VICTORRES
The New York Yankees announced today that they have hired statistician Jayne Dough as a special consultant to manager Joe Torre. The 17 year old Dough is a former child prodigy who has created a statistical model that evaluates each player’s performance based upon a composite measurement called “Victorres,” obviously in deference to the legendary Yankees’ manager.
While the model is too complicated for anyone to completely comprehend, except of course, for Miss Dough, enough was inferred from the plethora of statistical formulas to allow Yankees’ owner George Steinbrenner to quickly hire Miss Dough and inform Torre that she would be in his dugout with her computers for every game. Torre was not pleased but softened his stance when he realized that the instrument had been named after him. He told reporters that he was quite impressed with Dough’s computers.
Inspired by Bill James’ creation called “win shares,” Dough explained to reporters that in her model, as in James', each player contributes positively to a team’s victories and negatively to its losses. A major difference between Win Shares and Victorres is that a player must actually be in the game to be credited with Win Shares, but that is not the case with Victorres. All players on a team’s roster contribute to winning, either overtly or covertly, and it is that premise that makes Victorres unique.
Some in the media believe that Mr. Steinbrenner was just waiting for the right time to respond to the Red Sox hiring of Bill James and that Miss Dough provided him with that opportunity. The Sox relieved manager Grady Little of his managerial duties after the Yankees beat them in Game 7 of the 2003 playoffs and brought in Terry Francona, who swore that he would adhere strictly to James’ statistical analyses, something that Boston management felt Little was wont to do.
Miss Dough gave one graphic example of how her system uncovers information that no one ever knew and that would have remained unknown without her instrument. She stated that it is counterproductive to trust one’s owns experiences instead of relying on esoteric statistical analyses. Dough used Ralph Houk, who played for the Yankees from 1947 to 1954, as an illustration.
The Yankees won six pennants and six World Series during Houk’s eight years. The perennial World Champions won 781 regular season games and 24 World Series games for a total of 805 victories and averaged 100.625 wins a season. The Yankees roster averaged 22.875 position players a season.
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