Nick Tyrell

The backlash against baseball analytics has always been bizarre to me. Some fans act like the data is somehow competing with what’s happening on the field. It’s not. We’re just getting better at measuring what happens during games and the data is derived exclusively from on field actions. Exit velocity tells you how hard the ball was hit. Launch angle tells you the trajectory. Chase rate tells you how often a hitter expands the zone. Pitch tracking tells you how fast a pitch is, how it moves and where it crosses the plate. Take thousands of those observations, find patterns in them and use those patterns to make better decisions. That’s analytics. Every serious industry on earth has spent the last few decades getting better at collecting data, identifying patterns and using that information to improve. Baseball somehow has a segment of fans who think the sport should be exempt from that. “Baseball Savant works until it doesn’t” basically means the measurements are fine until they tell you something you don’t want to believe. A guy can watch 30 plate appearances, remember the handful that confirmed what he already thought, and then dismiss a dataset containing thousands of pitches because his eyes told him otherwise. There are plenty of reasonable complaints about what analytics have incentivized. Maybe you preferred baseball before teams optimized bullpen usage, defensive positioning, swing paths or lineup construction. I prefer aspects of older baseball too. That’s a completely fair discussion to have. Where it gets ridiculous is when people start treating the underlying information as bullshit because they don’t like where it leads. These numbers come directly from the baseball you’re watching. The game has never been measured more precisely, and teams have never had more information available to understand why things happen. Your eyes are still useful. Scouting still matters. Context still matters. Data has limitations. But “I watched him play and I think he sucks” isn’t some higher form of baseball knowledge that overrides thousands of measured events. At some point, refusing to believe what the data consistently shows is just choosing your own anecdotal memory over evidence.