Here Comes the November 2023 Tournament! And my new Substack!
Separating sumo from deaaaaaath
Howdy all! This is Mary Pat Campbell — I decided to kick my sumo content over to its own substack. In my main substack, I write a lot about mortality trends and public finance, and I’m guessing there may be an audience for sumo statistics and fun sumo stuff… that would rather not read about that other stuff.
I am still a numbers nerd, though, so I will be doing my brand of sumo fandom, which is primarily making graphs.
Each tournament, I update my main scatterplot of the height and weight of the Makuuchi wrestlers.
Sometimes I dip into Juryo, but I will stick to Makuuchi for this inaugural post.
November 2023 Graph (first shot)
Upon the release of the banzuke, this is my new graph:
Now, there’s a reason for me noting “first shot” on this graph — as with the September graph when I first did it, the heights and weights matched the prior banzuke. Because they hadn’t done a new weigh-in yet.
The main thing being reflected above in the graph are the changes of the banzuke — the size of the bubbles just reflect rank (bigger bubbles for higher rank). There are some differences.
September 2023 final graph
So while the top of the banzuke is the same, in terms of Sekiwake, Ozeki, and Yokozuna, you can see some of the others have moved around in rank.
We had a turnover in the Komusubi - Abi and Hokutofuji are now in, while Tobizaru and Nishikigi, who were Komusubi in September have fallen down a few rungs.
I’ll check again on the weights next week - it will likely change, but in the mean time, I’m getting my spreadsheets together, and will likely try to populate this substack with my older posts from the other substack.
Spreadsheet and data source
I get my height/weight info from https://www.sumo.or.jp/EnHonbashoBanzuke/index/ — the official Japan Sumo Association (Nihon Sumo Kyokai). The main problem with this data is there is no date info as to when they were measured, but in general, all of the wrestlers are measured at the same time if they’re competing in the tournament.
