Analytically Speaking

This article written by Alan Jacobs for the Weekly Standard, pretty much sums up my feelings about the game of baseball as it has been played at the major league level for the past several years.

In essence, Jacobs says the current scientific approach to the game, the in-depth analysis, the putting into action strategies for the sole reason that they statistically achieve slightly better results than traditional old school approaches, have all made the game for the most part, predictable and boring to watch.

In his article, Jacobs describes his youthful appreciation of the old Baltimore Oriole teams managed by the late Earl Weaver in the seventies and eighties. Going against conventional baseball wisdom, Weaver eschewed traadional strategies such as base stealing and bunting to advance runners, otherwise known as small ball, his logic being that too many things have to go right with that strategy to produce a minimum number of runs. Going for the big inning, Weaver encouraged his batters to get on base any way they could, then let the batter with runners on base swing for the fences to hit a home run, which he believed was a much more efficient way to produce runs.

Conversely he had his pitchers challenge batters with pitches down the middle of the plate, rather than risking walking batters and accumulating base runners. Yes they gave up more home runs, but they were typically one run homers which were usually more than made up for by the big innings his batting strategy was designed to produce.

It was during Weaver's tenure as manager when very serious fans such as Bill James, began to probe deeper than anyone ever had into the inner workings of baseball. James built his passion into a serious career as a writer, analyist, and ultimately a consultant to major league teams. He is considered to be one of the greatest minds in the game, and is probably the single most influential pratitioner of Sabermetrics, a term he coined for what in his words is "the search for objective knowledge about baseball."

The Earl of Baltimore's unorthodox strategy was ultimately backed up by Bill James and others who proved that statistically, Weaver's methods resulted in a greater probability of producing more runs for his team, and giving up fewer runs for the other teaam, which of course translated to more wins.

Sabermetricians like James were originally labeled as crackpots by the baseball community. After all, what could eggheads sitting in front of their computers who never played the game know about baseball? That scenario is portrayed brilliantly in a scene from the film Moneyball, where a portly nerd of a Sabermetrician named Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill), who is hired by the woebegone Oakland A's to be their braintrust, sits at a table with what would become the former braintrust, the old school scounts, coaches and manager of the team. Rejecting traditioanal baseball logic, Brand, a fictional character based upon the real Paul DePodesta, convinces his boss, Oakland GM Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) to dump over-paid and sabrmetrically under-performing players, in favor of bargain basement players rejected by other teams. Needless to say, the old baseball foagies thought the nerdy fat guy was full of shit. Nonetheless, Beane and Brand (in reality, DePodesta who bears no physical resemblance to Hill) turned a losing team with little capital into a contender for the American League pennant in 2002.

It's hard to argue with success, MLB teams took notice and before long every team was employing Sabermetric analysis for everything from player personnel to the tiniest minutiae of game management. Take for example the lowly bunt. Traditional baseball logic dictates that when there are two runners on base and nobody out, the batter should bunt, in other words square up and tap the ball about ten feet rather than taking a full swing to drive the ball. If the bunt is successful as it used to be nine times out of ten in the hands of a major league player, the two runners advance bases and the batter is usually, but not always, thrown out at first base. In baseball parleance this is called a sacrifice because the batter sacrifices himself in order for his teammates to be in a better position to score.

Thanks to sabermetrics, sacrifice bunts are all but a thing of the past as the analysis of data drawn from hundreds of thousands of situations shows that the probablity of scoring runs while swinging away, is greater than giving up an out in order to advance the runners.

Another victim of sabermetrics is one of the most exciting parts of the game, the stolen base. Analysis has shown that the risks of being thrown out while attempting to steal a base outweigh the benefits of a successful steal. The general rule of thumb with MLB teams these days is if a runner's stolen base success rate is worse than eighty percent, he's better off staying put on base and wait to be advanced by the batter, hopefully by a home run. And with pitchers better at holding runners on base and catchers being able to throw runners out, hardly anybody can steal a base eight out of ten times in the big leagues today.

Slugger Jose Abreu of the White Sox with a home run swing on July 6, 2014.
As you can see at the top right, the result was a very impressive foul ball.
To the best of my recollection, he struck out on the next pitch.

