If you haven’t seen Money Ball, you ought to. It’s an extraordinary biographical film that traces the ascendance of Billy Beane, the present general manager of the Oakland Athletics, from player to his current occupation. He is recognized as one of the inaugurators and promulgators of analytics in baseball. Perhaps overdramatized, the movie depicts Beane — restricted by dismal financial circumstance — as a ruthless boss with little regard for anything but winning on a budget. To achieve this, he uses analytics and sabermetrics, which are the application of statistical analyses to measure and compare player success quantitatively. Put simply, the purpose of using analytics and sabermetrics is to predict a player’s future output. I’d like to challenge the impact that these practices have on modern era baseball without undermining their value.
What’s most important is the value placed on Beane and his practices; the Boston Red Sox offered him a position for a record dollar amount, which he ultimately turned down. In a consequential and noteworthy move, Major League Baseball and its member organizations — like Beane — have invested time and resources to accumulate mass amounts of data on player performance. All of this, of course, is for the purpose of bolstering the use of analytics and sabermetrics as principle features of administrative thinking in baseball. While the origins and lifetime of these methods are contested among experts, their impact is indisputable.
These practices are best exemplified in one statistic: Wins Above Replacement (W.A.R.). BaseballReference.com, a preeminent source for baseball statistics, defines W.A.R. as a measurement of “how much better a player is than a player who would typically be available to replace that player.” In other words, W.A.R. discerns the number of wins for which a player is solely responsible compared to an average player otherwise capable of filling the role. This all sounds neat and tidy, doesn’t it? After all, the dream of statisticians, managers and general managers is to reduce a player to a number that determines their salary, playing time and general notoriety. The attractiveness of W.A.R. is its simultaneous complexity and practicality.
Problematically, though, these practices displace a certain human element from the predictive rationalities and thought processes of talent evaluators. All of this operates on one simple assumption: ball players — human beings, indeed — are reducible to numbers. I reject this. The human mind is not representative only in numbers. Are statistics valuable, especially in a baseball setting? Definitely. Should they be weighted equally or less than other elements? Certainly not. A player’s contribution and value extends beyond on-field production. The recent resurrections of the Kansas City Royals and the Pittsburgh Pirates are in part due to the use of analytics. Nonetheless, both teams give serious consideration to a player’s intangible qualities; leadership, focus, motivation and other qualities are not measured in W.A.R.
Human beings play baseball. Necessarily, evaluations of talent and success must include measurements of human-ness to be truly complete. Neither something as simple as batting average, nor the ostensibly robust calculation of W.A.R. includes these impalpable attributes.