In sports, it's a time to learn

I shudder to think of how many hours I've spent watching and thinking about sports. It's better framed in terms of days -- or weeks, or months, or years. My earliest memories are sportsy: my dad parking way far away and taking me to The Aud; my grandparents pumping up the "Redlegs"; my mother dissing the Dolphins; poring over the backs of my baseball cards.

Now, at 41, thanks to a certain development in the way all these games are analyzed, lately I've been dogged by an equally daunting sports-related thought:

That after all these years of living a life immersed in sports, I still know nothing.

The statistical revolution is well under way and to this point I'd describe myself as a willing but passive participant. New, sound principles for analyzing sports are being created and tested all the time, and they are redefining everything we know.

So many things I used to think carried weight in a sports conversation no longer do, assuming the goal remains being right: Momentum that football teams take into locker rooms at halftime, or that hockey fights provide. Advantages you think your hockey team gains by facing the other guys' backup goalie. Batting average as a way to determine how good a hitter someone is.

BS, BS, BS.

Whether a football coach should go-for-it or punt on fourth down used to be a matter of personal preference; now, win probability charts clearly deliniate good strategy from bad. Yesterday it was right to judge hockey players simply on the basis of whether or not they were scoring goals; now, doing that without even peeking at statistics like puck possession, shooting percentage, offensive starts and Relative Corsi is foolish.

All of this is good. Clarity is good. Knowledge is good. Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

That sports radio is fueled by conversations ever nearing obsolescense is but a minor obstacle. I think.

I've never thought about until the last couple of years how abstract most sports talk is, and also how necessary that is to the enthusiasm within it. Fans love to debate who's better or worse. It's a lot of what makes sports fun. You argue about which player or team is better than another, and then eventually you stop, not having persuaded the other to your point of view, and clink your mugs.

An awakening I had to this was a moment I may never forget. As Derek Jeter approached his 3,000th hit last summer I opened a topic on WGR about whether Jeter is an overrated player. I was using a lot of the new sabermetric analysis in this effort because, well, why wouldn't you?

What happened was fine for a thesis paper but not so good for a radio show. I kept answering all of my own questions. Instead of engaging listeners to compare Jeter with Cal Ripken, or even Honus Wagner, I kept finding myself resorting to how all these comparisons have already been made, and by the proper authorities on such matters. (No offense.)

Before all this information came to light, how great a player was was an open-ended, and in turn sometimes heated, debate. Now, not only has all that work been done in a cold, comprehensive manner, the results like all other information in this age are at your fingertips.

How does Derek Jeter rank all-time among shortstops? Eighth.

And now this commercial break.

While potentially challenging at work, I think all this makes for a thrilling period in sports history. Forever, professional sports coaches, managers and players have made the rest of us feel uneducated and inadequate, necessarily inferior because of our lacking "battleground" experience. In my opinion this attitude, while it's always been short-sighted and flawed, is now in pieces all over the stadiums of America.

There is no doubt in my mind that the Bills would have a better record over the last seven years had Brian Burke of advancednflstats.com handled all their game-day decisions. While Chan Gailey and Dick Jauron were piling up years of hardened sideline experience, Burke was an F/A-18 carrier pilot in the U.S. Navy. Why is this not outrageous? Because Burke clearly has demonstrated a firmer grasp on football strategy than Gailey and Jauron did.

I'd also bet my house that Darcy Regier and Lindy Ruff know less about hockey analytics than my twentysomething-year-old colleague, Matthew Coller. If that weren't true you wouldn't have seen Brad Boyes on the Sabres' fourth line last year or Ville Leino on any line. Ron Rolston, Matthew says, has respect for these statistics so maybe the Sabres have stepped forward here, if perhaps accidentally.

Teams are taking the hint. Major League Baseball clubs are now frequently hiring sabermetrics analysts that probably have never been caught in a rundown, and they're not in the closet when doing so. The NBA? Two months ago ESPN's leading advanced stats expert, John Hollinger, was swept away by the Memphis Grizzlies to be their vice president of basketball operations. I had to look it up but Memphis is good.

Remember when you first saw television in high-definition? For me it came at a time when I was starting to lose interest in watching sports. But then everything was so bright and clear and wonderful to look at that my enthusiasm for it came back and I fell back in.

That's what all this sabermetrics stuff is for me. It's baseball-card backs in HD. It's opened up all these new pockets of wisdom, and making it even more fun is how relatively few people have yet to catch on. Yes, having to recalibrate sports is a bit unsettling and scary. But it's necessary or you'll sound more and more like you think the world is flat.

Adapt or be swallowed up. That's what I say.