Sabermetrically speaking, the home run is the most valuable outcome of an at bat. That should come as no surprise, as it is the most efficient method to score a run, one swing, one run, plus one run for each runner on base. However there is a definite risk factor with home run hitters as they are typically more likely to strike out. Not to worry say the Sabermetricians, in this case, the benefit of efficiently scoring runs by swinging for the fences, outweighs the risk of striking out. Consequently in current major league rosters, it's not unusual to see power hitters up and down the lineup, taking away the spots previously left for batters who hit for average, or weaker hitters who excel at defense.

It's also not unusual to see dramatic shifts for power hitters, especially lefties. Well detailed spray charts are provided for all MLB players showing the location where every single ball hit off their bat landed on the field. Managers place their fielders accordingly, even if it means shifting the entire infield, with the exception of the first baseman, to one side of the field. One would think this would provide an excellent opportunity for the batter to place his hits, or as Wee Willy Keeler a long time ago suggested, "hit 'em where they ain't", for an almost certain free base. Not so, the analyists say, it's still more statistically feasible to damn the shift and swing away for a home run, rather than settle for a piddly base hit.

To counter all those home runs, MLB teams won't even look at pitching prospects who cannot throw the ball a minimum of 90 plus mph. What used to be a once in a generation phenominon, you can find pitchers who can throw in excess of 100mph on about half of the big league rosters. Consquently, serious injuries to young pitchers have become commonplace and teams adhere to strict pitch counts to protect the arms of their valuable assets. Combined with the relatively recent practice of the situational use of multiple relief pitchers in one game. what was once commonplace, a pitcher tossing a complete game, is extremely rare these days, as we saw recently when a couple of pitchers were pulled from games while throwing no-hitters.

Anatomy of a 100 mph fastball.
Reliever Kelvin Herrera with the Kansas City Royals in 2016.

Another asset the sabrmetricians highly value is the base on balls. In days of old, it was considered unmanly for a batter to be walked as it was thought to be the error of the pitcher rather than the achievement of the hitter to reach base that way. That obviously is foolish thinking, but the premium on the walk is probably the single biggest contributor to the ungodly length of major league baseball games today. That is because batters have become so adept at fouling off pitches that it's not unusual to see double-digit pitch at bats as the rule these days, as batters try to foul off every strike, either to draw a walk, or force the pitcher to make the mistake of offering a hittable pitch. As pitchers get better and better, able to throw pitches that just graze the corner of the strike zone on command, and batters get better at fouling them off, these contests of one foul ball after an other after another, are only going to increase.

There is absolutely no question that ballplayers have never been better than they are today. Current players are bigger, stronger, faster, more agile, and probably smarter, at least in terms of the objective knowledge of the game, than they ever were. As MLB's official historian John Thorn points out, the great players we revere from the past, would never make it onto a big league roster today, (that is if you were to somehow transport them from their glory days to today). Baseball writing is better than ever, in no small part thanks to Bill James, who beyond his remarkable analytical skills is a wonderful writer. The same can be said of the level of scholarly research of baseball history which was once the exclusive domain of jaded sportwriters with a personal axe to grind. And as we've just seen thanks to the work of the Sabermetricians, analytical research into the complicated workings of the game has never been more precise and thorough.

The problem with all that as Alan Jacobs suggests, is that armed with the same data and analytical conclusions, and the universally high level of talent and skill among the players, there is little variation in each big league team's approach to the game. Today, every team plays like Earl Weaver's Orioles, without of course, Weaver's legendary histrionics. Today's game seems to be run by actuaries, risk managers rather than baseball managers.

Perhaps it's inevitable with the quantum leaps of player athleticism and skillsets, and the knowledge of how to successfully win baseball games by the people who pull the strings, that a typical game played at its highest level in the future might look something like this:

Game begins. After a 20 pitch at bat, the batter finally succeeds in either getting hit by a pitch or walking. He stands on first base while his teammate waits at the plate with the other side offereing him a free base hit by placing all their fielders on one side of the field. After fouling off 12 consecutive pitches, he defiantly swings as hard as he can in the fielders' direction in the hopes of hitting the ball over their heads for a home run. He either strikes out on a 110 mph fastball, or lines out to the third baseman perfectly positioned in short right field. Repeat twice. Inning over. Repeat entire process 16 times switching sides with each repetition. On the next iteration, first batter succeeds to hit 750 foot home run of a 115mph pitch. Game over. Final score, 1-0. Crowd goes wild.

Sheesh, almost makes you want to become a soccer fan.

Not to woryy however. Thank God Sabermetrics hasn't found its way yet into youth baseball, which is still the greatest game around.

Now that's better. The game as it was meant to be played.