I enjoy Jonah Keri and I recently read his book about the Tampa Bay Rays and their new management team that brought Wall Street arbitrage techniques to baseball. The book was a great read and I flew right through it. Now I read this article and it reminds me of the problem with some of these sabermetric oriented baseball writers. Baseball is very approachable for a lot of fans to analyze because it has so many numbers that can be objectively analyzed and talented writers can take those numbers and objective analysis and provide fans with a brand new insight into a player and team's performance.
However, the numbers in baseball arise from the historical nature of baseball. Unlike most other professional sports in this Country, baseball has been a part of the fabric of the culture of this Country. I know it sounds cliche but its true. Yes football and basketball (and hockey to an extent) have a big place. But professional baseball has existed for more than 100 years and its been mainstream for essentially that amount of time. There is a poetry to be a baseball writer. Sometimes its about the humanity of the sport and the players behind it because sometimes we spend twenty years with these players.
When it comes to Derek Jeter, its been 17 years. And people forget that he signified a major shift for a group of Yankees fans that didn't have much to be proud about for the previous fifteen years. Its funny how the internet has changed baseball and the media relationship to it. No other sport has benefitted as much as baseball on the advent of blogs. It is the perfect sport for blogging because there is essentially daily content for seven months out of the year. Not to mention the off season where there is so much speculation about trades and free agents.
The other part of the change is how quickly the popularity of sabermetrics. Its amazing how quickly it was gobbled up by the people my age. I read the book Money Ball and even I was fascinated. I started reading more of Rob Neyer and Bill James, and I appreciated everything they were saying. The point of the sabermetric movement and Michael Lewis' book was with respect to people within the industry understanding how important these types of analysis would be to teams and those who were trying to predict and form opinions on either the players they were scouting, signing free agents or writers who were covering the sport. And it was true, there was this valuable resource that had been around for 20 years and no one in the mainstream media or the industry had really exploited it.
The one thing that got lost in all of it was that its a game and some of this IS supposed to be fun The concept of being traditional baseball fans and these new sabermetric fans became a black and white argument. There was nothing in the middle, you were either a sabermetric fan or an "old school fan" (for lack of a better description). It was a one sided fight, the numbers guys were all younger, technologically advanced and they were dealing with objective arguments grounded in statistical analysis. The problem was one of the things that attracted to me baseball was the history of the sport and specifically the romanticism of how people wrote about it.
The history of baseball and the fact that even the 1920's people were documenting (in detail) everything that was going on with the sport. The stars of the game were mythologized. A guy like Jackie Robinson had major cultural impact because of the presence the game had on this country. There is something fun about reading a book like "The Kid from Tomkinsville" when I was growing up because it wasn't about the statistical analysis. It was just about the game and how it "felt" to play the game. What gets lost in the numbers (and those that write about it) is the fact that we have all played baseball, so while we can't transpose ourselves as major leaguers, what we can do is think about that time in little league when we connected for our first big hit. The feeling as the ball met the bat and the slight pause to watch the ball sail past the outfielders.
Those feelings and the fun around a game is what gets lost in all of these numbers. Yes its fun to understand something but its also fun to just enjoy something. And no matter what anybody says, there is something subjectively appealing to watching baseball. Derek Jeter, for a Yankee fan, has this subjective appeal. He is built into these tremendous memories. Just like the guys who immortalized Mickey Mantle, Derek Jeter gets the mythology because he did so many things right AND he was a little lucky. I just wish some of these talented writers who focus on the numbers of the game would take the time to actual enjoy the game and let that show in their writing.
In the end the numbers won't matter as much as the memories. Joe D's 56 game hitting streak wasn't about the number, it was about the the man and the mythology that went along with it. Derek Jeter has had a harsh reaction because the numbers don't match up to the myth. I think time will change that and while those numbers people will never go away There will be a time when he is up in Cooperstown ready to make a speech and I will be there remembering the 300th hit, the dive into the stands, the play, the home run and all the other things that make Derek Jeter transcend beyond the numbers.
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