A good friend recently explained to me his take on why professional soccer hasn’t caught on big-time in the U.S.
“Stats!” he declared. “Unlike basketball, football and baseball, soccer does not have much in the way of stats.” I think he’s on to something.
Major sports teams and broadcasters employ statisticians who keep track of team and league statistics ranging from the basics to the most mundane and even the ridiculous. The best of these devoted wonks can instantly drag up on their laptops any possible stat and whisper it into the announcer’s earbud so it can be repeated to the listening audience as if it were the announcer’s own knowledge.
For example, here’s an instance of stats run amok from a recent Los Angeles Dodgers game. This year, the Dodgers have two players with the last name of Turner: Justin and Trea. During the game in question, both Turners hit a homerun in the same inning. Quick as an infield double play, the announcer observed, “Last time two teammates with the same last name homered in the same inning was in…,” and he filled in the date, team and players who had previously so distinguished themselves.
The Warriors’ Klay Thompson fired up the statisticians’ memory cards during the recent season’s playoffs by becoming, we were quickly informed, the first player in N.B.A. history to hit eight three-pointers in multiple series-clinching games. I’m impressed that anyone records such minutiae, much less retrieves it instantly.
The N.B.A. just finished what’s called the summer league, which is played in Las Vegas midway between the regular seasons. It’s an opportunity for teams to assess possible recruits by playing them in a sort-of-real N.B.A. environment. This year, the Warriors gave a 23-year-old named Mac McClung an opportunity to show his stuff with some game time in Vegas. The sportswriters were modestly impressed by his stats: He averaged 19.5 points, 57.1 percent shooting (75 percent from three-point range), and 1.5 assists. These are good stats, even if they were averaged over only two games. But the stat that got the headliner placement on the Chronicle’s sports page was that young McClung has 827,000 followers on Instagram. Wow! I’ll bet Michael Jordan couldn’t claim a stat like that at the same point in his career.
One more sports stat, this one I plucked from the aftermath of the root-tooting parade down San Francisco’s Market Street on June 20 honoring the Warriors for their unexpected fourth N.B.A. championship in eight years. A day later, the city’s public works department lamented that the close-to-a-million parade-goers left behind 38 tons of trash. To be honest, I thought that stat paled a bit when it was noted that San Francisco’s daily litter average citywide is a monumental 90 tons!
If you watched the parade, perhaps you were as awed as I was by the confetti cannons all along the route that for two hours launched cascades of blue-and-gold flecks. By the end of the day, Market Street was blanketed in what looked like tinselly snow drifts. I’ll bet someone has a stat on how much this stuff contributed to the 38 tons.
Turning to some disturbing stats closer to home, I found a bevy of interesting numbers provided by the county’s Community Development Agency to the Board of Supervisors for their recent action placing a two-year moratorium on issuing permits for short-term rentals in West Marin. The C.D.A. reported that there are 5,250 developed residential parcels in West Marin, which covers everything from Muir Beach to Tomales and Dillon Beach, and inland as far as White’s Hill in the San Geronimo Valley.
There are currently a whopping 683 registered S.T.R.s in this area, amounting to 13 percent of all the single-family residences. In other words, better than one of every eight houses here is already licensed for overnight rentals.
The data also included a telling fact about homeowner occupancy. HOPTR stands for Home Owner Property Tax Relief, a state program that exempts the first $7,000 of the assessed value of your principal residence from the basic property tax (it saves the homeowner $70 a year in taxes). The key is “principal residence,” so you cannot claim HOPTR on a second home or on a rental property that is not also your home.
Of West Marin’s 5,250 residences, fewer than half, just 2,252, or 43 percent, claim the HOPTR exemption, which means that almost six of every 10 residences are (presumptively) not owner-occupied. We already knew that to be true in Inverness, but I am surprised that it holds throughout West Marin. We hear frequently about the “hollowing out” of West Marin, so it’s useful, if depressing, to have the numbers that validate the concern.
Here’s a final stat: Over the next two weeks, 73 percent of the Light’s readers who reach the end of this column will repeat one of its stats in a social setting. Although I made up that stat, it is a stat in print, so it must be valid, right?
Wade Holland of Inverness gets his stats correct 97 percent of the time.