Sports & Entertainment

A fascinating article on L.A. Dodgers pitching ace Clayton Kershaw’s pursuit of an obscure but astonishing baseball record, illustrates just how powerful ratios – or key indicators, KIs, KPIs, or whatever else you want to call these metrics – can be in sports, business, personal finance, and many other walks of life. It also shows how such metrics should NOT be used.

With one game left in the Golden State Warriors’ NBA regular season, their MVP Steph Curry has a chance to score an astonishing 400 three-point field goals this season. This remarkable accomplishment underscores why business metrics, and especially ratios, are such a powerful tool for understanding business trends and achievements. Here’s why:

It’s ironic that two of the most popular forms of data visualization are named after delicious but fattening and unhealthy foods: the pie chart and its developmentally challenged sibling, the doughnut chart. To illustrate my point, let’s look at how we might present the distribution of scoring on the NBA’s current top team, the Golden State Warriors. We first see a pretty but non-nutritious doughnut chart, then consider some much better ways to look at that data.

Today’s USA Today story about last night’s World Series game (GO GIANTS!) includes an interesting graphic, showing the success of “wild card” teams since they were first included in Major League Baseball’s postseason playoffs in 1995. 2014 is the first year that two wild card teams have faced off in the World Series – yes, a major-league record!!!

Far be it from me to help a gambling website present information better, and one based in Curacao to boot, but I can’t help myself. My friend John Cardozo sent me a link to the Pinnacle Sports website, where the betting odds for the upcoming Academy Awards are posted.

It’s important to present numbers that your audience actually cares about. We sometimes lose sight of that in an effort to turn out a beautiful table or graph. I have Ira Apfel of the Association for Financial Professionals and the editor of AFP’s Exchange, to thank for a great example of this point. Here’s a snip from the “Medal Tracker” page of the ESPN website.