Why We Need Quantitative Sports History - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/why-we-need-quantitative-sports-history
The early 19th century golfer Harry Vardon was the Tiger Woods of his day, and not just because he had marital difficulties. He even had a biography written about him, which recounted, among other things, how he handled losing his first child and living with tuberculosis. But Vardon’s life would be more useful to sports history if it were contextualized. Was tuberculosis an industrial disease of professional golfers? Did his marriage problems result from his time away from home? These are statistical issues. Unfortunately, a host of academic areas have moved away from quantitative work and towards the qualitative. Sports history, my field of interest, has been one of those fields. Perhaps, in the same way that academe tends to distinguish between the hard sciences (science, (...)
