For those who don't follow baseball, an at-bat can seem as simple as a guy with a club trying to hit a ball hurled from another guy standing 60 and a half feet away.
For those who follow baseball, it's about the hitter's batting average, and the velocity of the pitcher's fastball.
For those who love baseball, it's about the hitter's batting average against the right handed pitcher on the mound, and the late movement on the pitcher's 95 MPH fastball, the hitter's approach to the pitcher, the pitcher's strategy against the hitter, the hitter's at-bats on the day, the pitcher's last last three outings that haven't been so great, the hitter coming into the at-bat as 14 for his last 30, with 4 home runs and 12 RBIs...
And then...there are sabermetricians.
Sabermetricians are proponents of new school baseball ideologies. Sabermetricians use mathematical analysis, known as sabermetrics, to study advanced baseball statistics and numbers. Simply put, sabermetrics are the Lamborghini to old school baseball thinking's '95 Honda Civic. The word sabermetrics is (somewhat fittingly) derived from SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research, a group that was founded in the early 70s by Bob Davids. Davids organized a group of others much like himself, with their sole purpose to dissect, investigate and evaluate some of baseballs' more traditional numbers (batting average, for example), and come up with a more efficient and accurate way to determine a ballplayer's production and value. SABR has influenced other well-known statistical analysis groups today, such as Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs.
The main idea behind sabermetrics, to make it simple without delving deep into how statistics are calculated or derived, is to exploit inefficiencies in the statistics we use (and DON'T use) today and to find worth in undervalued players. 15 years ago, we would have viewed a player with a low batting average, a high strikeout rate and a low Runs Batted In (RBI) total as replaceable. However, thanks to sabermetrics, we look at a player more deeply than we ever have before. That player with a low average that barely matches his listed weight? He has a high On-Base Percentage (OBP) to counter his low average. OBP holds much more weight than average, since it dictates how often a player is on base (and by NOT giving up baseball's most valued commodity; outs), rather than knowing how often a player is on base by way of base hits. A player that's on base 40% of the time is only giving up outs 60% of the time. While a player with a .300 OBP gives up outs 70 percent of the time. Strikes out a lot? While it's an issue, it's not that serious of a problem, because striking out - while still giving up an out - is still better than grounding into a double play and giving up two. That 80 runs that he drove in? That's a low number, but RBIs are more reliant on the other players on your team getting on base and the context of the game. So, because we looked at more than just the surface numbers, we find out this player is more valuable than we originally thought. And since the players that exhibit these particular statistics well are incredibly undervalued in the open market, they come cheap. This is the perfect philosophy for smaller market teams who can't spend as much money as the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, etc.
(It's still important to note that hitting is still prevalent, but it isn't the end-all-be-all to what a baseball player should be.)
While sabermetrics and its supporters have been around for 40 years, it's growth has been stunted by classical baseball thinkers. First ballot Hall of Famer Joe Morgan has always been one of the biggest opponents of sabermetrics. Morgan, like many other players past and present, believe that baseball is a game that can't be judged by numbers. It's a sport that can't be judged by a couple of desk jockeys sitting with a TI-34 in a cubicle, crunching numbers until the last pitch of the season is thrown. In one of the better examples of this idea, Joe Torre quotes himself in his book The Yankee Years as telling Yankee General Manager (and closet sabermetrician) Brian Cashman, "Don't forget the game has a heartbeat." Sabermetricians have typically been ridiculed, bullied and rejected throughout their existence, since they can't seem to factor this into their equations. It's true, the game has a heartbeat. The game is played by humans. The game have players who demonstrate extraordinary amounts of courage, will and heart. But have you ever tried paying your bills with courage, will and heart? Doesn't exactly work that way. You try walking up to your manager with your piss-poor .269 OBP after being benched and saying, "But Skip, my intangibles are incredible!"
Sabermetrics have also given the game a slew of new school thinkers in high positions. General Managers such as Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics uses a more analytic approach to signing players. Beane and the 2002 Oakland Athletics were put in the spotlight in the 2003 book Moneyball written by Michael Lewis. The '02 A's were put together using sabermetric principles, such as OBP, to keep their payroll low (only around $41 million) and stay competitive with bigger market teams such as the New York Yankees (at over $150 million). Even though they didn't make it far into the postseason, the A's won an American League record 20 games in a row that season.
