Episode 32: Most Genericest, the 2020 Padres Rankings

Summary: For a month we at ASAB have been working on a metric called ALPE, that stands for Anonymity to League Popularity Egregiousness. What ALPE does is it measures a sports franchise level of genericness, or Padres, as we like to call it. It factors anonymity, league popularity, market size, market share, and a team's history. All of these come together to create a team's Padres rating. Wait, why "Padres"? Because the San Diego Padres baseball team embodies what it is to be generic. They are the world's most historically generic sports franchise. They are bland, they are unmemorable, and no amount of star power and success (they've actually had a lot of those two things believe it or not) can alter it. They are truly vanilla. Why? Why do this? Why create a metric to specifically point out the unrelenting blandness of certain sports franchise? Why even bother to make fun of the completely unmemorable? Well, because it's funny. Being generic is objectively funny. And we took this joke to extreme measures, because we lack tact. I mean, that's it, really. Our first show of 2020 explains the history behind our rankings, the process of creating the metric that measures genericness and blandness, and all of the interesting things we discovered while creating the metric. So I present to you our ALPE metric, the rankings can be found as a companion piece here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ApZyCpeEOJH6VZTtZ0iflC1gST3E4ym2IlHZbBrz05Q/htmlview Oh yeah, we also talked about the NFL playoffs and the NBA too, believe it or not.