|
Part 2:
Race and ethnicity are confused in Major League Baseball by sports statisticians who classify blacks as Hispanic when they are obviously just blacks with Hispanic surnames. In spite of the large black presence in baseball, it does not lend itself well to our study. The large proportion of Latin American players of unclear race presents a problem.
Basketball skills are few and elemental. Quickness, jumping ability, eye-hand coordination and size form the basic arsenal of good basketball players. These qualities can be developed only so far (size not at all) before running up against genetic constraints. Basketball will be well suited to our analysis.
Perhaps, of all athletic competitions, the purest and most dependent on natural gifts is running. It is a primal survival ability, whose simplicity makes it especially suited to our purpose. It is also universal. Show me a man who has not known the thrill of a sprint and I will show you a man born without two good legs. On every block, in every town the fastest kid is soon discovered.
With strong dependence on simple endowments, basketball and sprinting are well suited to our study. It is no coincidence both are dominated by athletes of West African ancestry. Data from each sport will enable us to assess the black-white gap.
GAMES WE CAN PLAY
After precisely defining and measuring the gap, we will be able to answer all manner of questions. Here are a few. (The reader will no-doubt come up with more.)
What is the probability that a randomly selected adult American white male will be faster than his similarly selected African-American counterpart?
Suppose an integrated suburban high school with, say, 2000 students. If the school is 25 percent black and 75 percent white, what is the most likely racial composition of the basketball team's starting five?
It is possible to increase the NBA's white representation by increasing the number of teams in the league. How big would the NBA need be to make it half white?
What is the most probable a priori racial composition of the Dream Team that will represent the USA in the 2000 Olympics? (At this writing the Dream Team has already been selected.)
We will answer these questions, but first we need to develop the machinery to do so.
THE ATHLETIC QUOTIENT, AQ
Few areas of human activity are documented with as much detail as major-league sports. On its website, the NBA provides daily updates of player stats. They are sortable on various statistics like total points, rebounds per game and much more. With the NBA season about a third over in late December 1999, we selected 150 of the NBA's finest to grind up in our engine. We chose the 150 players who were averaging the most points per game, limiting our selection to Americans who had played in at least 10 games. They were not all stars, but neither was any a scrub. Of these players, 135 were black and 15 white. We will translate these numbers into a more general measure of black superiority.
|