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

As a fellow ‘get off my lawn’ guy, I can understand Jayson Werth’s rant.  But sometimes you do actually have to lay some new sod on that lawn.

The Atlanta Braves are doing a lot of new work with advanced baseball metrics – even ramping up previous efforts that were underway prior to the arrival of Alex Anthopoulos.  But to hear former rival Jayson Werth talk about such things, he believes that the sport of baseball is being ruined by such things.

In a wide-ranging interview held via the Howard Eskin Podcast (radio 94 WIP in Philadelphia), Werth talked about his attempts to play again this season and about some of the complaints he has about the current state of the game, which dovetailed off of a conversation about new hyper-Sabremetrically-inclined Philly manager Gabe Kapler.

Here (transcribed) are some of his key statements from the interview linked above:

“I think it’s killing the game… It’s to the point where – just put computers out there…and let ’em play. – we don’t even need to go out there anymore.  It’s a joke.” “It’s crazy… when they come down – these kids… from M.I.T. or Stanford or Harvard… wherever they’re from… never played baseball in their life… the question [from Howard] was asked about the shift, well should I just bunt it over there [toward the hole]?  They’re like ‘no, don’t do that – we don’t want you to do that – we want you to hit a homer’… It’s just not baseball.” “We’re creating something that’s not fun to watch; it’s boring, it’s… we’re turning players into robots; they’ve taken the human element out of the game… I’m not a big fan of the instant replay…more rule changes in the past 5 years than in the first 120 combined.” “It’s worrisome – It’s a beautiful game and I think it’s getting screwed up.”

This requires some discussion.

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.

So what are advanced stats?

I am a software engineer by trade.  What I do is actually not unlike what the sabrematricians do:  attempting to take the available data and developing tools to recognize patterns.

Take facial recognition software as an example.  You or I can look at two different photos and usually decide instantly whether they are images of the same person.

To simulate such behavior, computers must be taught to do what we intuitively do via our minds and our sight… and that’s a difficult task.  Programmers must come up with a variety of tools – control points, stats, etc. – to be able to mimic our innate ability.

But it’s an imperfect science.  I am reminded of Helen Hunt’s line in the movie Twister about state of the art in tornado warnings: “They’re not good enough, they’re nowhere near good enough.”  The same thing applies here, too.

The holy grail of this new science would be to guess what any hitter’s outcome is going to be for any given plate appearance, pitcher, pitcher’s repertoire, location, weather, trends, etc.

Now granted:  this goal will never be achieved.  But you can make better educated guesses about such things… and here’s a bulletin:  managers have been using such tools for longer than you might believe.

This actually isn’t all together new

Are you old enough to see a camera panned into a dugout while a manager and his bench coach are flipping pages in a notebook?  You think that’s only a list of players that he still has on the bench to use?  Nope… such “charts” as they were called were trends of player performance vs. pitchers – done in an era before computers made it much easier to store, manage, and retrieve such information.

You recall when pitchers ‘charted pitches’ before an upcoming start?  You think that data was just thrown in the trash afterwards?

No – it’s all data:  every bit of it.  From Strat-O-Matic baseball cards to Bill James to modern stats… you can draw a straight line from ‘old school’ baseball to today because every team has always wanted an edge to gain an advantage over their competition.

Werth’s Last Stand

Werth, who is now 39, still believed early this year that he had something more to give that teams could use, and told Eskin that after having been advised by his “former” agent (Scott Boras) to “wait” on offers made early in the off-season, he finally decided to “take matters into [his] own hands”.

With some evident disappointment in his voice about the process he was forced to go through – and this is why he fired Boras – he personally called every team to see if he could get an opportunity to play in 2018.

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table

Werth talked to nearly every GM, finally getting a AAA chance with Seattle, but hamstring injuries, timing, and more conspired to leave him home and retired by mid-June.  It was kind of sad to listen to this.

Well… there was one team he didn’t call when he was beating the bushes in looking for work…  one team that he said he would not play for.

The Mets.