The Wall Street Journal - 12.03.2020

R1 0 |Thursday, March 12, 202 0 THE WALL STREETJOURNAL.

Data-driven playbooks and the rise ofrobot

umpires risk taking the heart out ofthe game,

says columnistJasonGay

WILL THE QUANTS

BREAK SPORTS?

A

re sportsin danger ofbreaking?

Iknow: that seems like an

unnecessarilyprovocative sen-

tence tokickoffacolumnin

The Future ofEverything,but

come on, what doyou think I do

around here? Work with me. I’m not saying

sports aren’t still worth playing,watching

and screamingat the television over. I rec-

ommend doingall ofthat,frequently, and

especiallyifyou watch the Mets.

Ijust wonderifwe’re startingto suck the

life out ofourgames. And sure,

I’ll start by blamingtechnol-

ogy. It’s OK, the robots don’t

take it personally. (Yet.) The

tech—the number-crunching

data, the enhanced equipment,

the pushfor precision superior

to the human eye—is undeni-

ably makingathletes smarter

and better. It has helped unlock

new levels ofteam perfor-

mance. But I wonderifsports

are startingtoget too smart

for our own good, to the point

where the games we love are

becoming less interesting.

Take the modern craze for

“efficiency.” If you want to

sound smart in a business

meeting, just start saying “ef-

ficiency,” or its evil cousin,

“inefficiency,” over and over, and pretty

soon,you’ll be promoted to a corner office.

Sports is obsessed with efficiency; it’s

changing the way we judge athletes and

strategize games. In basketball, there’s even

a statistic—“player efficiency rating,” or

PER—used to quantifya player’s usefulness

against his or her, well, uselessness. Effi-

ciencyis whybasketball teams have decided

to take more three-point jump shots, and

why baseball players stopped laying down

sacrifice bunts and started swinging for the

fences. The data says bunts and two-point

jump shots are inefficient, and in sports in

2 020, inefficient is about the worst thing

you can be, besides being a Knick.

This has changed an entire culture.A

generation of quants have supplanted old-

school coaches who relied on gut instinct

and vague eye tests, and the revolution is

over. Whereas it was once sociallyaccept-

able to bash sports “nerds,” to

fight analytics todayistodeclare

yourselfa passed-over relic.

But the numbers can have an

aesthetic cost. Consider the sport of

bike racing.Acyclist today has

never had more numbers at hisor

herfingertips—personal, longitudi-

nallyexamined, performance-capac-

itydata that tells themin real time,

via an onboard computer, howfast theycan

go,for how long.

In one sense, thisisgreat:

Acyclist knows how much

theyhavein the tank, and the

data makes a competitorfar

more efficient. The problem

is thatitdiscounts heart,and

I’m using“heart”figuratively

here, becauseyou can bury

yourselfin heart-rate data,

too. Heartiswhatcycling

used tobe about—those mo-

ments when a riderignored

the numbersor even common

sense tomake a valiant at-

tempt to win a race. The cy-

cling-mad French have a term

forit:panache.Sometimes it

works. Usuallyit doesn’t. It

doesn’t matter. Panache

thrills,because it honors the

humanness of the sport.

With data, panache isn’t reallynecessary.

The numbers give a cyclist a very good idea

of exactlyhow hard he or she can ride for

9 0 seconds,20 minutes,two hours,what-

ever. The numbers know if a rider’s attack

is likelyto work, or is doomed to fail. It

takes much of the guesswork out of racing.

The problem is that it’s created sterile com-

petitions in which riders follow the num-

bers insteadof their hearts. Now there is a

vigorous push from bored fans and even

some riders to eliminate onboard comput-

ers, to return the sport to its impulsive,

tech-deprived heart.

We’re getting there in other sports as

well. I think about this while watching effi-

ciency-minded basketball teams launch three

pointer after three pointer, ignoring huge

sections of the court,because it doesn’t

make statistical sense to take a two-point

shot a few feet closer tothe rim. This feast-

Top: Former Boston

Red Sox manager

Alex Cora argues

with umpire Mike

Estabrook at a New

York Yankees game

in August. Above

right: James

Harden of the

Houston Rockets.

or-famine longballismcanbehardtoenjoy;

a Houston Rocketsgame can start tofeel like

watchingsomeonefold laundry. Baseball,

similarly, has dispensed with the “small ball”

strategies ofprior eras—movingrunners

over, stealingbases—becauseit’s more effi-

cient toclobber home runs. The effectisa

slowergame, withfewer balls hitin play. It

may make sensefor winning. It’s stilla

tough watch.

