The Art of Prediction

While I don’t think politics and sports are quite the same, I think it’s pretty instructive for most folks who are set to crow about this or that candidates lock on the nomination to take a look at what happened this past Sunday.

As the Fark headline read, “Somewhere in South America, a village is getting a shipment of “19-0″ T-shirts.” So pardon me while I delve into some sports, and Mitch Albom’s excellent column on the question of prediction.

Before the Giants made it to the Superbowl, before this 19-0 business was even on the table, my beloved Detroit Tigers did the unthinkable and came back from a losing season, not just to post a winning season, but to march all the way to the World Series in dramatic and convincing fashion–and then lose just as dramatically and convincingly to the St. Louis Cardinals.

Do you know what stood out about that post-season, though? The general consensus among sportswriters was wrong in every single match-up but one, and that was the Mets’ first-round victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers. They pegged that one. Every other one? Including the Tigers being favored over the Cards in the World Series? Laughably, dramatically wrong.

Mitch Albom takes up the question again in his most recent column, and calls out sportswriters everywhere for the empty pontificating that is most sports prediction. The act of observing changes that which is observed. Broadly, we know it to be true; teams play better in front of home crowds. That active observation can change the dynamics of a game. But the predictions, these days, are starting to become part of the storyline. Yet again (and maybe this is a great place to attack this first, rather than in traditional journalism), the so-called journalists are starting to take a hand in making and shaping the news.

Granted, in this instance, even if there was no 24/7 sports machine echo chamber, most folks would be privately thinking that the Patriots were going to smear the Giants all over the field. But, then again, part of the storyline of the Patriots’ success was how the head coach used the media’s incessant coverage of the signal-stealing controversy as a sort of goad for his players, making them out to be the victims of a former assistant’s petty revenge. So if there had not been the constant mention of it in the media, would it have been as effective as a goad for the coach?

As with national-scale news, I’m pretty fed-up with national-scale sports reporting. And I find it amusing that Albom and the rest are getting into the recursive self-analysis that comes with any big surprise like this.

My only hope is that as the 24/7 cable channels start to become more and more irrelevant and consumers gain more power to choose by program, rather than carrier, that this kind of non-stop hype machine starts to go away. There will probably continue to be a market for it, but I suppose I can hope that it gets marginalized and returns to the province of bookmakers and Vegas and such. At the very least, I hope to be able to get insight and analysis without the hype and predictions at some point in the future, with the ability to ignore the rest.

Kinda funny how my demands for the future have changed. Screw the flying car, give me choice in my media, damnit!

Crossposted with klech.net