The Recency Effect, Analytics, and the Decline of Sanity in Sports Debates

The recency effect as applied to social psychology refers to the principle that the most recently presented items or experiences will most likely be recalled better than those in the more distant past. Extrapolating from this principle, it also implies that more recent items or experiences are assigned more weight or value than those from the more distant past.

We see this phenomenon across all disciplines and fields of endeavor, from politics to history to pop culture.

But it really kills me when this principle is applied to sports. Case in point is the current fascination with comparing the NBA player Steph Curry — admittedly a fantastic player — with Michael Jordan, who is widely considered to be the greatest basketball player ever.

To me the comparison is absurd.  I saw Michael Jordan play, and I know he was a better player than Curry. I don’t need a detailed sports analytics piece from SB Nation telling me that Curry is a more efficient scorer.

To be fair, most sports media folks don’t claim Curry is better than MJ overall, just that he’s a better offensive player. Which is still absurd.

Before Curry, Jordan was compared to LeBron James, with many astonishingly arguing LeBron was the better player. And before LeBron it was Kobe. No! Stop! Just because you’re 24 years old and Steph is the best you’ve seen doesn’t negate 60 years of great players throughout basketball history.

And now a point on analytics in sports. I believe that numbers and stats — and the concept of employing data and information for analysis– can be a valuable tool to evaluate players, teams, situations, etc. But things have shifted so far in the analytics direction that we’ve lost perspective.

For example, Nate Silver’s statistical website, fivethirtyeight.com, has a May 2015 analysis that employs analytics and the popular “WAR” statistic to compare two great players from different generations. WAR is an acronym for “wins above replacement,” and it refers to the number of additional wins a selected player contributes to a team when compared to an average replacement level player. Using WAR, the article declares that Willie Mays was “way better” than Alex Rodriguez.

As an A-Rod fan (despite the steroids) I’m skeptical of this.  I would venture that most of the analysts and writers at fivethirtyeight.com never saw Mays play, or if they did it was at the tail end of his career, perhaps the forgettable Mets years of the early 70’s. Can we really say Mays was “way better” than A-Rod by disregarding traditional statistics such as home runs and RBI and simply employing new analytics instead? Personally, I’d like to hear the opinion of someone old enough to have seen them both play in their primes.

(Disclosure:  while I have a decent understanding of economics, statistics and demography,  I did have trouble with high school calculus. So maybe I’m off.  But I don’t think so.)

We also see the analytics mania around the relative valuation of  Chicago Cubs’ infielder Ben Zobrist, who to my mind is a somewhat above average player.  But if we just go by WAR, fangraphs.com has Zobrist as the 2nd best player in baseball from 2009 – 20014, better than superstar sluggers Mike Trout, Andrew McCutchen and Jose Bautista.

I know that WAR values defense highly, but are you kidding me?

I should probably wrap up now, it’s just that I’m so fired up about this issue!  Let me just close by saying that the recency effect effect has been with us since the dawn of history, and it shows no signs of abating with today’s younger generation of sports fans, team officials and media.  And while analytics is newer on the scene, it has lately become the dominant evaluative lens and is surely here to stay.

I only urge caution, and respect for history and the old-fashioned eye test, before we declare the latest superstar or analytics darling to be the ABSOLUTE BEST TO EVER PLAY THE GAME.

Ok, I’m done. Enjoy your evening.

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