King Kaufman's Sports Daily

100 percent of TV networks flash junk stats with no context during game broadcasts, an insult to the intelligence of 73 percent of viewers.

July 9, 2004 | Of all the people who looked at the first page of my column Thursday, 76.9 percent of them clicked through to Page 2. That's really something, isn't it? Amazing. It really tells you everything you need to know about this column and its readers. Fantastic.

If this were TV, that paragraph would pass for analysis. The 76.9 figure would flash as a graphic ("King Kaufman column: 76.9 percent of readers click through to Page 2") and that would be it. If you were paying attention at all, you'd be sitting there going, "Uh, 76.9 percent: Is that a lot or a little?"

TV does this all the time. I have bruises on my forehead right now because of the most recent example I saw, which had me banging my head against the wall. The Anaheim Angels had just scored a bunch of runs with two outs in their game against the Chicago White Sox Thursday when ESPN flashed a graphic saying the Angels score 40 percent of their runs with two outs.

"Uh," thought I. "Is that a lot or a little?"

I mean, it seems to me that a pretty healthy percentage of runs are going to score with two outs. There are only three possibilities -- no outs, one out or two outs -- so if everything were distributed evenly 33.3 percent of all runs would score with two outs. And since it sometimes takes a while to get runners around the bases, it makes sense that more than a third of the runs are going to score after two are gone.

And the Angels are a team that likes to sacrifice -- that is, they're willing to trade an out to move runners along -- so that should bump up their two-out scoring totals a little.

Forty percent just didn't seem that high to me, but analyst Buck Martinez launched into a lecture about how that stat reflects the Angels' scrappy personality, that they never give up on an inning, etc. and so on. It was a measure of their character, he said.

Well, whenever anybody starts talking that way my hogwash alarm goes off. I decided to try to figure out what that 40 percent figure means.

Next page: It means bupkis!