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These days, we are bombarded with statistics in every game we watch. Yards made, passes completed, success and failure percentages are all displayed live on screen, in real time, as the game unfolds. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The familiar GPS unit that we see stitched into the shirts of our favorite players relay incredibly detailed information on every single step they take. This is then used to analyze every play and every player in phenomenal detail in order to create strategies for how to play better in the next game.
In the age of super computers, it is no surprise that data plays such a big role. Alongside sports strategies at the big clubs, and predictions for the season ahead, statistics are crunched by computers and sports experts to come up with the odds for everything, including your football betting. Yet sports data goes back far beyond the invention of GPS and computer analysis. In fact it goes back over a hundred years, to a time when a few dedicated analysts gathered the numbers by sight and crunched them by hand to come up with their own analysis and predictions. The man who started it all even ended up exposing one of the biggest scandals in world sport.
It was a journalist named Hugh Fullerton who first used stats to analyze sports. He devised his own shorthand system to record events in every baseball game he attended, including how the ball was pitched, how and where it was hit, and the throws made by fielders. He used these numbers to create some remarkable predictions, including picking the unfancied Chicago White Sox to beat local rivals the Cubs in the 1906 World Series, despite the Cubs record setting regular season.
Fullerton went on to predict four more World Series Winners between 1912 and 1917, using what he described as ‘the science of baseball’. While this made him something of a celebrity and established him as an expert in this emerging field, this is not what he will ultimately be remembered for. Sadly, that was something altogether less sportsmanlike.
In 1919, a handful of baseball players were approached to see if it was possible to throw the World Series. In their minds it was, and it could be done in such subtle ways that no one would notice. Unfortunately for them, they forgot just how closely Hugh Fullerton watched the games. He quickly realized something was amiss and tried desperately to get the authorities and the press to listen to him. Sadly, with baseball a national sport and the players seen as unimpeachable heroes, no one would take him seriously, and even if they did, they were too scared to back him up.
Eventually the truth came out in 1920, as part of a separate investigation into game fixing. A number of players confessed to the Black Sox scandal and were banned for life, despite being found not guilty in court. Sadly, this was too late for Fullerton, who had been ridiculed at the time for seeing what no one else could see. He walked away from the sport and his pioneering approach left with him. Statistics faded in popularity and were not used again for almost thirty years.
Fullerton would be impressed by how statistics are used in the NFL, MLB and other sports in the modern era, but he would probably not be surprised. He always understood that for all the human interactions, sport is, at its heart, a science, and as such it can be measured and predicted with surprising accuracy.