Math receives a lot of criticism in sports, especially when it suggests things that are normally not true due to a person's ability to hold special situations in a significant light. The battle over how to interpret sporting events comes down to the battle of the subjective vs the objective. A biased view that allows special situations to rise above others against a system that holds everything at the same level with no exceptions. There are benefits to both. The objective system helps small market teams by removing the lore that players receive in large cities while the subjective system recognizes when an event is statistically significant (in the sense of overall statistics of an event, not in the mathematical event that something is statistically significant).
This battle has emerged again after a computer program Game Score, actually ranked Lincecum's performance over Halladay's. The two hits and 14 strikeouts scored better than the one walk and 8 hits. While some may say this is the problem with Math,. that it doesn't recognize the importance of a no-hitter, I think this shows how Math is just not as objective as we think.
Look, its really hard to make Math objective, when it isn't pure Math. Pure Math such as calculus, alegebra, etc is unbiased because their are no arbritary values. When we use Math to rank players, we have to add some arbritary values. We decide how much a strikeout is worth vs a hit. Normally our assertions are correct and work, but they break down (like how classical physics breaks down) at a certain point.
By the way Game Score was designed, you cannot say that Halladay was better than Lincecum. According to the parameters used in the calculation, Lincecum was the best, and that is the end of the story.
However if we change the parameters to reflect how we really feel, then who was the best changes. But that feels grimey. It feels wrong to change the parameters to change so the results match what we feel. Thus is the ethics in the scientific method, possibly the difference between science and religion, represented in Sports.