In addition to Beane, we've seen Theo Epstein (formerly) of the Boston Red Sox bring two World Series titles to Fenway Park after an 86 year drought, alongside the tutelage and guidance of sabermetric wizard and legend, Bill James (James is known as the godfather of sabermetrics). We're seeing sabermetrician (and Beane's mentor) Sandy Alderson rebuild a New York Mets franchise that was left decimated after Omar Minaya's failed "Latinization" of the team and broke because of owner Fred Wilpon's relationship with Bernie Madoff. Going back further, thanks to the baseball intelligence of then Yankee GM Gene "Stick" Michael (and then successor Brian Cashman), we saw the Yankee dynasty of the '90s built on basic sabermetric principles; drawing walks, hitting for power, getting on base.
Even with all the advancements made in baseball statistics and analysis thanks to sabermetrics, it still has its flaws. While there's an extensive and all-inclusive stat for almost everything now (including defense), that in itself lies a problem. That heart, courage and will that may not pay the bills is still an important factor for any big league ballplayer. There are the fabled "intangibles" that a player can have. In the 2006 Baseball Prospectus book Baseball Between the Numbers, the authors try quantifying the "clutch" ability of a player. That is, the ability to get big hits and drive in runs in game-changing situations. While they did a fairly good job presenting an argument as to why the clutch gene doesn't really exist, what they fail to realize is clutch is one of those things that you just...can't measure. You can't measure how a person feels against the pressure in any situation. When there's 50,000 screaming fans in attendance and it's the bottom of the 9th and the tying run is on second, you can bet that Tony Womack probably won't handle that situation as well as a Derek Jeter or a David Ortiz would. The bottom line? Maybe that sabermetrical Lamborghini isn't looking as sexy as we originally thought. However, there's one thing that's indisputable at this point; sabermetrics are saving and re-energizing baseball.
Sabermetrics aren't saving the game because they're better, more efficient statistics. Sabermetrics aren't saving the game because it's giving value to players that would have been on the scrapheap 20 or 30 years ago. Sabermetrics are saving the game because it has gotten fans, young and old, traditional and new school, more involved. It's gotten fans to defend their ideas. It's gotten fans to stand up for what they feel, is the right way to analyze the game. It's gotten players, retired or not, GMs, current or unemployed, out to the water cooler and fighting over ideologies like two Trekkies fighting over which incarnation of Star Trek was the best. Sabermetrics have given small market teams a means to combat the big bad Bronx Bombers, or the BoSox, or the Phillies, or any team in a big market that is used to spending exorbitant amounts of money to put butts in seats and wins in the ledger. Hell, sabermetrics has even gotten people that AREN'T fans to get involved, get interested, if only to analyze and wear out the digits on a calculator.
To even promote this idea further, the Major League Baseball (MLB) Network recently debuted a new show (MLB Now) that capitalizes on New School vs. Old School, by way of number-crunching sabermetrician Brian Kenny and retired ballplayer Harold Reynolds. They debate the days' hot topics, with Kenny taking the role of analyst and Reynolds standing in the corner of "human." In addition to this, more and more teams are including members of the new school ideology in their commentary booths to poke this beehive just a little bit more. (David Cone on Yankees broadcasts, just as an example.)
Sabermetrics are giving the game a proverbial face-lift. While everyone enjoys the long-ball, Major League Baseball needs to do everything it can to distance itself from the Steroid Era. With the book about to close on one of the darker chapter in the game's history, the sabermetrics popularity boom could not have come at a better time. Rather than having fans debating who's juicing and who isn't, they're arguing over whether or not Nick Swisher, a player who is revered by traditionalists as well as sabermetricians, is really worth the money the Cleveland Indians decided to pay him.
Whether you're a new school thinker or a baseball traditionalist, there's one fact that remains; sabermetrics are here to stay. I'd like to believe that both schools of thought will come to terms with one another and live together as well as a cat and mouse can some day, but until then I'll sit by idly and watch the war between the two rage on. However, with America's Pastime being over 200 years old, I can see and understand why traditional baseball followers want to stave off the onslaught of those pesky sabermetricians; don't fix what isn't broken. In the same vein, I can understand why sabermetricians want to change the way we think about the game, the way we watch the game and the way we analyze the game. There is a game within a game, whether traditionalists want to admit it or not. But the game also has a heartbeat, whether the sabermetricians want to admit that or not. There isn't a right or wrong way to think, but the important thing to remember as baseball fans is that whether you are new or old, traditional or advanced, whichever school you want to follow, baseball will always have drama. Baseball will always have excitement. Baseball will always have fun...
...because it wouldn't be nicknamed "The Show" if it didn't.
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