Ahead of the Curve: Long way to go?

Yesterday I spoke with Brian Kenny, MLB Network broadcaster and author of a new book on, basically, how a lot of our thinking about baseball is wrong. The subtitle is “Inside the Baseball Revolution,” but I think “evolution” is more accurate. After all, it’s taken decades for some of the new generation of analytics to gain acceptance by the powers that be in the front office. Kenny certainly has some revolutionary ideas, but several commentators have noted, baseball, as perhaps the most tradition-conscious of the major sports, moves pretty slowly when it comes to change.

I won’t say I’m a “dinosaur,” the word — unkind in my opinion — used by Baseball Prospectus to describe former NY Times and notorious blog-hater Murray Chass — but I do think that some of these metrics go above and beyond my interest level when it comes to deconstructing the game. A few years ago I received a copy of Eric Blabac’s Encyclopedia of Baseball Statistics: From A to Zr. It’s obvious a lot of work went into this; after all, there are over 500 pages in the large format paperback. But are all of these stats really necessary? I may be wrong, but if I recall correctly, there are different formulas for calculating WAR (Wins Above Replacement), which is one of the new standards.

Back to Kenny: his new book is certainly not all about numbers. One of the most interesting sections has to do with the “importance” of wins in judging a pitcher’s value. According to Kenny, baseball should abolish that individual stat altogether. I won’t go into it in detail here; buy the book or listen to the Bookshelf Conversation which will be posted next week (actually listen and buy). But do we really expect that concept to be adopted any time soon?

Evolution, not revolution.

Here are a few pieces about Ahead of the Curve: