The smart folks are right. But it is wronging baseball.
They are right that wins are a bad gauge of what kind of season a pitcher had, as Jacob deGrom is exemplifying this year.
They are right that batting average reveals far less about a hitter’s skills than 10 other metrics and that RBIs and runs scored are so highly dependent on the team around you as to not be as insightful into an individual as once believed.
I agree with it all. Yet, I believe part of the decline in passion for the major leagues is mixed into how we view these numbers.
For we keep telling one generation of fans they are dumb for caring about 20 wins or .300 batting averages or 100 RBIs, and the next generation of fans doesn’t care about them. But what has risen in its place to keep interest in players and teams and seasons?
It used to be that even if your team was out of it, you could still be engaged daily by a favorite player pursuing 20 wins or 100 runs or 100 RBIs. Baseball is novelistic, you turn the pages daily and the rewards are generally at the end of a long, challenging commitment.
As a kid, I was such a huge Pete Rose and Cincinnati Reds fan that I could not wait until the paper arrived each morning so I could calculate how much closer he was each season to 200 hits. I can remember my father, a lifelong Yankees fan, happy on the final day of the 1997 season that Bernie Williams hit a solo homer to reach exactly 100 RBIs. My dad felt he had taken both the career-long and season-long journey to accomplishment with a player he liked.
But as these numbers have been pooh-poohed — again, if I ran a team I would pooh-pooh them, too — we have lost a thread that connected eras. What are fans living and dying with individually these days? Is anyone tracking if their favorite has exceed five wins above replacement or if their most beloved pitcher had an xFIP that has dropped below 3.00?
I do think the pace of play is too slow and that there are not enough balls in play as ailments to the current game. But I also believe statistics have been the backbone of this sport. And between the Steroid Era and the Metric Generation, we have weakened that backbone, even as more revealing stats have been introduced.
It used to be if a player topped 20 or 30, but certainly 40 or 50 homers, we hailed it and remembered it. Now, the first instinct is skepticism, not exhilaration. Anticipation used to come with career marks of 300 or 400, but especially 500 or 600 homers. Albert Pujols reached 600 homers last year attended by more of a pin drop than ceremony. Pujols exceeded 3,000 hits this season, Adrian Beltre did so last year, but did it in an age in which we know collective times on base is more valuable than just the accumulation of hits. So where was the attention and euphoria?
There was a time that many fans could rattle off all the members of the 500-homer, 3,000-hit and 300-win club with the same efficiency as the names of their own children. Now? Maybe that is the internet and having the answers a mouse click away and, thus, no need to commit it to stored human memory. But a lot of this is lost passion based on drugs having soiled accomplishments and smart folks doing the equivalent of patting heads and saying, “Enjoy your archaic stats,” and making those who still cite them feel like fools. No one wants to work to be a fan or feel stupid.
Due to how many fingers are on each hand and how many we have in total, we like numbers that end in fives and 10s. This is fans’ leisure time. They want 20 wins, 30 homers, .300 averages or career totals of 300 wins, 500 homers and, yep, a .300 average. Easily calculable and understandable, simple to follow over long seasons and lengthy careers.
I just don’t see the day coming when fans are going to hang on players’ career amassing of ERA-plus or weighted runs created-plus. And, again: I agree that those are more revelatory. But we have taken away one language, replaced it with another and failed to appreciate what that change (as valuable as it might be in evaluation) would mean to both the history of the game and fan passion for it.
We know now that it is not worthwhile to extend a pitcher into workloads never before ventured into by that individual to pursue a no-hitter, and we even have told fans no-hitters are kind of luck-based and not that sexy because they come with walks or errors. But hearing someone was working on a no-hitter used to be a reason to flip on a baseball game. To care. Now, we tell them, “Nah, don’t care.” It is like telling moviegoers to only care about Oscar candidates and you are a fool if you invest in the latest Kevin Hart or Will Ferrell film.
If I ran a team, I would pull a starter who was beginning to run in the red, I would use reliever after reliever to attack games because numbers show that is most effective, I would not re-sign older players that even my fans have come to love because the flow charts show imminent decline, I would not care about complete games or .300 batting averages or 300 wins in any vital way while coldly deciding what is best, today, for my team. It all makes sense.
Unfortunately, it also is hurting the game.