A Red Sox vs. Rockies contest on Tuesday provided an excellent example of how “advanced metrics” are harming baseball.
While the new metrics can show which tactics work best, on average, over a long stretch of games, they also can make it harder to win individual games in individual circumstances. Sometimes common sense and old-time baseball smarts still work best. Worse, slavish devotion to the new metrics is making the game less varied and less interesting.
Attendance at Major League Baseball games is significantly down in recent years. Among the obvious reasons are high attendance costs, new technology that allows more games to be viewed remotely, and slow play. Surely, though, another reason for the decline in interest is that there’s far less actual, on-field action than ever before. With the number of home runs and strikeouts both up, up, up, the number of balls put in play has gone down, down, down.
Sure, fans love, or at least once loved, home runs and epic strikeouts. Yet when more and more of the game involves only pitchers, catchers, and hitters, with fewer baserunners and with other fielders more often just standing around, there’s a lot less of both movement and miscellany to keep fans’ eyes and minds occupied.
Nonetheless, metrics say that teams ultimately score more runs by swinging for the fences, even at the risk of striking out more often, than by playing “small ball” by patiently finding ways to advance runners around the diamond one base at a time. So that’s what teams do — so much that home runs, by becoming more frequent, also seem more routine, and thus less thrilling. Fans yawn.
Another result is that old skills, such as bunting, rarely get practiced, much less used, even in cases where all logic says bunts should be employed no matter what metrics indicate.
Case in point: the weird game in which the Red Sox (my favorite team, so please forgive the sour-grapes aspect of this review) somehow managed to lose despite striking out an astonishing 24 Colorado players in 11 innings.
It was in the bottom of the ninth inning that metrics overtook common sense and old-school values. The game was tied 4-4. The Sox had a superb runner, Jackie Bradley, Jr., on first base with nobody out. One lone run would win the game. The batter, the usually solid-hitting Andrew Benintendi, was mired in an 0-for-12 slump, including three strikeouts in that game alone. Batting behind Benintendi were two of the very best hitters in baseball, Mookie Betts and J.D. Martinez.
In, say, 1980, there would have been no doubt what the Sox should do. The slumping Benintendi should bunt. Move Bradley to second base; let his presence there force different infielder positioning to “hold him close” at second; put the added pressure on the pitcher who knows a single would likely drive the swift Bradley in with the winning run; and let Betts and Martinez, thus advantaged by those considerations, do the hitting voodoo they usually do so well.
But no: Metrics say don’t take the bat out of a hitter’s hands! Don’t use a sacrifice bunt to advance a runner to second base. Putting the runner “in scoring position” isn’t worth taking an out and removing the possibility of Benintendi hitting an extra-base hit. That’s what statistics say — on average.
So that’s what Red Sox manager Alex Cora did. He went by the new “book,” not the old one. He let Benintendi swing away. Benintendi struck out. Bradley was stuck on first base, rather than distracting the pitcher from scoring position on second base. Betts and Martinez swung for the long ball rather than for singles. Neither succeeded. The Sox failed to score that inning, and went on to lose in the eleventh frame.
Blast the metrics. The metrics don’t account for an otherwise good hitter being in a slump. They don’t account for Bradley’s ability to cause havoc via distraction. Nor do they account for the possibility of him advancing to third on a pitch in the dirt that gets booted up the first base line, thus meaning a sacrifice fly could bring him home.
The averages can’t account for the particulars, nor can they entertain the fans as thoroughly. No matter how fun it is to hope for, and then see, a home run, it will never be as exciting as a “bang-bang” tag play at home plate with the winning run on the line.
The metrics may say the long ball wins more games, but they didn’t win this game, nor did the hope for the long ball allow for the development of so many other more subtle, more interesting possibilities.
Baseball should be a game of humans, not of algorithms. Bring back “small ball,” and bring back the fans.
[Also read: Trump: Championship team visits to White House better than cover of Sports Illustrated]
