Hello, Sports Fans!

I’ve always wanted to say that (in the voice, of course, of Robert Duvall in The Great Santini).

So I’ve said it.

Are there any sports fans out there in QuickMuse land? [Duh! Fletch himself is the biggest Red Sox fan I know.–ed.] In any case, here’s an interesting article by Michael Lewis, in which he talks about the “intellectualization of professional sports.” By “intellectualization,” Lewis means the application of statistical analysis to the action on the field. We might also call this the “stock-marketification” of sports. But enough with the goofy suffixes. Lewis writes:

“The trend in pro sports — away from the intuition of insiders and toward a more objective, data-driven valuation of assets — resembles the shift that transformed global financial markets in the 1980s and early 1990s. There’s never been a better time for the guy with no muscle definition, Coke-bottle glasses, and a laptop to influence the value of a professional athlete. In the past three years, at least a dozen baseball teams have hired the type of young statisticians you’d more commonly find working in risk arbitrage at Bear Stearns.”

When I first read this article, I thought, “Man, someone’s going to apply this sort of thinking to the evaluation of, you know, poets.” I’ve heard people use the stock-market metaphor to describe poetic reputations before, but no one had ever created an actual system to measure this stuff. Can you imagine if people could put a price on someone’s cultural capital? It would cause a civil war in our nation’s creative-writing programs.

Remember, for instance, this scene from Dead Poet’s Society? (Note both the graph and the early acting work of Dr. House’s pal, Robert Sean Leonard.) Lots of people stenuously object to the charting of poetry.

Besides, I figured, it would be too much work to apply the money-ball concept to art. Who would bother?

And then, the other day, I discovered Media Predict, a website that allows people to speculate on the value of various cultural products. Now, the chances of MP taking bets on poetry seem slimmer than Nicole Richie, but still… It’s pretty grisly stuff. Or is it?

Could you imagine linking the ideas the words “poetry” and “stock market” together? Well, maybe you can’t, but Robert Frost could.