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The Brains for Baseball

Over at National Review, John Derbyshire has cast himself as the one brave conservative who will stand up for Reason. He even quoted himself on The Corner recently, The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we […]

Over at National Review, John Derbyshire has cast himself as the one brave conservative who will stand up for Reason. He even quoted himself on The Corner recently,

The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers. For most people, wanting to know the truth about the world is way, way down the list. Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust. There is probably a sizable segment in any population that believes scientists should be rounded up and killed.

Somehow this got me thinking about baseball. Just this week, Buzz Bissinger, the author of Friday Night Lights and 3 Nights in August revealed himself as a member of this sizable segment. You see, Bissinger is a partisan for the poetry of baseball and seems to be against anything like a statistical analysis of the game. He describes mediocre players like David Eckstein as “scrappy.” That’s the baseball way of saying, “he tries real hard.” He brushes aside statistics as “fads.” He protests (too much) that 3 Nights was not written as a rebuke to Moneyball, the book that brought sabermetrics to the masses.

Bissinger also declared himself an enemy of the future. (video-NSFW) He said that sports blogs were dedicated to cruelty and to profanity (while unfurling his own string of four-letter pearls.) He asked the founder of Deadspin, Will Leitch, whether he had ever read W.C. Fields, (Leitch had). The exchange brims with age and class resentments. (Bissinger admits that he’s over 50. He went to Phillips Exeter and won a fellowship to Harvard. Leitch is just over 30 and went to a state school.) In retaliation for the offense against blogdom, the whip-smart (and occasionally profane) writers at Fire Joe Morgan went through a recent Bissinger feature and showed that once Buzz is talking to a old-timey baseball man, his critical faculties shut down. Bissinger wants to be a scribe for a shaman like Tony La Russa.

Bissinger’s lament is the most explicit complaint against the revolution that is taking over so many sports — football and basketball included. The old poets who wanted to share beers with Brent Musberger and pal around with their subjects are horrified at the sight of the calculator jockeys and muckrackers. Deadspin returns the scorn, paordying the old fashioned sportswriters. It’s devastating stuff. Look at this account of a recent Cardinals game against the Astros

In this deplorable era of specialty and short-timers earning nine innings green, the 100-point banner headline was not the winning safety or the angried up teams, but Iron Adam Wainwright. The Dab Hand of the Redbirds’ rotation rode the train to its terminus, the first Compleat Contest hurled by a Card this season, and only the 18th in all of base ball. Seems like only yesterday when the Big Train or Happy Jack would take mortal offense at the idea of replacement.

Probably the easiest explanation for this sabermetric revolution is the amount of money involved in sports. The David Wrights, and Stephon Marburys of the world are way too famous and way too wealthy to make the local beat writer into their pal. They don’t need the beat writer to even like them. And so sports bloggers who need little access are more than happy to expose an athlete’s debauched lifestyle and then explode the received wisdom of baseball’s priests.

On the other side, sports teams are willing to pay handsomely for the mathematical skills the spreadsheet-wielders have. Teams like the Oakland As and the Boston Red Sox have been hiring sabermetricians and getting to the World Series. Facts work. Facts about hitting and pitching mean winning more games, winning more games means more people in the seats, and more advertising revenue. It’s simple. And almost enough to almost make me agree with David Brooks that the revolution is cognitive.

Bissinger is wrong to see math and the blog-tabloid style as the enemy of his “craft,” his ability to “evoke a moment.” The writers at Faith and Fear in Flushing are at least as good as Bissinger. They just don’t feel compelled to indulge in all the vices of the old sportswriters – who, if we are to be frank, diminished the beauty of the game by being unofficial P.R. men for their subjects.

I welcome the future.

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