Fabricated Stats

A coworker forwarded this link to me a couple of weeks ago. It's a fascinating story, as NASCAR continues trying to think of ways to expand their market and make their sport more understandable to the general sports fan.

According to the article, NASCAR is working with STATS, LLC to invent some new, trackable statistics for their races. The article states:

Starting soon, NASCAR hopes race fans will talk about drivers' "quality passes," "speed in traffic" or "consecutive passes", three of the roughly 30 new stats it will begin releasing after races.

Here's my problem with this: These statistics don't measure a driver's ability. How do I know this before even seeing the first "box score?" Easy. NASCAR race car drivers are limited by their motorized equipment, and behind that is money.

Sports statistics are supposed to measure skill. If a race team lacks funding, they can't hire the best engineers or crewmen. Without the best minds, the chances are higher that the team will field a poorly-designed aerodynamic machine, or a car with less-than-optimum tuning in its engine. That car will drive slower, and won't handle as well in traffic, even if Dale Earnhardt is at the wheel. How accurately, then, are the "new statistics" going to measure a driver's skill?

In a particular five-year stretch, Dale Earnhardt won championships in 1990, 1991, 1993 and 1994. What about the one year in that stretch when he didn't win the title? It was 1992, the year of Alan, and Dale Earnhardt stumbled to a 12th place points finish. He didn't even make the TOP TEN! Does that mean he lost his skill that year? Of course not. The team had a down year, equipment-wise, and Dale suffered for it. As if his mediocre finishes weren't evidence enough of an off-year, his "new stats" that year probably would've shown Dale as suddenly less capable of "quality passes," and that would've been hogwash.

In baseball, the best American sport, a batter faces a pitcher. The batter swings at the pitch, and a variety of outcomes is possible. It's skill versus skill, with no engines, tires, body shops or multi-million dollar engineering departments factoring into the equation (illegal substances aside, of course.) Baseball statistics, the more subtle, underlying ones, measure the skills possessed by the baseball player.

Without even seeing these 30 new statistics, I'm skeptical. Scott Wimmer is a talented driver, in my opinion. But with Wimmer driving for the now-fringe Morgan-McClure Motorsports #4 team, how will these stats show he's the talent equal to someone like Jamie McMurray, who'll be piloting a car for the Roush juggernaut? How will these stats show that Wimmer is as skilled as another driver?

Maybe NASCAR doesn't care. If the intention of these stats is to track how a certain driver/team combination is doing THIS YEAR, and THIS YEAR ONLY, then I think NASCAR will get what it wants from these new numbers. But for a fan interested in discovering which driver possesses the most talent, these numbers won't help, and may in fact mislead.

This all smells a little funny to me. "Hello, is this STATS, LLC? Brian France calling. The Chase for the Championship helped us increase viewership in its first year, but in year two, TV viewership levelled off. We need something else. Something. We're bored with meaningless stats like laps completed and top-five finishes. Can you help us come up with something new?"