WASHINGTON 鈥� I was sitting in the lobby bar of the Gaylord National Harbor Hotel last December as , catching up with a friend. At our table was one of the hundreds, maybe thousands, of young job seekers swarming the scene, looking for any in to be found.
This young man, a recently graduated college baseball player, wanted to work in baseball operations and had an upcoming interview. I asked him what I considered to be a very rudimentary piece of statistical knowledge for those working in the game 鈥� the difference between ERA and FIP (fielding independent pitching) — to make sure he wasn鈥檛 completely unprepared, only to find him staring back at me blankly.
It wasn鈥檛 this kid鈥檚 fault, his lack of knowledge about the statistics that govern baseball. Even though he鈥檇 spent his entire conscious life playing the game, he had never been exposed to the more effective tools of measurement, just as many casual fans are not. Most broadcasts still display old, dumb stats that don鈥檛 really tell us anything meaningful about the player at bat. But just because MASN still shows RBI on a player graphic overlay doesn鈥檛 mean that anyone inside the game puts any stock in the number.
Baseball broadcasts can be dumb. But baseball front offices are no longer dumb. The statistical revolution is long over within the walls of your local MLB club, where desks are manned by Ivy League grads and other mathematical minds analyzing data much of the baseball-watching public never sees. Yet those old, dumb numbers are still fed to us, mostly just because they鈥檝e always been.
In his most formal attempt to shake up that paradigm amid a career spent railing against the old guard, former MLB scout and current ESPN baseball writer Keith Law delivers 鈥�.鈥� A treatise designed to clearly demonstrate a better way to digest the numbers of the game, the book steers clear of overloading the reader with too much math or making too many assumptions. Imbued with Law鈥檚 trademark snark, it鈥檚 an all-levels primer into the changes the way we see the game have undergone and where baseball is headed next.
Law chatted with 海角精品黑料 about why he wrote the book, which stat he hates the most and why bunting is almost always the wrong decision. Listen to the full interview.
