Numbers Do Lie

By winning Sunday’s incredible Wimbledon final for his record 15th major, Roger Federer, in most people’s eyes, “clinched” his spot as the greatest tennis player ever. The fact that his victory followed up the completion of his Career Grand Slam at the French Open made Federer’s “greatest ever” claim even more of a certainty.
While I agree that Federer is probably the greatest tennis player, I don’t understand how the validation of his “greatest ever” status was when he reached the magic number of 15, or of 14. To be considered the “greatest ever” is a subjective statement, so why are we trying to objectify it with magic numbers? While numbers, in the form of statistics and records, are important metrics in evaluating the performance of athletes, sometimes we lose sight of the fact that numbers are there to assist in the evaluation, and not to tell the whole story.

Much like the mistakes of Wall Street quants that helped to cause the financial meltdown, solely trying to interpret statistics without considering the big picture can result in poor assessments of players’ performances. Let’s say Rafael Nadal was 100% healthy for the French Open and Wimbledon and won both events. Assuming Federer played just as well as he did in the past couple months, how does that change Roger Federer as a player? It doesn’t change him at all. However, how does that change the perception of Roger Federer as a player? He would have been stuck at 13 Grand Slam titles, and not considered the greatest ever yet.

The desire to objectify subjective designations and the ensuing abuse of numbers is not confined to tennis. Last season, when Francisco Rodriguez broke the save record, he finished 3rd in the AL Cy Young voting, with 7 second place votes and 11 third place votes. Meanwhile, Mariano Rivera finished with just 3 third place votes, despite posting a lower E.R.A. (1.40 to 2.24), lower WHIP (0.67 to 1.29), more innings pitched (70.2 to 68.1), and a higher save percentage (39/40 to 62/67). Mo also pitched in more pressure games than did K-Rod, as the Angels ran away with the AL West last year. Unfortunately, we have put so much weight into the saves statistic that voters will blindly vote for the man who broke the record. What if K-Rod had finished 1 save shy of the record, and blew 3 less saves? Despite having a better performance, he would have had less saves, and subsequently less votes.
The number of saves a closer accrues in the course of a season has much less to do with him, and more on the number of opportunities he receives and the quality/pressure of those opportunities. Numerically, a save that protects a 3-run lead counts just as much as a save to protect a 1-run lead. Likewise, a save against your division rival’s heart of the order counts just as much on the stat sheet as a save against a losing team’s bottom of the order. A save is still a save, just as winning a major by beating Nadal counts just as much as winning a major by beating Soderling or Roddick.

Still, the use of saves may not be nearly as ludicrous as the use of wins, which has historically been perhaps the most important statistic in Cy Young voting. How else could Bartolo Colon have stolen the 2005 Cy Young over Johan Santana? Colon had 17 first-place votes to Santana’s 3, and had 118 voting points to Santana’s 51. Below are their 2005 statistics.

Player	W	L	CG	SHO	IP	K	ERA	WHIP
Colon	21	8	2	0	222.2	157	3.48	1.16
Santana	16	7	3	2	231.2	238	2.87	0.97

Santana deserved that Cy Young, and most of the numbers backed him up. However, voters oversimplified the statistics, improperly using the number of wins as the main statistic in evaluating the pitchers’ performances.
In basketball, the 6 NBA titles are what many use to separate Michael Jordan from Kobe Bryant. So if Kobe wins 3 more titles with him as the main man in L.A., many at the moment Kobe wins that 7th championship will say that he has eclipsed MJ as the greatest player ever. While they may have an argument, I would not say that the argument should be centered solely on the magic number of 7. If you can win 6 titles, you can probably win 7 given the proper conditions. Lebron has won 0 titles despite extremely clutch play in the playoffs over his career (2007 NBA Playoffs were incredible). I would not hold him below Dwayne Wade in any way just because Wade has won a title with Shaq in Miami.

I don’t mean to suggest that numbers cannot be extremely useful in evaluating athletes’ performances, but merely think that they should be taken with a grain of salt. We could create much more complicated statistics that take into account a massive amount of factors, but these would be impractical or hotly debated in their accuracy (e.g. BCS). Trying to oversimplify subjective classifications into records and numbers could result in missing the whole picture.

P.S. The word greatness is so vague that it makes it even more of a crime to simplify it to a record. Does greatness refer to who dominated his era the most, who performed at a high level for the longest time, or who at his prime played at the highest level?

P.S. In tennis, it’s impossible to compare the wood racquet era with the current era. If Rod Laver was born in 1985, would he even qualify to play in Grand Slams? His 5’8” frame may not have had the power necessary to compete in today’s game, and would not have had the wingspan to approach the net as Laver did in his day.