Comments on: NY Times: The Bad Contract

By: Andre

Andre — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 20:49:10 +0000

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.

By: Shaun

Shaun — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 18:43:27 +0000

You could eat the Cheerios.

By: Neil Paine

Neil Paine — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 22:43:54 +0000

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.

By: Mike Goodman

Mike Goodman — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 22:26:28 +0000

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.