As a kid, Rick Cleary learned early on that a career as a professional athlete wasn’t going to add up. Luckily, he had a pretty good backup plan.
“I’ve always loved both math and sports,” he says. “I wasn’t too good at sports. I was good at math.”
Cleary would eventually land on his high school cross country team – and parlay endless hours with The Sporting News into a life in statistics. With a PhD in the subject from Cornell University, he joined Bentley’s Mathematical Sciences faculty in 2001.
Geek Chic
Mathematicians who specialize in sports weren’t always popular, among either sports nuts or professional peers. But with the success of bestselling author and baseball-statistics pioneer Bill James and the rampant growth of fantasy sports, being a sports geek has never been more fashionable.
“People in sports statistics went from being outsiders to insiders, and in a very parallel way, that happened in academics as well,” says the professor and department chair. “In the last 10 years or so, people have come to realize there are important economic questions as well as athletics questions.”
Much of Cleary’s work involves probability, or answering the sports fan’s age-old question: “What are the chances . . . ?” He has published research on the rarity of events such as a baseball team hitting four consecutive home runs, and the effect of shortening playoff series from best of seven games to best of five. The actual numbers, he says, don’t always match up with popular perception.
“People tend to overestimate things they’ve observed,” Cleary explains. “They remember the upsets rather than the non-upsets, and that tends to cloud statistical judgment. People remember the outliers.”
The rising respect for sports statistics has come with honors, and opportunity. Last fall, Cleary received the Howard Eves Award from the Mathematical Association of America for his teaching and scholarship in the field. When his eight-year stint as department chair ends in July, a grant from Bentley’s Henry E. Rauch Faculty Enrichment Fund will help him create an undergraduate course in math and sports.
The Business ‘Bunt’
Sports statistics isn’t just breaking down batting averages.
Calling the discipline “a nice bridge between the theoretical and practical,” Cleary touts its use in introducing tools that students can later tap to solve problems in finance or public policy. For example, the merits of calling for a bunt in baseball can shed light on business decision-making.
As Cleary explains it, the business equivalent of a bunt might be “an executive who says, ‘I need a win right now, before the Board of Directors meeting. Here’s the decision that might get our profits up next quarter – and even though it’s not as good long term, I might do it.’ There’s a lot of that thinking in bunting, too.”
Cleary remains an active athlete. In addition to playing a regular game of pick-up basketball with other Bentley faculty and staff, he has run the Boston Marathon every year since 1979.
With regard to running, his mathematical mind leans less toward the probability of winning and more toward optimization.
“I like to see how little training I can get away with and still be pretty good,” Cleary says with a laugh. “I try to keep my commitment at a level where running friends view me as a slacker and non-running friends view me as a compulsive nut.”