My friend Brian is a pretty knowledgeable guy, and considers himself a casual sports fan. He's not a die-hard by any means, but he can still sit down with you and have a conversation about sports ranging from football and basketball to soccer and golf.
One sports that he absolutely doesn't care for, though, is baseball. He doesn't watch it, doesn't read about it, and can't really talk about it. His main reasoning, aside from the game's pace, is that he doesn't understand it; that it's too complicated.
As I was talking with Brian about this the other day, I had a thought: "When did baseball become a complicated sport?"
In reality, it isn't, but to outsiders it only seems that way because of the influx of too much unneeded, complicated statistics.
You know what I'm talking about. It's the current baseball mindset that every single moment and situation needs to be expressed and anylized statistically. It's regular statistics, advanced statistics, and sabermetric statistics, and every time a baseball player so much as sneezes, there's a statistic for that.
OBP, OPS, RISP.
WHIP, Runs created, Balls in play average.
Average with a 2-2 count. Average with a full count. Average with a 1-1 count with no outs on the road after the 6th inning.
It's every single possible moment, instance and situation being described by numbers. It's a push from baseball to have the entire game and any possible outcome to be expressed as a stat.
In basketball, a player can be described as being so much better when his teammates are involved, or a football player can be thought to be more effective in a certain formation, but in those sports commments like these are just speculation, even if they are perceived as accurate. In baseball, it's as if the only way you can think about a player's value is through the numbers.
"I like our starting pitcher, he seems to pitch better in tight games."
"Oh yeah? Well according to his ERA-per-27-innings-in-games-within-2-runs, he's actually in the bottom half of the league."
It just takes the fun out of it, and turns it into math class.
Statistics are a valuable tool in any sport, but in baseball its seemed to have gone overboard. For some, like Oakland's Billy Beane, baseball is a math equation where everything can be expressed or predicted numerically. But that concept takes away most of what makes sports so fun and unpredictible: things like gut instincts, hunches, hot streaks, and risky moves. In my mind, statistics are great and can be very useful, but the influx of unnecessary sabermetric statistics can never fully replace player or coach judgement and insight.
But unfortunately, baseball seems to be entrenched with this current mindset that statistics are needed to create something more out of a simple game.
David Halberstam once wrote that with the rise of televised sports, fans flocked to the more up-tempo, fast-paced games like basketball and football because it was more exciting to watch. Baseball, he said, then turned to countless new statistics - every situation and tendency broken down into stats - to try to make up for the fact that its pace was slightly slower than the other games on TV. He said that the soul of the game was pushed aside because an unnecessary need to have the statistics make baseball seem like more than it really is.
Some stats may be very accurate, others may be completely bogus, but baseball doesn't need to have everything measured with numbers in order to makes things more interesting. It's the simplicity of the game that is interesting.
Fans watch basketball because it's easy to understand. They watch football because, at its essence, its fun and straightforward. Baseball needs to understand that the majority of its fans feel the same way. Fans don't like a better because his OPS is out of this world, they like him because he's a good hitter. They don't like a pitcher because he's the league leader in WHIP, they like him because he can strike guys out.
And fans do like statistics, too. They love seeing a pitcher's ERA, or who leads the league in hits. But for fans, baseball should still be left as a game, instead of an equation. Not everything needs to be analyzed from all angles.
Instead, leave the advanced statistics to the eggheads who use them while running a team. If they think that it's useful to learn a player's RC27 (runs created per 27 innings) or ISOP (Isolated power), then let them go nuts. It's their team.
(And let's face it, sabermetrics doesn't always yield big results. The Oakland A's, for all their years of "Moneyball" tactics, aren't exactly a powerhouse.)
Baseball is a simple game, and that's where the fun lies. Fans have loved it for over a hundred years because of its players, its games, and its stories. Like any other sport, it's about the feeling you get from being there, from watching it, from taking it all in. You can measure things in statistics all you want, but in the end, fans will always care more about the fun and the entertainment of baseball.
You don't need a calculator to figure that out.
1 comment:
I can understand your skepticism on the stats but baseball is a different breed than basketball and football and soccer. In those sports, generally the best athletes succeed. The big, better faster usually are the most successful. But that isn't the case in baseball. Athleticism doesn't translate to success as automatically as in those sports. For every Grady Sizemore, there's a Joey Gathright that doesn't live up to the hype.
Because all and all, baseball isn't about athleticism. It's about skills. And statistics help judge who is the best at certain skills. Who's the best at being patient and getting on base to generate runs. Which pitchers are on the cusp of having good careers, and which pitchers are just getting lucky. Sabermetric stats help reduce those unknowns. They don't eliminate them completely, but they eliminate it to the point that they can make educated decisions on who to pay the big bucks to.
The whole point of GMs and people using these stats was not to make the game more complicated. It was to help understand how teams were able to compete with others who had dramatically bigger payrolls. In my mind, I don't feel you need to understand sabermetrics or the stats to be a baseball fan or watch a baseball game. In fact, watching baseball games live or in person clouds sabermetric stuff even more for in order to sabermetrics to really be successful, you need to take it objectively and watching games forces you to be subjective.
All and all, I think people who say baseball is getting too complicated are simply looking too much into it. I think sabermetrics allows baseball fans to become hardcore baseball fans but it doesn't help the casual fan or sway one who doesn't like baseball.
But I think the stats are important because baseball and basketball treat athleticism differently. So I just don't think people saying "They don't use these stats in basketball" is a fair argument simply because athleticism doesn't always succeed in baseball as much as other sports.
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