This is so stupid

Alright, this is getting out of control. You all know I'm a huge sports nerd--I think it's great fun, though some people apparently disagree. But lately, a number of people have just been trying way too hard to play the sports nerd game, and failing miserably. People like Josh Hamilton. And now, the New York Times' Karen Crouse, who spends 1,000 words arguing that at Wimbledon, "Left-Handers Have Edge in Slice and Singularity", whatever that means. I think it means that lefties have an advantage at Wimbledon. Let's find out.

An estimated 10 percent of the world’s population is left-handed, but in the men’s and women’s singles at Wimbledon, five of the 32 remaining players, or 16 percent, are.

Oh. Okay. So out of 32 not-quite-Wimbledon-quarterfinalists, we probably should have expected there to be 3 (9.4%) or 4 (12.5%) lefties. Neither of those outcomes would have raised an eyebrow. But instead, we've got a whole 5, which means that one lefty who was supposed to lose in the third round... didn't (we'll call him Feliciano Lopez). Meh. What else ya got?

According to the tournament’s Web site, in 125 years 10 left-handers — eight men and two women — have won a total of 26 singles titles.

Hey, you went to the tournament's Web site, that's great--puts you one up on Josh Hamilton's friends at ESPN. Unfortunately, your analysis sorta stopped there.

Because you see, 26 out of 240 total singles titles (we skipped a few years at Wimbledon while there were some wars going on) is a whopping... 10.8%. We'd expect to see 24, and we got 26. So, if one of our star lefties happened to lose instead of win a couple times, we really wouldn't even be having this argument, would we?

The point is, contrived statistical "studies" like these with naturally limited sample sizes are highly vulnerable to the occasional outlier. In this case, the outlier is of course Martina Navratilova, quite possibly the most dominant player on any surface, male or female, in tennis history. Miss Navratilova won Wimbledon NINE TIMES, including six straight from 1982 to 1987. Cut her down with an early-career injury (or, alternatively, give Chris Evert 1 or 2 victories out of the 5 Wimbledon finals she lost to Navratilova), and instead of being over-represented among Wimbledon champions, lefties would be fairly represented if not under-represented.

Really, this article should have read, "There have been a lot of great tennis players in history. Some of them have been left-handed. Sometimes, the really great left-handed players won Wimbledon. Other times, they didn't." Hey, this article kinda sucks, doesn't it? Yeah. I thought so. Instead, Ms. Crouse glossed over the statistical inadequacies of her argument, waved her hands a little bit and then started interviewing some people to make a qualitative argument instead of a quantitative one, because that's all she had.

The problem is, if you're a lazy journalist looking for a story, it's exceedingly easy to do this sort of thing. Take golf, for example. From 1934 to 2002, exactly zero of the 66 Masters champions were left-handed. Then, suddenly, 4 of the next 8 champions were. Holy crap, what happened? Clearly, something changed at Augusta that began favoring lefties... right? No, of course not. Phil Mickelson showed up, and won a few tournaments (yes, I know, Mike Weir won one of them). Mickelson is your new Navratilova. Does he change the underlying probabilities of golf and the advantages of being left-handed?

Honestly, don't answer that. I've already wasted enough words on this one, and I really don't want to get into a semantic argument over golf equipment manufacturers and whether they're making more left-handed clubs than they used to (they are). It's really not the point here.

Look, journalists, if you're going to dabble in the world of statistics and sports-nerdness, at least know your statistics, and recognize what's meaningful and what isn't. (Hint: be very wary of small sample sizes). Alright, good talk.

[New York Times]