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Bill James, who is considered the godfather of modern baseball analytics, says that analytics are now ruining the game.
James is a statistician who founded sabermetrics, which are named after the Society for American Baseball Research.
My goal in starting sabermetrics was to use measurement and logic to address basic, large-scale issues about baseball and sports. Why do teams win? What are the characteristics of a winning team? How are runs created? What elements of an offense are most important?
— Bill James Online (@billjamesonline) July 2, 2024
Sabermetrics served as the foundation of the Oakland Athletics’ legendary moneyball season in 2001. But now James says that baseball has trended too far in that direction.
Bill James Goes On Lengthy Rant Decrying The Use Of Analytics In Baseball
“My goal in starting sabermetrics was to use measurement and logic to address basic, large-scale issues about baseball and sports. Why do teams win? What are the characteristics of a winning team? How are runs created? What elements of an offense are most important,” he tweeted. What is the aging curve? When is a player’s prime? What types of players (and what types of skills) age well? What is a player’s economic value? Why do franchises succeed or fail? What is the relative importance of the draft vs. trades vs. payroll?”
James now says that baseball is too focused on small measurements that have made the game more difficult to watch for fans.
“The vast proliferation of (and fascination with) small measurements (exit velocity, pitch counts, pitch movement, launch angle, etc.) represents not the success of sabermetrics, but its failure. We have fallen back into details. It is like our clothes have been caught in the machinery,” James wrote.
He still understands the use of more focused metrics.
“Of course new measurements are valuable and the process of measuring new things is vital to the development of knowledge, and of course my work has fed that stream or work.”
But James believes that newer metrics are counterproductive when it comes to the good of the game.
“The fact is that the development of real understanding about the essential questions that form the game–all games–has essentially stopped,” James writes. “No one really works on them or writes about them. At some point, our field must find the courage to set the decimal points aside, and return to the study of basic, large-scale questions about which we know no more now than we did in 1970.”