I read what young baseball fans write on their blogs and various comment sections. I get the sense they aren’t haven’t fun with the game, but rather analyzing the game. It’s ok to do that, but it gets to a point where they bog everyone, including themselves, down. Years from now they won’t have stories for their kids, like a Greg Prince, but print outs of graphs of David Wright’s pitch recognition.
Ironically the volume of information, as much as it has helped the game in the front office, has hurt the quality of the fan in the stands. It used to be fun scouring the internet for good baseball discussion. Now I feel like I should be sitting in a classroom with a #2 pencil. I don’t want to be dramatic and say this is the “day the music died”, but with advanced stats and information it very well may be the day it became harder to have fun, dream, and enjoy a summer rooting for your favorite team.
– Mike Silva, NY Baseball Digest.
Look: I’m not out to tell anyone how they should enjoy baseball. I can only speak for myself, and I don’t feel much need to defend my love for the sport. You’ll just have to trust me on this one: I love baseball. Absolutely f@#$ing love it.
I love every in and out and up and down, every dribbler up the middle and crushed foul ball, every called strike three on the outside corner and every ill-timed mound meltdown. Baseball is meant for entertainment, and it is great theater. So I even love it when the Mets blow a seven-game lead in September or trot out a lineup filled with Triple-A caliber players. Heartbreak, as torturous as it can feel, is entertaining too.
And my enjoyment is only furthered by understanding — or trying to understand — the various metrics used to quantify every element of the sport.
I recognize that plenty of people are probably content to appreciate the natural beauty of a sunrise without bothering to learn that it’s caused by the earth spinning on its axis. And I don’t begrudge them that right. I just happen to think understanding the elegance of the mechanisms prompting that sunrise makes the effect even more spectacular.
The numbers driving baseball are dictated by very subtle differences. Anyone can watch a few basketball games and recognize that the guy who put up 30 points in each is probably the best player on the court. But the distinction between a great hitter and a crappy one is as small as safely reaching base once more in every ten plate appearances. If you think you will notice that a .320 hitter gets one more hit over 20 at-bats than a .270 hitter, well, good for you.
I don’t think I can, though, and so trying to know the tendencies and probabilities involved in every play help me better appreciate both the completely predictable events and the staggeringly improbable ones.
Knowing that Rod Barajas has a .275 on-base percentage doesn’t in any way diminish the awesome aesthetics of his moonshots. It does, however, help me realize how unlikely he is to continue homering at such a ridiculous rate, and watching a player triumph over the odds is pretty spectacular, too.
And that’s — to me at least — the redeeming thing about statistics, and maybe about baseball as a whole. We get to watch people succeed against the odds all the time. Adam Kennedy once hit three home runs in a playoff game. If you only watched the games and never studied the numbers, you wouldn’t realize how crazy that was. But just glance once at the back of Kennedy’s baseball card and you recognize it as a beautiful, hilarious, unbelievable, uplifting feat.
That makes baseball more fun.
Maybe other fans don’t care to know more or understand more thoroughly every aspect impacting a baseball game. Again, I can only speak for myself.
I know this: When I come across something that excites me like baseball does, I want to know everything about it. And part of what has made following baseball and writing about baseball so enjoyable, to me, is that every time I think I know everything, someone uncovers some new, deeper way of understanding the game.
It can be frustrating sometimes, and the breadth of information available can be overwhelming, for sure. But the time spent learning to sort through that information to better appreciate all the wonderful intricacies of the game creates a positive feedback loop: Everything I learn about baseball just makes me like baseball more.
Tedquarters 
I do sometimes think I’ve made a bit of a deal with the devil, as someone put it on AA – exchanging my old faith for knowledge. I used to believe all through the summer (most years) that these boys could go all the way! I still do, but when I know the reaches and the averages of players’ performance in most all measurable areas, and the numbers don’t really add up for my team this year, it’s harder to believe. I’m left hoping for miracles, which do happen, so I do hope. In fact, I think maybe I hope as much as I ever did, and if it happens despite my rational skepticism, I’ll be that many magnitudes happier about it!!
But making the argument that more knowledge is a worse state of affairs is spurious. It would be like arguing that if a man is cheating on his wife she’s much better off not knowing about it, because knowing will take all the joy out of the marriage.
I am more of a freak about baseball now than I was before I knew what I know now. The correlation may go the other way – perhaps I was destined to be a freak for baseball and so the knowledge followed, but the knowledge hasn’t harmed my love of the game. At all.
