NY Times: The Bad Contract
Posted by Justin Kubatko on January 21, 2011
My latest offering to the New York Times:
Keeping Score: The Bad Contract
Look for it in the Friday print edition as well.
Posted by Justin Kubatko on January 21, 2011
My latest offering to the New York Times:
Keeping Score: The Bad Contract
Look for it in the Friday print edition as well.
January 21st, 2011 at 5:26 pm
Win Shares per 48 minutes is in many ways a wonderful statistic. But when I see it in a list of players and their numbers, and there's a mysterious leading zero, my brain feels compelled to wonder what else could be there but a zero. What player has anything but a zero before the decimal?
We don't see batting averages like 0.286, nor FT% like 0.857, unless someone has forgotten to format their display. Even TS%, which for a game or a spell can be over 1.000, is shown in the b-r.com tables without a leading zero.
Perhaps this custom harks back to an earlier stat that used a leading zero. But it hasn't really been around long enough to be permanently ingrained, has it?
If it's useless and uninformative, why not dispense with it?
If you had a map or a chart, or tables of statistics spread out on a desk, would they be any clearer with a bunch of cheerios thrown upon them? They don't add information; they're just clutter.
January 21st, 2011 at 5:43 pm
In this case (and many others with the charts we post on the blog), it's all about a spreadsheet program not allowing you to display a decimal without that leading zero.
January 22nd, 2011 at 1:43 pm
You could eat the Cheerios.
January 24th, 2011 at 3:49 pm
If you are using Excel you could go to format cells>custom>, then type in the format you want (in this case .000) and then it should come out the way you want.