I have a terrible confession to make

Exactly. The trouble with Moneyball (through no fault of Billy Beane or Michael Lewis) is that it made people, like your unpleasant-sounding colleague, believe that everything could be dissected through statistical analysis. Which led to all sorts of sham number-teering and self-proclaimed "code crackers" who had done no such thing. It worked in baseball, because baseball was ripe for it. Same with the market and so on. But even baseball has some facets that are resistant to statistical analysis. Like, What makes a good manager? It's a classic case of the pendulum making a necessary swing, but now we're in the over-correction phase of the game. I want to help push the pendulum back just a little.

 

Baseball has always been about poetry and numbers.

The recent weaponization of numbers isn't just about Bill James, or a reconsideration of what makes a useful statistic.

It's at least a little about the arrival of personal computing, and the rise of rotisserie baseball, too.

 

Tom Verducci’s Cubs book emphasized strongly that what Theo Epstein really craves is as much information as possible. Sometimes that means data. Sometimes that means what a guy likes for breakfast.

 

As true as that is, Connie Mack and Branch Rickey had just as much access to breakfast information as Theo Epstein.

It's the postmodern mass of data collection, and the computing mechanism for manipulating it, that they didn't have.

And 50 years ago, my sandlot buddies and I imagined ourselves almost exclusively as players; only rarely as managers; almost never as general managers.

That's a recent and relatively huge change to the way people think of baseball.

 

Us, too. And when I realized I was going to peak as the backup middle infielder on my high school team, I went the sports writing route. Today, maybe I go for the front office.

 

Exactly.

The "statistics" revolution is just another way for smart, thoughtful people to engage the game.

Those same folks have been filling out scorecards since the 19th century.

 

It’s a good thing that the so-called gatekeepers (scouts) have been taken down a notch. But it seems like the playing field has almost been leveled again because every team utilizes advanced stats. Is there any team that lags decidedly? And how have they done?

 

Good question.

I don't know. I don't follow baseball closely enough at the moment to know the data laggards.

But I think 'Moneyball' as we now understand the term was at least in part about exploiting information asymmetries.

If everyone now has access to the same information, and the same sophisticated thinkers to break it down, we're sort of back to where we started.

 

Great. Baseball is being run by adult fans who wear their gloves to the games.

 

I'd be tickled to go back to day games and organ music and cigar smoke and fans in suits and ties and straw skimmers.

 

Can we get back to the statistics that matter?

30,884 words.

*Pete Weber crotch chop*

 

I wrote 623 words for homework this week but they were entirely in Swedish so that must count double, right?