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This great line in about sport analytics fanatics from cultural criticChuck Klosterman, author of the provocative and insightful new bookBut What If We’re Wrong: “There’s simply no prick like a math prick in a sports bar.”

Nailed it with that comment, no? But he might have added: “Or on a blog or on Twitter.”

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Klosterman sets up his critique by writing how when he was a boy he could only watch a few pro football and basketball games on TV, mainly due to how few games were televised in the 1980s of any sport. To fill in the gap for his sports obsession, he turned to the newspaper stats page, where he became obsessed with the numbers of his favourite sports. This led him to put a massive amount of weight on these numbers when it came to rating and ranking players. As he writes, “I felt the adult world was wrong about how they gauged athletic greatness, and that many complicated questions regarding value of various superstars could be easily answered by looking at the Tuesday edition of USA Today and comparing one column of digits against another column of digits, even though every announcer on TV seemed to incessantly suggest the opposite.”