I was talking my friend Dan through the Internet today about a variety of topics and I expressed that I had, just this season, found myself becoming a bit of a fan of the Oakland A’s – our local baseball team.
I attributed this sudden liking to several factors: we recently bought a house less than 5 miles away from the stadium, star outfielder Matt Holliday is on both my fantasy teams, and the team has two young promising pitching prospects. And there’s nothing that gets me excited like prospects, be they young baseball players, untapped rivers where gold nuggets are to be found, or a variety of eligible bachelors.
He then mentioned that he liked their GM, Billy Beane, because he consistently managed the team well, while having to deal with the budget of a small-market team. He also mentioned that Beane pioneered the use of the statistical analysis that most baseball teams now use (in some format) for evaluating players.
Which got me thinking: I like numbers. Deep in my heart, behind the emotions and aorta, I often think that most things can be determined by numbers.
And I find numbers comforting. If my fantasy baseball players are performing poorly right now, but their past numbers indicate that this is well outside the realm of how they’ll finish the year, all I have to do is wait. The numbers say that they’ll get better, and the numbers know a lot more than I do.
I can look back on the amount of money our household has spent on the past 6 months on dining out at restaurants versus groceries and they will inform me of trends and patterns that are helpful for future planning of both finances and food.
Numbers calm me down when I think about things like plane crashes or random murders or meteors crashing into my house.
I also really like math. I love being able to distill decisions down to a simple (or not so simple) equation. That’s probably also why I like games so much. Video games tend to have some of these decisions (RPGs and games with inventory management have more), but Euro-style board games are essentially an hour-long exercise in making decisions based on math.
I think I’d like managing a professional sports team, although I don’t know if I could deal with all the hate mail. Or all the athletes.