One of the joys of sports fandom is the stats. The endless number-crunching, theorizing, quantifying attempts to grasp the underlying secret truths of the game. The less-than-scientific, Malcolm Gladwellian art of bandying numbers around to try to prove why player A is more valuable than player B.

Bibliophiles, dealing with an even more subjective and elusive subject, can debate with the best of them, but they rarely get to bring numbers into the conversation. The Tournament of Books is one of the few literary occasions that embraces literary stats. With the opening round, uh, in the books (it saw two number one seeds, NBA-winning Lord of Misrule, 296 pages, and Super Sad True Love Story, 352 pages, both suffer ignominious first round defeats) Andrew Seal jumped in for some analysis of statistical trends in the competition.

First off, Seal analyzed how book length has affected success in the six years of the tournament. His observations were intriguing:

The most successful books in the opening round are books shorter than 200 pages, winning their match-ups 71.43% of the time. However this success plummets in the second round as these books win only 25% of their match-ups. My quick hypothesis here is that among an average sampling of books, brevity is an asset. However, as the tournament progresses, the charms of fleetness are overwhelmed by the mass of gravitas: 500+ page books do well in the first round (winning 68.75% of the time) but dominate in the second round where they win 80% of the time. So far, the numbers seem to indicate that when it comes to showdowns between two “winning” novels, sheer weight might start to become a factor.

Seal writes “who doesn’t feel pretty good about herself after getting to the end of a 500-page baggy monster?” I’ve often felt that readers who successful read a very long book (Infinite Jest), or a very difficult book (Pale Fire) feel a need to defend the book’s value out of proportion with their actual appreciation of the book. This is not to say these aren’t great books, but I feel that their champions are compelled to overstate their case based purely on their personal investment of time and energy. I can’t prove this; it’s just a hunch. But now I have some numbers I can throw carelessly around when i want to make my case.