
1
A few sports fans are still not
satisfied this new approach is valid, pointing out that the A’s did not win the World Series
1
Read Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis (W. W. Norton, 2003), for
the full story.
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