First of Many

Whether you've stumbled across this space or arrived here from social media, welcome. This space will transform over time into (I hope) a trusted resource for burning questions about any and all things about the science of our game.

As a scientist, I do not deal in absolutes. p<= 0.05 and all that.¹ The scientific process is just that: a process. We propose a question, make our best guess on how to answer that question, collect the answers, and see if our questions were answered. What exists between those steps is a wholllllllle bunch of nuance, bias, and, when you're looking for answers in humans, a level of complexity that makes 1+1=2 look like quantum mechanics. That's where it gets dicey.

I'm here to explore the nuance, our biases, and what it means to keep the human element of the athlete in context with the X's and O's, 1's and 0's and all other forms of information and data flooding softball. Buckle up, it's going to be a non-linear ride.²

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Footnotes

¹ I don't think we address what this statement actually means in the scientific community. "p<= 0.05" is a level of probability that researchers are willing to accept that differences between groups of... anything (humans, fungi spores, fish eggs) maaaaaaay be just random occurrence. That level of probability is set before the answers are collected. We go into experiments already knowing "there's an outside chance (5%) these answers just happened and are not related to how we asked the question."

²This is a constraint-led training joke. There will be more.