It's more than a numbers game to some of us

I absolutely plead guilty to being too fascinated by numbers. It goes way back.
My relatives tell me, and it certainly fits in with the way I remember things, that I pretty much taught myself how to do division by figuring baseball batting averages.
I vividly remember when I was about 8 having one of those "eureka" moments when I finally grasped how a pitcher's earned run average was determined.
Statistics in sports have always been interesting to me. It's difficult to compare eras in sports, but statistics are often the best - and always the most dispassionate - way to try.
So about two-thirds through Sunday's Neighborhood 400 at Dover International Speedway, Jeff Burton was leading and I looked up how many races it had been since his most recent victory. I knew it was around 150, and the actual number was 160.
If Burton won, it would have made a good chart to list the most number of races between two wins in a Cup driver's career.
But that's not a list that, as far as I could tell at the time, anybody had handy.
Never fear, I said to myself, I can figure this out before the race is over. Back a few years ago, I wanted to know how old the top winners in the sport were when they won their races. So I spent a pretty good while making a list of people who'd won 20 or more races, looking up their birthdays and the dates of races, then doing a spreadsheet of how old they were at the time of each win.
By the time I was done, I realized that I was well on my way to having a list of ALL of the races in Cup history. So that winter, between the end of one season and the beginning of the next, I finished that list off.
It's on a spreadsheet in my laptop (backed up on discs and flash drives six ways to Sunday) and it has the number of the race, the race date, the track name, the track site, the winning driver, the driver's birthday, his age at that win and the car owner's name.
Off that list, I can create lists of wins by driver, by track, by owner and by age.
And with the list by driver, Sunday at Dover I started going down the list looking for big gaps between victories by the same driver.
About the time that Burton no longer had the lead, I thought I had a pretty good handle on the list. The complicating factor was that there were some really big gaps that are misleading.
There is, for instance, a span of 417 races between Paul Goldsmith victories on the Daytona beach course in 1958 and on the Daytona International Speedway track in 1966. But Goldsmith actually ran in only 24 of those 418. So it was a little too complicated to have any shot at getting right on the fly like that.
Had Burton won, or even Jamie McMurray, who could have broken a 124-race drought of his own, it would have been something I would have spent time Sunday night figuring up for a Tuesday follow story. But once it was on my mind, there's no way I could walk away from it.
My friend Monte Dutton, who covers NASCAR for the Gaston (N.C) Gazette, rightly accuses me of being a "wonk" when it comes to such things. So, after getting back home Monday, I sat down with my list of races and found what I think to be the list of long streaks between wins.
Goldsmith's 417-race streak is the longest in terms of the total number of races held, but in terms of races started between victories the longest all-time streak is held by...somebody whose name will appear at the top of a chart you'll be able to find in the Charlotte Observer and on thatsracin.com when Burton or McMurray or anybody else with more than 100 wins between their most recent victories goes to victory lane.
Hey, I might be obsessed and therefore compelled to do all that research But I ain't stupid enough to give it away for free.