I always read that strip as making fun of sports commentators more than sports per se.
THANK you.
How many of you even watch enough sports to say you can get this? A few games and it'll be painfully clear to you what the issue is here.
"Jeter has had... more RBIs in this inning... than any other inning in the last... 4 months."
Meaning he hasn't batted in two runs since June.
"This is only the THIRD TIME that Moss has ran more than 700 yards in a game... in his career."
Moss has run more than 700 yards in this game. He has done it twice before in however much time he's been playing. Other people have done it before.
"Jordan is playing on a bad ankle."
Everyone's playing on a bad ankle.
It's not a random number generator, per se, but it's painfully clear that there's a very complex data sifter in there somewhere feeding these guys statistics that may or may not be interesting (probably not). I've actually wanted to research it a little because the sheer amount of data the machine has to sort, and then find correlations between them without being given an explicit query (or given a vague one, i.e. "Tell me something about Drew Brees"), means there's a staggeringly complex AI somewhere in that multimillion dollar enterprise we call a commentator's box. If SkyNet's going to be born somewhere, it'll be in the backroom of a football stadium, not on an air force base.