Baseball is a game of statistics. Ever detail of every game gets scored, every ball a player hits or misses gets noted and ends up in a database. Baseball fans love getting lost in cascades of numbers, love comparing players and teams. Every baseball fan knows that statistics are an essential element to what makes this game so exciting to follow.
There is an interesting link between baseball and science and that is that science is increasingly becoming a game of statistics, too. And by that I mean that impact factors in many cases have a higher priority than the actual content of the scientific work. In other words: many scientists would prefer a dull paper that hardly anyone is interested in but that is published in a highly ranked journal over a great paper that actually conveys important finding but that does not get published in a top tier journal. That is kind of odd.
Now, there is a noteworthy difference between baseball and science and that is that science is focused on a single measurand and that is the impact factor. In baseball there are dozens of measurands that provide insights into how a player performs in every aspect of the game. Yet, there is not an overall statistic that simply says who is the greatest player. There is no such statistic because it wouldn’t make sense. A great defensive player might not be as great offensively, a great pitcher might not have the stamina of a weaker pitcher … Statistics help fans to understand who is good and who is not, they point to the strengths and the weaknesses of players but they cannot decide who is the most valuable player. Annually, this decision gets made by humans, by the Baseball Writers Association of America, and they never decide unanimously.
In science however, people belief that a single measurand is enough to rank scientists. It is somewhat absurd that the same people whose job it is to create knowledge have created so little knowledge on how to comprehensively evaluate scientific works. Why don’t we have a database that shows how often a journal article gets downloaded, how often it gets mentioned outside the scientific community, how many word a scientist publishes a year, how often he/she helps other scientists, or how many other scientist find an article actually insightful?
