A New Look At WQ

A number of years ago, Bill James revolutionized the way people looked at baseball. By taking a new approach to statistical analysis, James challenged much of the conventional wisdom of baseball. Some forward thinkers, such as Billy Beane of the Oakland A's, adopted many of the methods proposed by James (and his chassidim). These day, much of the baseball world has come to realize the value of the James approach.

Today, I am suggesting a new way to look at the Weirdness Quotient (WQ) of my shul.

Until now, we have calculated WQ as a simple percentage, to wit, the number of weirdos in shul divided by the total number of people.

Over the past few weeks, it has become clear to my chaverim and me (who are responsible for determining the WQ), that this calculation (like batting average as compared to OBP or OPS), does not capture the true extent of the weirdness. There are times, we concluded, that there are present in the shul individual weirdos of such magnitude that simply counting them once, like stam a weirdo, would not do justice to the WQ.

But where do we go from here?

Sadly, the WQ committee is comprised of three lawyers. None of us is a math geek (although one of us was valedictorian at YU and the other is a computer geek (neither of whom is me, btw)). We need help.

We are open for suggestions as to how make the WQ a more meaningful statistic. Ben? Anyone?