Are sports in danger of breaking?
I know: that seems like an unnecessarily provocative sentence to kick off a column in The Future of Everything, but come on, what do you think I do around here? Work with me. I’m not saying sports aren’t still worth playing, watching and screaming at the television over. I recommend doing all of that, frequently, and especially if you watch the Mets.
I just wonder if we’re starting to suck the life out of our games. And sure, I’ll start by blaming technology. It’s OK, the robots don’t take it personally. (Yet.) The tech—the number-crunching data, the enhanced equipment, the push for precision superior to the human eye—is undeniably making athletes smarter and better. It has helped unlock new levels of team performance. But I wonder if sports are starting to get 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 “efficiency,” or its evil cousin, “inefficiency,” over and over, and pretty soon, you’ll be promoted to a corner office.
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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 quantify a player’s usefulness against his or her, well, uselessness. Efficiency is why basketball 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 2020, 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 socially acceptable to bash sports “nerds,” to fight analytics today is to declare yourself a passed-over relic.
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But the numbers have an aesthetic cost. Consider the sport of bike racing. A cyclist today has never had more numbers at his or her fingertips—personal, longitudinally examined, performance-capacity data that tells them in real time, via an onboard computer, how fast they can go, for how long.
In one sense, this is great: A cyclist knows how much they have in the tank, and the data makes a competitor far more efficient. The problem is that it discounts heart, and I’m using “heart” figuratively here, because you can bury yourself in heart-rate data, too. Heart is what cycling used to be about—those moments when a rider ignored the numbers or even common sense to make a valiant attempt to win a race. The cycling-mad French have a term for it: panache. Sometimes it works. Usually it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter. Panache thrills, because it honors the humanness of the sport.
Britain’s Chris Froome during the 2017 Tour de France.
Photo: David Stockman/Zuma PressWith data, panache isn’t really necessary. The numbers give a cyclist a very good idea of exactly how hard he or she can ride for 90 seconds, 20 minutes, two hours, whatever. The numbers know if a rider’s attack is likely to work, or is doomed to fail. It takes much of the guesswork out of racing, which diminishes the chance of fading in a critical moment. The problem is that it’s created sterile competitions in which riders follow the numbers instead of their hearts. Now there is a vigorous push from bored fans and even some riders to eliminate onboard computers, 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 efficiency-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 to the rim. This feast-or-famine longballism can be hard to enjoy; a Houston Rockets game can start to feel like watching someone fold laundry. Baseball, similarly, has dispensed with the “small ball” strategies of prior eras—moving runners over, stealing bases—because it’s more efficient to just clobber home runs. The effect is a slower game, with fewer balls hit in play. It may make total sense for winning. It’s still a tough watch.
James Harden of the Houston Rockets shoots the ball, while Eric Bledsoe of the Milwaukee Bucks defends in an October 2019 game.
Photo: Tim Warner/Getty ImagesFinally, there are the robot umpires, and our obsession with using every means necessary to make the right call. Now we have not only instant replay, but granular instant replay—games now examine, in Zapruder-like detail, even mundane officiating calls in nearly every professional sport. Action is constantly delayed as referees don oversized headsets, watch replays, and reassess their own, human calls. These delays are not efficient, it should be said, but they are excused in the name of accuracy. Getting it right is everything—goodness knows we cannot have another Jeffrey Maier, reaching over to snatch a fly ball out at Yankee Stadium—to the point where we are considering doing away with the humans altogether. We are not far away from the era of the robot umpire—balls and strikes called not by a fallible, imprecise person, but by an efficient, virtual grid overlaid on the strike zone. To fight this revolution, too, is to declare yourself a dinosaur.
Let me declare myself a dinosaur. Let me be the person in The Future of Everything to declare some skepticism about the future. I haven’t even gotten to those bouncy Nike running shoes, with their carbon-fiber plating, which are rewriting the record books and provoking a heated debate about performance technology and who gets access to it. I haven’t even gotten to youth sports, where a culture of professionalizing children has created a generation of over-specialized kid athletes with burnout issues and repetitive stress injuries. (Of course, there are now modern fixes for the latter: It’s not uncommon for young baseball pitchers to get Tommy John elbow surgery, almost prophylactically, as a ritual in their development, a phenomenon that its namesake, ex-pitcher Tommy John, finds overprescribed and troubling.)
None of this is to diminish the value of analytics and technological enhancement. I ride with a computer on my bike—it’s fun to know exactly how bad I am. I want to try the kooky Nike sneakers to see if they make me faster. But on the biggest stages, it may be time for a reset, and a re-embrace of the erratic human element. I wouldn’t mind seeing an umpire blow a 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.
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Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
Tommy John surgery affects the elbow. An earlier version of this article incorrectly described it as a shoulder surgery. (03/11/2020)
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