Death by Gibber

              Much if not all of what is killing baseball can be found in this sentence I ran across in a story that mentioned Yolmer Sanchez in today’s The Athletic: “The best defensive rating of any American League second baseman may not be enough to cancel out a woeful 74 wRC+ offensive figure in 2019.”  Say what? 

 Oh, “weighted runs created plus.”  That really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?  This is what analytics does, reduce players down to an equation (and you should see the one that produces wRC+).  Casey at the Bat?  Why, wRC+.  The Sultan of Swat?  Only if sRC+ says so.  And Yolmer Sanchez?  The lazy money’s on wRC+.

Baseball is in danger of turning scouting and coaching over to the equation crowd.  There is no way on God’s good earth that wRC+ can measure what a player like Sanchez brings to a team.  You want to know what organizations will do the best in this benighted age of analytics?

The ones that never lose touch of the human element in the game, that’s who.