Analyzing analytics, and fixing college sports

“If your experiment needs a statistician, you need a better experiment.”
— Ernest Rutherford

The nonathletic eggheads who gave us “analytics” insist that Luis Arraez is overrated. That the greatest contact hitter of his generation — a man whose skills and numbers rival those of legendary Hall of Famers Tony Gwynn and Rod Carew — is worth less to a baseball team than somebody with a .240 average who hits a couple dozen home runs every season.

This is why actual baseball fans who understand the game so despise the analytics crowd.

Arraez is possessed of a career .318 batting average, has more than 1,100 hits over eight seasons, has won three batting titles, has two 200-hit seasons, with more than 170 each of the last four years.

He also shows patience at the plate, rarely swinging at the first pitch — allowing his teammates to see what the other team’s pitcher is throwing. (He also forces the other pitcher to throw more pitches, getting them closer to being relieved.)

He is only 29 years old, and if he stays healthy into his early 40s could well collect 3,000 hits in his career. He is popular with teammates, is improving as a fielder, and is passionately competitive.

Back in the day, he’d have been a perennial all-star like his idol Gwynn.

Instead, he’s bounced around, regularly moved from team to team, either via trade or free agency.

Maybe the Phillies, who picked him up last weekend from the Giants, will be the team smart enough to sign him to a long-term deal knowing you have a dependable bat in the lineup day in and day out.

With judges both state and federal basically legislating from the bench in regard to collegiate eligibility, making up standards as they go, amateur athletics as we understood them even three years ago are gone.

The sports media by and large believes this to be the greatest advance in civilization since perhaps the Magna Carta, buying into the myth that a full-ride scholarship to a prestigious university somehow equates to a cruel form of indentured servitude.

Never mind that a full-ride scholarship, including complimentary dorm room, three meals a day, free medical care, and dedicated physical trainers are worth anywhere from $40,000 a year to more than $100,000 a year.

Or that the same media outlets that disparage the compensatory value of a scholarship also claim that student debt is perhaps the worst injustice this side of allowing Americans to install air conditioning in their own homes.

So we have had judges declare — with no legislation to cite — that athletes on scholarship are, in fact, “employees” of the universities and colleges on whose teams they play. That they have a “right” to organize into unions, and that the universities are compelled to recognize these unions.

The latest development in sports lawfare is judges declaring that NCAA rules regarding eligibility are somehow illegal and that athletes have the right to continue playing collegiate sports for some indeterminate length of time the courts will decide later (presumably based on their deep expertise in running sports programs).

Congress should step in and fix this.

In fact, only Congress can fix this.

This quickest path is to give the NCAA a congressional charter allowing the nonprofit organization to oversee college athletics at any unviversity or college accepting federal funds of any type: G.I. Bill, Pell Grants, research grants, guaranteed student loans.

There are lots of nonprofit organizations that have the imprimatur of a congressional charter: The Boy Scouts of America (currently changing its name to Scouting America), Girl Scouts of America, Little League Baseball, the Civil Air Patrol, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Disabled American Veterans, the American Red Cross, and dozens more.

The most apropos comparison may be the U.S. Olympic Committee. The congressional charter allows the USOC to officially represent the United States to the International Olympic Committee, and authorizes the USOC to set up subsidiary national governing bodies for various Olympic sports. It also allows the USOC to set enforceable safety standards for athletic competition.

A congressional charter for the NCAA could be structured to give the NCAA legally enforceable authority to set eligibility requirements as well as provide oversight of the finances.

Given that U.S. taxpayers subsidize higher education — colleges and universities — in this country to the tune of some $200 billion a year, while college sports lose a collective $8 billion a year, Congress clearly has a vested interested in ensuring that sports programs are not taking resources away from universities’ primary purpose of providing a quality education.

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