First Past the Post

This is the first post to the Patriot League. I will be primarily posting about sports though I expect other interests will find their way in at some point. I felt that the week that NHL training camps begin was a good time to start such a blog. September offers not only the recently completed week one of NFL football and baseball pennant races but other sports world highlights including Roger Federer's most recent salvo against the tennis record books. This is just a quick introduction so I will save a lot of opinions for later. I will issue the initial disclaimer that I will write a great deal about hockey and while I will attempt to view things objectively, I am an unrepentant Ottawa Senators fan and that may colour some of my opinions.

The one thought that I did want to share that should give some insight into how I look at sports is the division between words and numbers. As both science and religion offer a description of the world but use different means, so sports stories can almost always be told either with numbers or words. Statistics are the lifeblood of many a sports discussions but are only sometimes illustrative of the story of a game or a series or a season. I will try to spout both stats and stories in support of any argument I make or position I take. It is worth noting, though, that certain sports lend themselves more easily to numerical descriptions and that I will try to stay with the spirit of the sport.

As an example, it is often said that hockey is a sport of intangibles: toughness, experience, puck luck and grit are frequent factors mentioned in discussing hockey teams. None of these things can be measured like goals and assists but they are universally acknowledged as being important ingredients in a winning team. In contrast, one of the most beautiful things about baseball is the way that a nine inning game can be distilled into a tiny boxscore. Baseball is the statistician's dream and in many ways the sport of geeks and intellectuals. While the little numbers beside each players abbreviated name drain some of the oddities and beauty out of the story of a baseball game, they provide all the essentials in minimal space like an excellent plot synopsis. This is the beauty of sport for the spectator. Like life, sometimes you can't explain why things went one way and sometimes the most pleasing aspects are the barely recorded ones. A good pinch at the blue line or the way a runner slides under a tag can be just as influential on the outcome as a homerun or a breakaway goal.