Baseball is a game of inches and balance, not money and math

A half century ago, a Major League all star told catcher-turned-commentator Joe Garagiola that someone had stolen his wife’s credit card. Garagiola asked if he’d called the police, and he replied no “because the thief spends less than she does.”

Those were the days when you could get away with jokes about stereotypical free-spending wives. The world, and baseball, were about to become more serious — and less fun.

Every phenomenon, from Christianity to crypto, has its superstars, but there is always someone behind the scenes who sets the tone and establishes a framework that can endure for centuries. In baseball, that’s Henry Chadwick, an Englishman who was covering cricket for The New York Times, when in 1857 he happened upon a game of baseball.

A year later, he invented something that for the next 150 years would in America become as culturally iconic as apple pie and the automobile: the boxscore.

A novel written in the space of a playing card, the boxscore is ingeniously simple and complex. It is a time machine through which any fan can travel back to any year and understand a game without reading a word.

No other sport has this three-dimensional flashcard to explain successes and failures and breaking a team sport down into individual sub-dramas. Because of the boxscore, history became as important as the game itself. Chadwick’s other creations — earned run average, batting average — were established at the birth of the game, meaning it is possible to roughly compare players from different eras. (By contrast, sacks didn’t become an official statistic in football until 1982.)

Baseball endured scandal, ebbs and flows in popularity, relocation of popular teams and clubhouses full of characters who could barely stand each other. Manager Casey Stengel, asked the secret to success, said it was “keeping the guys who hate me away from the guys who are undecided.”

Yet the game itself remained so consistent that it connected generations in a way that no genealogy ever could.

The wheels of this blissful model began to wobble in the early 1970s, when CBS sold the New York Yankees to George Steinbrenner, and Bill James founded the Society for American Baseball Research, which became known for sabermetrics.

These two developments added two things the sport didn’t need more of: money and math.

The two forces played off each other, as Steinbrenner spent lavishly to buy championships, and math whizzes attempted to counter money with science.

In Oakland, A’s general manager Billy Beane adapted a process that became a book: “Moneyball: the Art of Winning an Unfair Game.” Beane was glamorized by Brad Pitt in the ensuing movie. The theory was laudable — the big-spending bullies could be outsmarted.

Thus, we bought in when traditional statistics such as batting average began to be elbowed out by on-base and slugging percentages and a convoluted combination of both that supposedly gave us a greater understanding of a player’s worth.

Math led to shifts that stacked defensive players on one side of the field. Shifts led to “launch angles” and “exit velocities,” hitting attributes that allowed batters to pound the ball up and over the shift. “Spin rates” came along which supposedly told you which pitchers could best counter launch angles and exit velocities.

Perhaps because of its noble beginnings and our modern perception of math as infallible, no one noticed that Moneyball doesn’t work. The Moneyball A’s never made it to the World Series, and the playoffs are littered with corpses of teams whose manager went “by the book” instead of what the eyes of any 12-year-old could have discerned (see Snell, Blake).

And the game became a mess. Fewer balls in play, fewer stolen bases, fewer spectacular defensive plays and games filled with so much strategy and counter strategy that they became tedious and horribly long. For those who like statistics here’s one: By the ninth inning of the average MLB game, 40% of the fans had left.

This year’s rule changes have removed 30 years of tarnish to expose the gleaming silver of the game, the game whose soul had been crushed by accentuating science over art.

This is — baseball. The baseball of the ’60s and ’70s when Baltimore Orioles pitching coach Ray “Rabbit” Miller demanded of his pitchers that they work fast, change speeds and throw strikes.

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Baseball is a game of inches and a game of balance. Chadwick’s brand of math, one that doesn’t overthink, has proved its mettle. This applies to more walks of life than sport and might explain why a society that increasingly relies on computers for everything can so often go off the rails.

Art still matters. So does heart and guts, things that computers can’t measure. As Stengel also said after winning it all, “I couldn’t have done it without my players.”

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 8:35 a.m. April 10, 2023, to correct the spelling of Casey Stengel's last name. Herald-Mail Media apologizes for the mistake.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Pitch clock undoes the mess made by Steinbrenner, sabermetrics