My parents recently moved (are in the process of moving? are only temporarily moving? it’s a bit complicated and in a way that connects to the title of this post, but I don’t feel like going into the details), and so I recently came into possession of a few boxes of scrapbooks from my childhood and adolescence. I understand that my siblings were all happy to have theirs thrown away, but I am a committed journal-er, and if my dumb Facebook and Twitter archives were worth importing into the Day One app I use, I figured I should put the effort into digitizing the good stuff out of these boxes before throwing out all of the physical artifacts. I’ve only put an hour or two of effort into this yet (and much of that into a Siri Shortcut workflow that I hope will make the process go more smoothly than previous digitization efforts), but it’s been worth the effort so far. It’s neat to have some documentation to go along with bits of personal and family history that I’m only vaguely aware of, like the year of German kindergarten (equivalent to U.S. preschool) that I attended.

In many ways, this is a great book! It’s well written (and well read), and it made me care about baseball in ways I usually don’t. It’s also an interesting story—a great example of the power of statistics and data science to do cool things.

That last part, though, is why I read it. I expected to be critical of the book’s take, and I wasn’t wrong. It cheerleads attitudes about (data) science that I’m skeptical of, like its supposed superiority in terms of objectivity and rationality. It acknowledges the reduction of human beings into abstractions without ever really being skeptical of it. As cool as the core idea is, it’s also kind of a horror story, and we can see some of its scarier implications a couple of decades later.

I have made so many sneering comparisons between sports fandom and blind nationalism as someone who doesn’t really care about sports, but now that I’ve got a team (my kid’s) to be super invested in… yeah, I actually feel the comparison more, just with more self awareness.