On the flip side, it gives you better perspectives on some players, like Wright and Reyes, people for whatever reason want to claim their bums or because they’re going through a slump (which for some of them, Wright, usually isn’t even a slump) worthless and you know that years of data back up the fact their top tier players and perennial MVP candidates. Stats also can help appreciate light hitters like Endy more, people always lauded his defense but never thought he should be more than a sub because of his bat, where as the stats said he was better than that.
Silva’s a complete tool. You are not. Stat-people 1, willfully ignorant self-important arrogance: 0.
I guess Silva’s traffic was down, so he had to resort to his usual standby – ripping sabermetrics.
There are two annoying things about this approach. First of all, why would how someone else enjoys the game affect how you enjoy the game? Second, as I’ve said many times, how is it even remotely logical to conclude that the people who invest much time looking at numbers and developing graphs, etc, are basically passionless about baseball? Shouldn’t the obvious lesson be just the opposite – these are the people that are so emotionally invested in baseball and passionate about the game that they are willing to do math not even on a school night just in order to delve deeper into the game they love.
I think Megdal had a post on that thread where he had a similar response to yours. The stats enhance his understanding and appreciation for the game. However, Silva may have a point where the endless analysis of baseball sometimes makes it a bloodless affair. Why even play the games when you could just statistically plot everything out. Late-bloomers will become increasingly rare because stats will project that they’ll be useless whereas a trained eye may pick out hidden talent. Theres a fine line to be trod and though I don’t agree with him, I think there is a kernel of truth to what Silva is saying.
And that’s why no stat-head would ever discount the importance of scouting. Look at a Fernando Martinez, even when healthy, he hasn’t exactly torn up the minors. But to the raw eye, there’s so much talent that even the most hardened sabermetrician is excited about his blossoming.
I’ve given up on F-Mart. The stats tell me this guy can’t get healthy as a youngster, at least not for long enough stretches to actually advance his game. All the talent in the world isn’t going to help him if he is never able to get the consistent at-bats to develop.
Reyes had the same injury problems. Look, is F-Mart a given to be a stud? Probably not. But I have at least some trust in everyone who’s been propping him up for the past, what, 5 years?
Reyes had a few injury problems and only to one body part as I recall. F-Mart is injuring one part after another. He has all this so-called talent that the scouts have seen, but the numbers really aren’t there because he hasn’t been on the field in long enough stretches to accrue any!
yeah that’s whats worrying about F-mart, that the injuries haven’t been localized. It doesn’t seem like something that can just be fixed with stretching routines or something he just seems to be made of glass. A lot of people consider the ability to stay healthy a skill set, as in some guys are just plain injury prone and there’s nothing that can be done.
That being said regardless if not for the injuries he would still be a much better prospect than his stats said 2 years ago, however now his stats are actually showing serious concerns, like 1 walk in 82 at bats before the injury.
Great song Ted. I loves me some Spoon from all the way back int he Matador days.
This. I momentarily looked for a like button just so I could like it for spoon. Favorite band ever.
Stats vs. stories is such a weird false choice to me. It’s like suggesting that, because I like action movies, I don’t like other kinds of movies. Or because I can see the beauty in numbers or problem-solving sets, it’s harder for me to appreciate or produce elegant words. (I’ll have you know, good sir, that I suck at writing for entirely DIFFERENT reasons.)
Stephen Jay Gould hits on these things in his must-read essay about the disappearance of .400 hitting. The charge, of course, is that through explanation of such things one can sap the game of mystery and fun. Why watch now, right?
He says: ” I suggest we should rejoice in the shrinkage of variation and the consequent elimination of .400 hitting. Yes, excellence in play does imply increasing precision and standardization, but what complaint can we lodge against repeated maximal beauty? I have now been a fan for 50 years. I have seen hundreds of perfectly executed double plays and brilliant pegs from outfield to home … that kind of beautifully orchestrated precision that probably occurred only rarely in baseball’s early years. I do not thrill any less with each repetition … Moreover the rise in general excellence and consequent shrinkage of variation does not remove the possibility of transcendence. In fact, I would argue that transcendence becomes all the more intriguing and exciting for the smaller space now allocated to such a possibility, and for the consequent greater struggle that must attend the achievement.”
Here’s a man whose love of the game clearer only grew with a deeper understanding of its inner workings, thus undercutting once and for all the stupid notion that studying something is akin to killing it.