WORKRATE II: NUMBERS

There were three main reactions to the last column.

1. Albert sucks, he's not that good and the system is screwed up.
2. How about doing this with longer matches? Or matches from different places? Or different eras?
3. This might work better if you only counted the time when the wrestler was in control.

1 and 3 I kinda had already figured - and threw out there if you made it past the last chart. And that's where I picked up here - changing how the time was evaluated.

This time through, I not only counted the moves and total match time, as last time, but also the time each person spent in control of the match. This wasn't as easy an idea as I thought it might be, mostly because figuring out exactly where one person lost control and the other took control isn't exact. There are situations where two people are quickly swapping back and forth control; an exchange of strikes is the usual example of that. There are also situations where neither person seems to be in control. Both wrestlers are out on the mat, or are circling and waiting for each other to strike.

My way of dealing with this, not the most scientific and not perfectly accurate, was that if someone was doing anything offensively, they were counted in control of the match till their offense was stopped. If they were just taking a move or out on the mat, then the clock is off. That means the individual times won't add up to the full match time, because if no one's fighting, nothing gets added.

This week's sample set was the 8/4 WWF Jakked and 8/5 WWF Heat, mostly because they were easily available to me. The matches included are: Scotty 2 Hotty vs Justin Credible, Hugh Morrus vs Albert, Essa Rios vs Raven, Chavo Guerrero vs Perry Saturn, Sean Stasiak vs Hardcore Holly and Rob Van Dam vs Jerry Lynn

Again, tag matches were thrown out for simplicity's sake. It worked out nice that no one wrestled twice, and that a lot of the names from the last column showed up again. More info on how I came up with these numbers can be can be found by reading the last column. This time, I've left off the reason for specific inclusions and exclusions of moves - mail me if you really want to know about something.

First, let's look at the numbers under the OLD system

The big fall off between week of Albert isn't really due to a move drop off (though he ended up doing one less), but because this match was longer because of a Mark Jindrak run in (who might have ended up with a higher work rate than Hugh if I counted.) 

Let's compare that to the results we get with the NEW system, where the moves are divided by the time in control.

After all that, who are the big movers? Justin Credible and Hardcore Holly bounce up - both controlled less than half of their matches, while some of those below dominated to get high move counts. Albert got to have a lot of moves in again this week because of the near-squash nature of his match, but because he got plenty of time to do it, it doesn't look good. Same with Jerry Lynn - he did more moves than most, but spent more time setting up stuff than everyone else so he ends up low.  

I'd like to think that Sean Stasiak that high up is just a fluke of his short match time - he wanted to get in his spots before Holly beat him, and didn't have time to fool around to pull it off. It's something, like Albert's numbers, that won't hold up in the long run.  

Essa's numbers, I don't know how to explain away. I really would like to since it taints the whole process - I'd hope y'all think me better than spending all this time just to find a new way to say "hey, I like Essa Rios" but it still isn't good to have someone that outside the pack. My best guess is that Raven decided he was gonna lay out so Essa could pop the crowd and Raven didn't have to do much on his end. Before the Evenflow, Raven did NONE of his trademark moves, and a lot of other stuff that allowed time for Essa to recover between high spots. In fact, it worked pretty good till Essa messed up, so to say that being low here means he goofed off for 2 minutes would be totally incorrect. He had a plan, it just wasn't one that shows up well in this system.

Which, of course, is the problem. Going back to the feedback, people were interested in seeing something like this applied to longer matches. The more I look at what I've got, though, I don't know if it'll be that much good. Like I said last time, this is just one aspect of the whole picture. To use a baseball analogy: I'm figuring out a batting average, but I don't know if the guys is a singles hitter or a homer run hitter, or if his numbers are artificially upped because he's got help around him in the order. It's wrong to assume someone's a great hitter because they're hitting .300, and it'd be wrong to say someone's a great worker because their numbers are at some number. I need a more complete picture to work with.

(Plus, this is a lot more work than even I thought it might be - and if I'm gonna apply stuff to longer matches, I might as well do it all at once than bits and parts multiple times. Refine the system before applying it, you know?)

Next time, I'll try to come up with another thing to evaluate; trying to add another aspect. Just haven't figured out exactly what yet.

I'll leave you now with a little extra bonus: last time, I made a line between wrestling moves and non-moves, somewhat implying that those non-moves weren't counted because they didn't mean as much and took less effort. But what if we ordered the wrestlers that way? We'd get something like this...

Later.