Story by Ken Duke | Photos by Tanner & Travis Lyons
Pick a number between 0 and 5. Don’t show it to me. Just keep it in your mind until I ask for it.
I’ve been following the sport of professional tournament bass fishing for a very long time and covering it differently than most. Sure, I write the occasional how-to story about spinnerbaits and jerkbaits and rod selection and knot tying, but I do a lot more about the numbers behind the sport and those who are most successful in competition.
I started studying the numbers because I was a baseball fan as a kid. I only cared about addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in school because I wanted to be able to calculate batting averages, earned run averages, and slugging percentages.
I was into bass fishing, too, and I thought I wanted to become a bass pro when I was in high school. But I didn’t see the connection between bass fishing and math untiI high school when I used it to calculate how many pounds of keeper bass I’d need to weigh in each day to qualify for championships or win a tournament on this lake or that river.
It grew into an obsession that still holds me today.
In the 1980s, I discovered Bill James—the baseball writer and the man who brought the study and application of statistics to the highest level of that game. It made me want to do the same for fishing.
In baseball, there a few statistics that always get attention, even though they’re not all that revealing. If a player hits .300 or hits 30 home runs or drives in 100 runs or has an ERA under 3.00, we know he’s been successful on some level. If he posts a strong WAR or has a lot of Win Shares, we’re talking next-level stats—the stuff the real experts calculate and break down.
I wanted (and still want) to bring next-level stats to bass tournament fishing, and I’ve shared my data with fans for many years now, with middling results and acceptance.
One of the most basic stats I’ve developed and come to appreciate is “Bassing Average.” If it sounds like “Batting Average, that’s no coincidence. You simply divide the number of bass an angler weighs in by the number of competition days he fished. If he weighed in three bass over three days, his Bassing Average (BA) is 1.00. If he weighed in nine bass over those three days, his BA is 3.00.
Since most tournaments feature a five bass limit, a perfect BA is 5.00.
But what’s a “good” BA? What’s the equivalent of a .300 batting average, 30 home runs, 100 RBI, or a 3.00 ERA?
In other words, what’s the “Magic Number”?
Of course, an angler’s BA is dependent upon a lot of things: weather, the fishery, time of year, size limits, and more. There are more BA variables than there are for any baseball statistic. Ours is a complex sport.
Before I give you this Magic Number, I want to set out a couple of parameters.
First, you don’t need a high BA to be a successful bass pro. In fact, success on the water is only tangentially related to a meaningful career. Catching quality bass (the only important on-the-water skill) is very different from selling sponsor products (the only important off-the-water skill), and doing a great job for sponsors is easily the most important skill for anyone wanting to be a bass pro.
For our purposes here, we’re only interested in on-the-water stuff—catching and weighing keeper bass.
Second, before you tell me that you don’t have to catch a lot of bass if you catch big ones, please know that you are correct in theory but wrong in practice. In practice, the guys who catch the most keepers are also the ones posting the biggest weights because they’re the ones who are culling most often and working through numbers of fish to intersect with some big ones. Show me an angler catching more than the average number of bass, and I’ll show you angler who is probably weighing in bigger than average fish.
Now that you understand the framework, I’m going to rephrase the question:
What is the breakline number in BA to be a successful on-the-water tournament pro? Is it 3.50? 4.00? Higher? Lower?
And now the big reveal. The Magic Number for bassing average is 4.50. It means that—on average—a successful pro is bringing four-and-a-half keepers to the stage each and every competition day. That number is even higher on circuits that allow real-time imaging units (forward-facing sonar) because that technology makes it easier to locate bass.
If an angler can catch 4.50 bass per competition day, he or she is going to qualify for a lot of championships, be in the money as often as not, win a fair share of the time, and avoid scoffing when offering how-to advice.
For the anglers who score below 4.00, they have a different and perhaps tougher row to hoe. They need to bring a great history of previous success or a lot of charisma to the table. Their catch rate alone may not be enough to sustain them in the world of casting for cash.
But even those anglers who score high have their work cut out for them. A solid bassing average keeps you in the hunt and in the conversation, but there’s always a lot of work to do off the water.
