Wins above replacement ozeki
May 13, 2016 8:28 PM   Subscribe

538 crunches the numbers behind 255 years of professional sumo tournaments.
posted by Chrysostom (8 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
Sumo is having a hard time now keeping an audience, because there hasn't been a Japanese Yokozuna since Takanohana retired in 2003. Since then there have been fully four Yokozuna from Mongolia, and that's all.

People still go to the matches but it's not as exciting since it's the quintessentially Japanese sport and the Japanese don't seem to be able to compete in it any more.

Also, the Mongolians are not seen as having the kind of gravity and nobility that a Yokozuna should have (though some of that is Japanese racism). Asashoryu was an astoundingly talented wrestler but a bit of an asshole; he got into a bar fight and the governors of the sport ordered him to retire. Which was really a pity since he was on his way to winning more titles than any other Yokozuna in history and probably could have set that record if he remained in the sport. He had 25 wins when he retired, and the previous record was 31 wins.

But... that left room for Hakuho, who actually has set that record with 36 wins. He also has the most undefeated wins (i.e. 15 out of 15 matches in a tournament) with 11.

But the gripe, I think, and repressed resentment is that there are three Yokozuna now in the sport and they're all Mongolians.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:02 PM on May 13, 2016 [2 favorites]


Holy shit that was a fascinating read.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:09 PM on May 13, 2016


Sadly, sumo is fixed.

(I know, I am a dream-crusher, but it is.)
posted by rokusan at 2:55 AM on May 14, 2016


Sadly, sumo is fixed.

Can you elaborate on that?
posted by Dr. Twist at 8:09 AM on May 14, 2016


Sadly, sumo is fixed.

Can you elaborate on that?


I dimly remember reading this claim in a Freakonomics chapter, which is probably what rokusan is referring to. No idea of whether it's substantiated.
posted by erinfern at 10:21 AM on May 14, 2016


Sadly, sumo is fixed.

Yes, this needs some elaboration. The old chapter it Freakonomics doesn't cut it: it leaves quite a lot to be desired and even if you accept it it cannot be honestly summarized as "sumo is fixed".
posted by anzen-dai-ichi at 1:51 PM on May 14, 2016


Yes, but:
- the Freakonomics chapter is mostly about 7-7 wrestlers against wrestlers with kachikoshi, hinting at a sort of quid pro quo system,
- the 2011 investigation (thanks for the mention, I hadn't really followed) ended up with several wrestlers being banned, but I saw no major wrestlers.
I still don't see anything which can remotely be stated as "sumo is fixed".
posted by anzen-dai-ichi at 2:23 PM on May 14, 2016


Sumo has had many scandals over the centuries, including match-throwing and match-fixing. In the more distant past, it's likely that a lot of outcomes were rigged to favor the popular champion. (Thus one of the purposes of the WAROZ analysis is to show that sumo has more parity in it now than it did in the 18th and 19th centuries.)

That said, I don't think this means much if anything for Hakuho. He has never been implicated in any match-fixing -- and why would he? He's one of the few rikishi who make plenty of money from the sport itself. As for the match-throwing thing from Freakonomics, Hakuho hasn't needed a last-day win for kachi-kose since March of 2005, so he is unlikely to have benefited from it -- and he's usually contending and/or facing top yokozuna or ozeki toward the end of tournaments, so he's unlikely to have been throwing to others either.
posted by skepticalsports at 1:56 PM on May 17, 2016


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