Baseball’s blessing, curse: time, numbers
For more than a century, baseball took pride in its singular blend of the pastoral and the scientific. Time never seemed to matter, and a very traditional set of numbers bound the generations.
It’s a shame those days are gone. Major League Baseball has completely botched its attempt to shorten the games, and the landscape of statistics is littered with confusion and distrust.
If you recall the spring training climate, Commissioner Rob Manfred seemed obsessed with game times. Television’s betweeninning breaks were shortened, support gathered behind pitch clocks (probably not until the collective bargaining agreement expires after the 2021 season), and plenty of optimism surrounded the reduction of mound visits, the intentional walk without pitches, and reminders from umpires to keep hitters and pitchers from wasting time.
Behold the results: Through Sunday, the average MLB game time was 3:09. Longest in history when compared to seasonending figures.
To great extent, the juiced ball has rendered all other factors irrelevant. With balls flying out of the parks at a ridiculous rate, innings have grown longer and the amount of pitching changes has become overthetop intolerable.
Nobody’s admitting to specifics on why the ball is traveling so much farther this year, but it’s undeniable. Couldn’t be more obvious, especially in the minors, in which TripleA teams abandoned balls manufactured in China and switched to the
CostaRica based Rawlings versions used by MLB.
What difference did it make? How about a staggering jump (58%) from last season in TripleA homers?
None of this matters to fans who just want to watch baseball and don’t care how long it takes. It’s not a big deal if Josh Donaldson steps out of the box to gather himself, or Max Scherzer gets a little too deliberate on the mound. That’s the game as we’ve always known it. But you’d think there would be some effort on the umpires’ part to address excessive dawdling. And when it comes to the cheap home run, it’s not so bad if it turns your team’s 53 deficit into a 65 lead.
That hardly eases concern among MLB executives, for when it comes to the juiced ball, there is no apparent remedy. Tired of watching routine flyballs soar over fences, particularly to the opposite field, pitchers would welcome a change. But how would that play with the multitude of hitters who have adjusted their swing to a launchangle approach and have watched their power numbers soar?
There’s no reasonable way out — and that goes for the statistical side, as well. As a fan, it’s pretty discouraging to have monitored the numbers a certain way for decades on end, only to suddenly be called a dummy.
Among the hardliners in the analytics camp, there’s not much to learn from batting average, runs scored, RBIs or pitchers’ wins. Not when those numbers are measured against far more sophisticated categories that break down performance in greater detail. Their argument is unassailable — but what about the millions of fans who really don’t give a damn?
It’s exasperating enough for older fans who feel perfectly secure in their ways. But it must be uncomfortable for Millennials to be ridiculed over a groundlevel acceptance of statistics.
“Hey, that’s his 100th RBI,” one might say, excitedly.
“Means nothing,” comes the reply. “Let me show you the stats that really matter.”
We’re not here to discount the value of comprehensive data, but it’s no longer cool to open a newspaper, or peruse the internet, to check on players’ traditional numbers. And so breaks a thread that has connected fans of all generations for decades. Whatever changed the playing field — particularly segregation, steroids and philosophical shifts — it was fun to measure George Brett’s .390 average against George Sisler’s .420, Sandy Koufax’ 279 season against Lefty Grove’s 314, or Rickey Henderson’s 146 runs scored against Ty Cobb’s 147.
How does a shattered thread get repaired? In this case, I’m not sure it’s possible.
The dilemma spreads into the broadcasters’ booths. Jon Miller, Dave Flemming and Ken Korach are among Bay Area announcers who devote much of their preparation time to advanced analytics, cherishing the torrent of fresh information. But when the “On The Air” button gets pushed, they’re in retreat. They really have no choice.
“Even if we like the new stuff, how much can an audience actually absorb?” Flemming said. “The answer is not that much. There’s an arrogance behind the theory that your audience is listening to every word you say so closely that they can understand some long explanation of numbers. That’s not how it works. I won’t say there isn’t a place for it, but it’s never a good idea to confuse your audience.”
Korach pointed out that “the first thing is always the game on the field. Whatever you want to talk about, you can’t divert your attention away from the game. I’ll always feel that stories, anecdotes and humaninterest elements are still the most important thing. An overreliance on stats is like the drunk who uses the lamppost for support and not illumination.”
Miller said he’s “fascinated” by advanced metrics, “but as for the broadcast itself, I’m back to listening to Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons. ‘Here’s Willie Mays, hitting .317 with 26 homers and 59 RBIs.’ Those numbers give you a little snapshot of the kind of season he’s having, and they still carry a lot of value in my mind.
“They say you’re stuck in the past if you use those numbers. So you take a bunch of coaches and managers, guys who have been successful for 20, 30 years, and none of ’em know what they’re talking about? Those are the people who do know the game. And as much as I’d like to enlighten the audience with expansive data, there’s just no time to explain it all. Why would I get into WAR when there’s more than one version of it? Even OPS, that has to be explained to a lot of people. How often am I supposed to do that — every day?”
Baseball has been dealing with doomsday forecasts since the days before World War I. It’s too slow, interest is on the wane, no hope, prepare for extinction. And it’s always complete nonsense. This is a game that cannot be killed, and if you don’t believe that, perhaps you’ve missed the spectacle of skilled, joyous kids contesting the Little League World Series each year, with an everincreasing amount of global participation.
As for MLB’s view on things, one can only marvel at the lunacy. A few weeks ago, on Players Weekend, players were asked to have some fun by placing nicknames on their backs. It sounded good, until
every ballpark found one team dressed in all black (terrible idea at any time) with names and numbers barely discernible. The other team’s players, in all white, came disguised as house painters. The SherwinWilliams Invitational. Names and numbers were practically invisible, and you had to wonder, who the hell comes up with an idea like this? And is it heartily approved in a room full of executives?
These are the people in charge of preserving baseball’s integrity, and it’s a good thing the game has such remarkable staying power. There are cracks in the foundation, and the repairmen don’t have a clue.