When Numbers Don’t Mean Anything
The national media is jumping on the story that home runs are down over the first five weeks of 2005. While 2.16 were hit per game over the same period last year, we’ve only seen 1.97 per game this year.
“Must be the steroid testing,” they say.
Not quite. Looking at the chart that accompanies the article, we can see that there have actually been more homers per game this year than in 2002 or 1997. There obviously wasn’t steroid testing those years, so what explains it? How about natural statistical variance? A change of roughly 8 percent lies well within what could be considered a normal fluctuation of the numbers.
Of course, that doesn’t stop some players from making more out of this than they should. Todd Jones, already a noted bigot and master of logic, “didn’t realize how deep” steroids had permeated baseball, what with the monstrous 8% dip. I can’t wait to see how Joe Morgan tries to use this information to “prove” his ability to even remotely understand statistical analysis.