Athletic skill and the value of close contests

ABSTRACT

In this paper I defend an Irreconcilability Thesis, claiming that two commonly held views about athletic contests are in fact incompatible. The first view is that athletic contests are essentially comparative tests of athletic skill. The second view is that the best contests are close contests. I take the second view to be true, hence I contend that the Irreconcilability Thesis shows that there is something wrong with the first view. I conclude by suggesting that the thesis has interesting implications regarding the value of winning an athletic contest, since that value cannot adequately be accounted for in terms of the athletic skill that yields victory.

KEYWORDS:

• Skill thesis
• close contests
• winning
• value

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I take further variants to be found in Butcher and Schneider (1998), Fraleigh (1984a, 1984b, 2003), Pearson (1995), Russell (1999), Simon, Torres, and Hager (2015), and Suits (1973), among others. There are of course important differences among these theorists, making them more or less susceptible to the criticism I mount here.

2. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to consider this possible reconciliation.

3. In this paper I use the singular ‘they’. While some find the usage annoying and even incorrect, it strikes me as most elegant gender-neutral way of dealing with third–person pronouns in English.

4. Cf. Kretchmar (1975) and (Kretchmar 2003, 133), though the senses of ‘test’ distinguished above is not Kretchmar’s distinction between test and contest.

5. Thanks to two anonymous reviewers for pressing me to develop these arguments.

6. Thanks to Ben Lindburgh for directing me to these analyses.

7. Pythagorean winning percentage is a measure invented by Bill James which has subsequently undergone a number of refinements and modifications. In its original formulation, the formula is simply RS²/(RS² + RA²), where RS = Runs Scored and RA = Runs Allowed. James found that this simple formula was a powerful predictor of a team’s actual winning percentage. According to Studeman (2005), the Pythagorean record can ‘explain’ 91–94% of a team’s actual record. Divergence between a team’s actual record and its Pythagorean record is subject to regression and often attributed to luck.

8. As Ruane (1998) and James (2007) show, some very poor teams have had surprisingly high winning percentages in one-run games, while some very good teams have had a surprisingly low winning percentages in such games. One way to understand our question is to ask whether there is any reason to believe that the former were especially good at winning those games or the latter especially bad, or whether instead these anomalies are principally down to luck.

9. James (2007) does contend that there is non-zero persistence in a team’s tendency to lose more than its share of one-run games. It’s mostly chance, he says, but not all chance.

10. See ESPN’s Relative Percent Index of NBA teams and Football Outsiders’ DVOA rankings of NFL teams, for instance.

11. See Dayaratna and Miller (2013) and Bertin (2016).

12. In fairness, Simon (2007) and Loland (2016) do countenance a role for luck in determining the outcome of contests.

13. Thanks to Yuval Eylon and John William Devine for pressing me on the question of what, if anything, is wrong with a draw.

14. Portions of this paper were presented at the 46^th Annual Meeting of the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport, in Oslo, Norway, 2018. I thank IAPS for that opportunity and the audience for its helpful comments and questions. I also thank my home institution, Ohio Wesleyan University, for its support. Finally, thanks to Paul Gaffney and the paper’s anonymous reviewers. Their critical questions and editorial guidance helped me improve the paper.