Explaining The Suffering Index

ASSOCIATED PRESS/JOHN MINCHILLO

In the latest Sully Baseball video, I talked about my new stat, The Suffering Index.

It is designed to quantify fan suffering among baseball fans. I wanted to put a number to a fan base’s suffering. When I came up with the formula, I did not know what order the fan bases would fall into in terms of least suffering to most suffering. But the final results pretty much lined up with what I would have expected.

The formula is this.

(Number of Years Since a Team’s Last World Series Title)
+ (Number of Years Since a Team’s Last Pennant ÷ 4)
+ (Number of Years Since the World Series Title BEFORE the Last one ÷ 8)
+ (Number of Years Since a Team’s Last Post Season Appearance ÷ 16)
+ (Number of Deciding or One Game Playoffs LOST since last World Series title x 10)
– (Number of Deciding or One Game Playoffs WON since last World Series title)
= THE SUFFERING INDEX TOTAL

Here is my thought process behind the formula.

Sully Baseball Daily Podcast – January 1, 2017

Happy New Year and it is time for The Sunday Request.

@sullybaseball What fan base is suffering the most going into 2017?

— Tom Taylor (@TomTaylor1138) December 2, 2016

For a question like this, I could not just make idle speculation. I needed to create a new statistic.

So, as demonstrated in this new Video Podcast, I created THE SUFFERING INDEX, designed to quantify numerically and mathematically which fan base is suffering the most.

But even these calculations found a few gray areas.

Wake up to a new year of The Sully Baseball Daily Podcast.

Butch Hobson 1978 Topps – Sully Baseball Card of the Day for January 1, 2017

Most days this year when I do the Card of the Day, it will be simply one I pull out of a shoebox with no agenda, rhyme or reason.

But to kick off the series, I figured I needed one that had a little emotion behind it.

Butch Hobson was my first favorite player. I rooted for the Red Sox as a kid (and still do) and the first teams I have any memories of were loaded with stars. Jim Rice, Carl Yastrzemski, Carlton Fisk and Dennis Eckersley are all in the Hall of Fame. Luis Tiant, Fred Lynn, Dwight Evans, Rick Burleson, Jerry Remy and George Scott were all All Stars.

So naturally I gravitated to the oft injured former Alabama quarterback Butch Hobson.

I think I just loved that his name was Butch.

Either way, when I got his card in a pack, it was a borderline religious experience for me. I wore out the borders of the card (this is a pic from the internet, not the actual card I owned.)

I also remember being thrown by the away uniform because it the N at the end looked like an H.

He was my favorite. When I got his autograph at Spring Training in 1980, I drew all around his signature, basically ruining it.

He eventually was dealt to the Angels and returned to the Red Sox in a not so successful stint as manager for the 1992, 1993 and 1994 seasons.

He is welcomed on the podcast any day.