Atlanta Braves take full advantage of everything Jayson Werth is complaining about

The Origin of Stats

In the years before computers, all we had – as fans and as participants in the game – were our eyes.  Managers made changes based on their experiences and based on their instincts. We called such actions ‘gut feelings’ and the like.  In those days, the only things we’d see published in The Sporting News or our local newspaper were things like AB, HR, RBI, AVG… that was about it.

The best managers had their gut moves pay off more often than not.  But think about how this would be the case:  it’s because they had – in their heads – some kind of a metric… a trend, a scouting report, a matchup… that they believed would work.  All of these things came from observation and experience.

Moving forward, think about the “4D Chess” matches that Greg Maddux was said to have played with over-matched hitters.  He would make pitches in situations that he knew hitters would not expect because he would set them up months ahead of time.

How so?  Mad Dog learned this by probing good hitters.  Witness this:

"Good hitters, such as Pendleton or Chipper Jones, became a resource. Maddux wanted to know what they thought in certain scenarios. “He’d ask … if you know his best pitch is his change-up, are you going to [wait] on that change-up the whole at-bat?” Pendleton said. “I said, ‘I know you’ll throw your change-up with two strikes.’ He said ‘OK, good. If I throw it to the right place, you’re still not going to hit it.’”"

On the flip side, Chipper Jones was said to be about scrutinizing pitchers for weaknesses.  Tony Gwynn was the a pioneer and a King of the video room.  So what are these things aside from the proper application of a hyper-advanced metric?

These things are all the result of observation, investigation, and application… but they are born of human activity while sabremetrics represent a means of attempting to do the same with a computer.