God Turns to Sabermetrics As Last Resort
published January 20, 2012BALTIMORE, MD. — God and Bill James, the undisputed God of Sabermetrics, have begun a new collaboration in an effort to help humanity recapture its gift for being decent to each other. The collaboration draws upon God’s ability to see and know everything, and James’ uncanny ability to assign a quantitative value to behavior that is difficult to quantify in other terms. James is a pioneer of Sabermetrics, which Wikipedia defines as “a specialized analysis of baseball through objective, empirical evidence, specifically baseball statistics that measure in-game activity.”James sat down with this reporter to discuss his new project with God, and what the two hope to accomplish through their work together. God, in keeping with his millennia-old style of communicating with humanity, was present in the room as a general sense of the futility of human endeavor and a strong appreciation for the sublimity of creation.“If I can take the liberty of speaking for both of us on this, I think the feeling that humanity has lost its way is a feeling many of us share,” said James when asked how the collaboration began. “But few of us can pin down exactly why we feel that way, other than some vague concepts like ‘bad economy’ or ‘cheating boyfriend.’ So we set out to identify some mathematical formulas capable of expressing some fairly un-nuanced concepts.“We wanted something that would identify individual performance. Not surprisingly, in the beginning, God was in favor of some team level metrics. But we agreed that the key to early acceptance of these new statistical measures was a sense of personal accountability. Self-centeredness being what it is, and God has some pretty amazing data on this, we decided to start with the individual.”“The new metrics build on some happiness and wellness indicators that take into account factors like income, health and education. Our new metrics also measure the amount of happiness and joy you create in your life, and in particular your ability to create these feelings and experiences for others: Instead of ‘trying to make a dollar,’ we want to encourage people to think about how much better it would be to introduce yourself to your significant other by by making an invitation to a date with an origami bird made from a dollar.”The categories:Gathering ScoreSaid James, “This measures your power of what many would call transmutation by looking at whether or not you are making chicken salad out of chicken feathers or if you are taking your ability to make a dollar out of fifteen cents and turning those dollars into a BMW and a lawsuit against your co-conspirators for defamation.”Relative Awesomeness“This metric is a measure of efficiency, specifically how close you get to the value of e=mc2 when you measure how much joy and happiness you create out of the resources you have. This metric takes into account the happiness and wellness of those most intimately connected to you, based on an algorithm God created that uses irrational numbers.”ASSHOLE Value, or Algorithmic Substitution over Standard Holistic Object Limit Evaluation“This is our most complex metric, and involves some number crunching that at this point can only be done in the mind of God, as human processing power isn’t quite there yet. The basic gist: If someone were to plug you into a simulation that maps extremely closely to reality, and the algorithm used to simulate your behavior is identical to your actual behavior, then you are less spontaneous that an algorithm. The less spontaneous, the higher the ASSHOLE value.”Z-Zone Rating“This surprisingly simple metric measures how infectious your joy and enthusiasm for life are as a measure of how long a similarly infectious zombie would take to infect a model city of 3 million people. It’s based on the work Kevan Davis and Matt Cordes did around Zombie Infection Simulation [editor’s note: you can find this online at http://zombies.insertdisc.com/mattcordes/ ].Amazingly, the new rankings, accessible soon to all humanity, do not skew toward celebrities or others one would think would dominate these types of statistical measures.“New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady does rank exceptionally highly, in the top three actually, but other than him, the list is comprised of ordinary people doing extraordinary things with the gifts they have. There’s also a child in La Paz, Bolivia showing great promise at a very young age.“To me, compiling these rankings, and having a chance to collaborate with someone whose work I respect so much, was a humbling reminder of how easy it can be to be someone other people admire, respect and ultimately love. I hope the release of these rankings in December of this year can be a resource to those of us who see the value in valuing things that go unappreciated by society at large for reasons that only my collaborator understands.”# # #