Jocks vs Nerds

For the first time I can remember an early June baseball game, involving two teams that do not even play in the city in which I live, was appointment viewing for me. The Nationals highly-touted prospect, Stephen Strasburg, was making his big-league debut a year after being drafted and thanks to the MLB Network I got to see all of it. After a year of hype I felt almost obligated to see how he would do, even if it would be against the lowly Pirates. He was, in a word, awesome. The game itself was really fun to watch - Strasburg was dealing, the fans were really into in and it was over quickly. [Sidebar: I had forgotten how much fun baseball can be to watch when there are a couple of mediocre, free-swinging teams going against good pitching. I'm used to Red Sox hitters grinding out 19 pitch at-bats, but Strasburg pitched 7 innings and was out of the game within two hours, so I was able to flip over to the start Celtics game before starting line-ups and I never missed one of his pitches. The timing was perfect.] I'm really happy for everyone who is a fan of the Nationals. The only complaint was the announcing team of Bob Costas, John Smoltz and Jim Kaat.

I don't have any problem with how they called the actual game (though Costas did jump to hyperbole on occasion), but more how they talked about the fact that Strasburg was on a pitch count. Both Kaat and Smoltz were pitchers and they spent most of the night complaining about how Strasburg is going to be limited in how many pitches he'll get per game and how many inning he will be allowed to pitch this season. They kept harping on scenarios such as 'what if he's got a no-hitter going' or 'what if the Nationals are in the wild-card hunt'? First off, neither scenario is very likely, so let's all calm down about it. It's along the same lines of 'what if a meteor is heading towards the stadium'? I say we can cross that bridge if we ever come to it. I know that Smoltz and Kaat are old-school players, but their open complaining about the new-school way players are coddled was annoying. It was all just a subtle dig that they think the stat nerds are in charge. Kaat even fell to the old athletes-know-best cliche and wondered if, "whoever is making up these pitch counts has ever toed the rubber."

Look, I get that the new generation of baseball executives can rely too heavily on statistics. And yeah, the analysts are probably right to a degree. A math formula can't tell you every thing there is to know about a guy. On statistics alone you would think Albert Belle is a Hall of Fame player, but if you ever interacted with the guy you know he was actually a clubhouse cancer who shouldn't be allowed near the building. But, the flipside is that having more information you can then use to make a better-informed decision is never a bad thing. With the amount of money the Nationals have invested in Strasburg perhaps it's best to air on the side of caution until they find out if his arm is made of Swiss cheese or titanium. When all these old players-turned-studio talkers just openly dismiss the new wave of statistical analysis it takes on a certain "Get off my lawn, you punk kids!" feel to it. It's the main reason I don't like Joe Morgan. He said he disagreed with everything in Michael Lewis' "MoneyBall" book, but then later admitted he has actually never read the book himself. Just like Tim McCarver was once ranting about how he disagreed with Bill James' idea of how you should treat a closer, only what he thought James said was completely inaccurate (showing he also clearly never read any of James' work) so he was ranting against the wrong position and made himself sound extremely ignorant. The answer, as always, lies somewhere in the gray area in between the extremes of the argument. While statistics can be a nice starting off point, a player should still have to pass the eye test. Also, I think baseball should have more new-school executives on the air and maybe we could have some balance in the discussion.