Some of my favorite childhood memories involved sports — whether it was my dad taking me and my friends to the park for batting practice, playing football and basketball in the neighborhood streets and driveways, or running with my Little League teammates to Fastop to get Icees courtesy of Coach Frank Dalere after another win (not to mention those potlucks after Saturday games!).
But not all great sports memories are made on the field. And as we get older, the physical exploits become less and less a part of our lives.
I haven’t put on a baseball glove or swung a bat in years, but one indelible memory from my childhood that has stuck with me dates back to the summer of ’83.
My Boston Red Sox had a young third baseman named Wade Boggs, and he had a great shot at winning the AL batting title. Every day I would check the Red Sox box score in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin to see what Boggs did a day earlier, tracking his batting average throughout the season.
That was the summer I fell in love with the box score.
Nothing matches watching a whole baseball game, but the box score does a great job of telling the story of the game, much better than your standard “SportsCenter” highlights package.
The rise of fantasy baseball about a decade later only made that love for the box score stronger — the internet wouldn’t become a reliable source of that information for nearly another decade after that. Heck, even once box scores became easily accessible on the internet, the newspaper offered the advantage of being able to see all the boxes at once. I could run down box by box and count my players’ hits, homers, RBIs and steals more easily than on a computer.
Of course, with so many hosting services for fantasy leagues and the advent of real-time stats, I no longer need box scores to check how my team does each day. But I still love a good box score, be it baseball, basketball, volleyball or … “Jeopardy!”?
Yes, the latest statistical innovation marries my love of box scores with the greatest game show of all time, a show that brings my family together for 20 minutes nearly every day.
“Jeopardy!” introduced the box scores on its website on Jan. 12, and my first two questions were “What took so long?” and “Why didn’t I think of this?”
The privately maintained “J! Archive” website has long been an invaluable source of game results and trivia, with nearly every episode meticulously cataloged — down to every answer and question, every Daily Double wager, and a tally of each contestant’s right and wrong answers.
But a quick look at one of the show’s official box scores shows why these are a level better than other box scores and how they provide information even the “J! Archive” can’t touch.
Anyone watching a baseball or basketball game can compile a box score as they watch if they care enough, but the “Jeopardy!” box scores include proprietary information. Along with easy to count numbers such as correct and incorrect answers, longest streak and amounts wagered in Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardy, it includes how many times each player tried to buzz in. That gives us insight we can’t get from watching the show.
Take, for example, the recent record run of 40-day champion Amy Schneider. For all the talk of strategy — betting big on Daily Doubles, keeping your opponents off balance by switching up categories, starting with the high-dollar clues, etc. — the key to “Jeopardy!” success is obviously knowing a lot of … stuff.
Through her 40 wins, Schneider averaged 32 correct and 1.5 incorrect answers per show, for an impressive 95%. She went down slightly in her loss to Rhone Talsma on Jan. 26, with only 28 correct answers but also only one wrong answer for a sparkling 97% conversion rate.
She also answered correctly on 70% of Final Jeopardy questions during her run. On the day she lost, Schneider missed Final Jeopardy, while Talsma got it. He also wagered big on a Daily Double to put himself in position to avoid being mathematically eliminated entering Final Jeopardy.
We could get a sense of most of that just watching the show, but the box score makes those numbers concrete. Adding another dimension, though, is the buzzer success rate. The number of attempts Schneider made to buzz in (46) was about the same as on other days. But her buzzer success rate? A mere 61%, well below her previous average of 73%. So she was getting beaten on the buzzer more than usual. She knew about as many answers as on days she won, but she couldn’t get through to answer as easily. That tells part of the story of why she lost.
We can apparently thank new executive producer Michael Davies and “Jeopardy!” GOAT Ken Jennings for this innovation. What I’d love to see next is an effort to create box scores going back across the show’s 38-year run so we can see how Schneider compares to previous “Jeopardy!” greats such as Jennings, James Holzhauer, Matt Amodio and Brad Rutter the same way we use stats to compare baseball greats across the decades such as Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron and Mike Trout.
Make it happen, Mr. Davies.
