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.
Yes, Francoeur was good for the last few months of the 2009 season and excellent for the first couple weeks of 2010. But every day it looks more and more like that success was the exception and the rest is the rule.
You’re never going to hear me rail against Val Pascucci’s return to the Mets’ organization. I will go to my grave believing he should have been with the big-league club in 2008 when Marlon Anderson was getting so many pinch-hit opportunities, and that he could probably be a decent enough Major League hitter if given an adequate sample of at-bats, despite concerns about his ability to hit big-league breaking stuff.
Thinking about radio too long makes my head hurt. This came up in the comments section not too long ago: There’s free music, just floating about in the air, everywhere. All we need is an inexpensive device to access it.
I realize it’s kind of gross, and Freud might have a field day with it. But I maintain that it’s not the jamming things in my mouth that I enjoy so much as the sensation of chewing itself. For some reason, I enjoy the feeling of working my jaw muscles.
Also, if the Dayton Police are serious about recovering that money, a good strategy might be simply waiting at area Taco Bells for an SUV to pull up to the drive through and order $2,000 worth of Taco Bell. Glorious Taco Bell.
Tedquarters 