Why We Need Quantitative Sports History - Facts So Romantic

The early 19th century golfer Harry Vardon was the Tiger Woods of his day, and not just because he had marital difficulties. He even had a biography written about him, which recounted, among other things, how he handled losing his first child and living with tuberculosis. But Vardon’s life would be more useful to sports history if it were contextualized. Was tuberculosis an industrial disease of professional golfers? Did his marriage problems result from his time away from home?

These are statistical issues. Unfortunately, a host of academic areas have moved away from quantitative work and towards the qualitative. Sports history, my field of interest, has been one of those fields. Perhaps, in the same way that academe tends to distinguish between the hard sciences (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and the soft ones (social sciences), it is time to distinguish between the hard (quantitative) and soft (qualitative) sports history.

Take a recent study of jockeys in the United States, for example. It was undertaken by creating a database of 4,794 jockeys, and was able to show that in 1880, African-American riders were surprisingly over-represented in the jockey profession (22 percent) relative to the proportion they occupied…
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