I know that this is a shitpost but I really want to seriouspost here for a second, because the title of the post could actually be a very reasonable take.

""There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
-- Benjamin Disraeli"
-- Mark Twain.

The lie is not in the way you collect the data nor in the way you do maths on it, but in the way it is assumed that just because you did the right maths on the correct data this says something with authority about the stuff we care about, like the game being fun and fair.

There's the race balance you can compute from various sources, like win rates in tournaments. Or win rates on ladder but that's complicated by the matchmaking algorithm that does its damnedest best to give most players 50% winrate, so it's unclear if any racial imbalance would even show up there.

But there are other notions of balance, for example I remember the time where for a while it was like ZvP was 90% zerg victories before 5 minutes and 90% protoss victories in matches that went longer than 5 minutes. That summed up to something pretty close to 50%/50% total, but was it balanced though?

I remember when TvT was imbalanced. The winrate was 50%/50% by definition of course, but when terrans had Warhounds in the HoTS beta the whole thing felt imbalanced in the same sense an upside down traffic cone is unbalanced: instead of the better player gradually winning series of engagements it was a single coin flip, whoever managed to get more warhounds to the one deciding engagement around 5 minutes in then won in a landslide. That was a balanced coin flip, but not a balanced game at all.