Globe and Mail, March 29th 1984

NSIDE BASEBALL Chasing game's ghosts may kill the fun

Thursday, March 29, 1984

BRYAN JOHNSON

BRYAN JOHNSON Are the new breed of statisticians "measuring the fun right out of baseball?" That's the charge made by Jay Teitel in the current issue of Toronto Life magazine - an argument that has surfaced in countless variations over the past year.

Without doubt, many fans believe the number crunchers are bending this delicate sport out of shape. So Teitel has sounded a shrill alarm about the "ominous effects" of Bill James, his Baseball Abstract, and the heretical writings of other "sabermetricians." So unnerved is the columnist that he comes down hard on both sides of the issue: simultaneously arguing that there is danger in knowing too much and that baseball is essentially unknowable.

Fuzzy logic aside, however, Teitel gives eloquent voice to the most common objections about the changing face of sports analysis. It isn't the new statistics themselves that bother him, but their profound impact on the game's time-honored strategies. "The vast bulk of sabermetrics research," he writes, "has a common time-bomb message: Brute power beats strategy every time." He goes on to argue that this approach destroys the very subtleties (the sacrifice bunt, stolen base, etc.) that attracted sabermetricians to the game in the first place.

Hmmm. It's quite all right to play the percentages, apparently, as long as no one bothers to figure out what they really are. For isn't that all James and his peers have done? Baseball people have assumed for decades that the intentional walk, the drawn-in infield and the sacrifice were good "percentage" plays. If those assumptions are false, it would seem a good idea to let them know. Or is the game somehow more "pure" when its practitioners are deluded than when they know the odds against them? By that logic, Roy Hartsfield is the quintessential baseball man, and Earl Weaver a threat to the game.

The flaw in Teitel's argument is his power-v-strategy theory, which ignores the rich strategic aspect of the new ideas. When you debate bringing in the infield and decide not to, that is also a gutsy piece of strategy. When you pitch to Eddie Murray with the tying run on second - knowing the intentional pass is a bad tradeoff - then you're making the kind of tough decision managers always have faced.

The crucial difference is in rejecting a century of wrong-headed conventional wisdom.

Baseball strategy may look a bit different when it's backed by hard research, but it is no less demanding. Fans might even find the game more exciting if modern managers adopted sabermetric (a term derived from SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research) theories about going from second to third on infield grounders, or scoring from third on anything hit to the outfield.

That said, however, we are indeed on the verge of a terrifying new era: the computer age. When the full force of artificial intelligence is turned loose on baseball, it will have no place to hide its secrets. There will be no more "hidden" stats that so delight the sabermetricians. Indeed, there will be little use for sabermetrics at all.

That might be what Teitel calls "the danger point beyond which knowing too much about a sport starts to ruin it." If so, it will not be the creation of sabermetrics.

Fans often lump the new thinkers together with computers, in one pernicious tangle of new-fangled ideas. Yet there is a wide gap between them, a crucial difference in their thinking.

Sabermetrics is, at its best, an art form - the creative use of statistics to chase the ghosts in baseball's machine. If there's no record of the balls a fielder misses, it looks for the answer in the ones he catches. It goes beyond the runs a batter drives in or scores, in a quixotic attempt to find those he "creates." When the game is fully computerized, there will be no need for such detective work. Want to know who has the best range in left field? Then ask the computer how many balls were hit toward each fielder, the number caught and the average distance that was run to get them. In seconds, you'll have your computerized Gold Glove winner.

A few more pushes of the button will reveal the ultimate record of each player's offensive contribution. Not just the bases he travels, but the exact number of bases he propels each of his teammates. Even the lowly sacrifice bunt, if it's still around, will be counted in this truly "total" average.

That will be an exciting era for the space-age breed of fan. And there are undoubtedly some statisticians who await it eagerly. Personally, I agree with Teitel: The game probably will become more sterile and predictable. It might even be ruined.