Finally, there are the robot umpires, and

our obsession with usingevery means neces-

sary to make the right call. Now we have not

onlyinstant replay, butgranularinstant re-

play—games now examine,in Zapruder-like

detail,even mundane officiat-

ingcallsin nearly every pro-

fessional sport. Actioniscon-

stantlydelayed as referees

don oversized headsets,

watch replays, and reassess

theirown,human calls. These

delays are not efficient, but

theyare excusedin the name

ofaccuracy. Gettingitrightis

everything—goodness knows

we cannothaveanother Jef-

frey Maier, reachingover to

snatch aflyball out at Yankee

Stadium—to the point where

we are considering doing

awaywith the humans alto-

gether. We are not far away

from the eraof the robotum-

pire—balls and strikes called

not bya fallible, imprecise

person, but byan efficient,

virtual grid overlaid on the

strike zone. To fight this rev-

olution, too, is to declare

yourself a dinosaur.

Let me declare myselfa

dinosaur. Let me declare

some skepticism about the

future. I haven’t even gotten to those

bouncy Nike running shoes, with their car-

bon-fiber plating, which are rewriting the

record books and provoking a heated de-

bate about performance technology and

who gets access to it. I haven’t even gotten

toyouth sports, where a culture of profes-

sionalizing children has created a genera-

tion of over-specialized kid athletes with

burnout issues and repetitive stress inju-

ries.(Of course, there are now modern

fixes for the latter: It’s not uncommonfor

young baseball pitchers to get Tommy John

elbow surgery, almost prophylactically, as

a ritual in their development, a phenome-

non that its namesake, ex-pitcher Tommy

John, finds troubling.)

Noneof this is todiminish the valueof

analytics and technological enhancement. I

ride with a computer on mybike. I want to

try the kooky Nike sneakers. But on the big-

gest stages, it may be time for a reset, and

a re-embraceof the erratic human element.

Iwouldn’t mind seeing an umpire blowa

game every now and then. Humans are now

underrated, it seems, and in our push to

make our games better, we are starting to

drain sports of an under-appreciated asset:

soul. FROM TOP: JIM MCISAAC/GETTY IMAGES; TIM WARNERGETTY IMAGES; DAVID STOCKMAN/ZUMA PRESS; ILLUSTRATIONS BY KYLE HILTON

Quidditch, a combination of rugby,

dodgeballandtag that is inspiredby

the airborne pastime of Harry Potter

and his wizarding chums, is already a

staple of college campuses—and now

is spreading beyond them.

Quidditch is played by two teams of

seven players on a 60-yard-long field.

Toscorepoints, a team’s “chasers”

must kick or throw the “quaffle,” a vol-

leyball, into one of the opposition’s

three hoops. That earns a team 1 0

points. Meanwhile, two players use

dodgeballs called “bludgers” to knock

opponents out of the game.

Each team also has a “seeker,”who

tries to catch “the snitch,” a ball at-

tached to the waistband of the “snitch

runner,” a neutralparticipant who tries

to avoid capture. The snitch is worth

3 0 points, and seizing it ends the

game. Players carry a 39- to 41-inch

pole between their legs, known asa

“broom”—a nod to the J.K. Rowling

novels, in which the characters played

the game flying on broomsticks.

The game originated among stu-

dents at Vermont’s Middlebury College

in 2005 before catching on at other

universities. Today’s Major League

Quidditch, formed in 2015, is a semipro

league in the U.S. and Canada that

fields 15 teams each composedof3 0

players, who get a minor stipend.

The U.S. Quidditch Cup, a national

amateur competition, draws 2,000 to

3 , 000 spectators a year, says Mary

Kimball,executive director of U.S.

Quidditch. This year’s version will take

place in Charleston, W.Va., in April.

One modern aspect of the sport is

that there are no single-gender

leagues in the U.S., she says. “That

makes itpossible for athletes with all

kinds of body types and skills to com-

pete together,” Ms. Kimball says.

Quidditch

TheCybathlon is a quadrennialcompeti-

tion in whichpeople withdisabilities use

robotics, exoskeletons andother technol-

ogy to race against eachother.

In one event, competitorsdeploy

powered,prosthetic arms to slicebread,

put on ahoodedsweatshirt andscrew

inalightbulb.Thebrain-computer inter-

face racefeatures competitors who are

paralyzedfrom the neck down racing av-

atars on a screen; wires connectedto

theparticipants’heads translate their

brain signals to computers, powering the

avatars’ movement. In thefunctional

electronic stimulationbike race, competi-

tors whoselegs are paralyzedride semi-

recumbentbikes; current running

throughelectrodes on their skin moves

their muscles.

WhiletheParalympics involve ath-

letes withdisabilities competing in

Olympic sports, theCybathlon also mea-

sures the proficiency ofthe technology.

It is a venuefor young companies and

researchlabstodemonstrate technology

they have developedfor people with dis-

abilities.

Robert Riener, aprofessor ofsensori-

motor systems at ETH ZurichUniversity,

founded the competition to benefitpar-

ticipants and showcase“the most novel

robotics,” he says. Thefirst Cybathlon

tookplace in Zurichin 2016, with 66

teams competing. In thesecond,this

September,96teamswill participate.

Cybathlon

s e t e s s - o e e g - y - d

Above: Britain’s

Chris Froome

during the2017

Tourde France.

THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING |SPORTS