Logic will break your heart...
When Keith Law wrote his primer that distilled decades of baseball analysis into something user-friendly for the average fan, he called it “Smart Baseball”.
It’s an apt term, both for the book and for the entire manner of that our thinking about this sport has transformed over the past 20 years. And to some extent, the way that it’s seemingly gone to its most absurd and sometimes unseemly extremes.
When I started blogging about baseball regularly, I wanted to be a voice that at that time, I didn’t really see in the coverage I was reading. I wanted to share the voice of a smart baseball fan. (And please forgive the self-congratulation in that statement, because I know that much of my musings over the years have been more focused on smart-arsed comments than smart analysis.)
Looking back to 13 seasons ago, it was easier to stand out as “smart” in comparison to the ballclubs themselves. While the work that was being driven by the nascent but revolutionary analytics work of the Oakland A’s and – brace yourselves – the Cleveland Baseball Club, there was still a lot of baseball that was being governed by tradition and axiomatic knowledge. Things that today look something like superstition, or rationalizations that helped to insulate field managers from criticism.
Let’s be honest: It was really fun to be smug about how much smarter we were about baseball than some of the people being paid to make these decisions. Picking apart the ridiculous explanations of managers or front offices, or parsing and mocking the utterances of Joe Morgan or other commentators for sport.
What we wanted was for our team to not be the one that bunted runners over, or focused on batting average or pitcher wins or runs batted in. We didn’t want our lineups to be developed because of a player’s legacy of being a “run producer”, nor did we want the bullpens managed according to who had the royal jelly, or the closer’s mindset to lock down games.
And at some point, it became clear to one and all that throwing good money after bad to sign up veteran players and pay them for past performance was one of the quintessentially backwards mentalities that helped to derail franchises. And lord, please don’t let it be ours.
But somewhere along the line, a division seemed to grow between “smart” baseball and “fun” baseball began to diverge, and as a result, what we’re left with now are 30 teams in a race against each other to be the smartest and most risk averse team in the league. To set themselves up for perpetual contention at some point down the road, even if it means deferring the joy of winning in the present.
And fans have largely accepted this new catechism, or are at least ready to apply it when their team stumbles to assess blame on the management or ownership.
Fans at times like to have it both ways. They want their team to go for it, but when things go wrong, they wail at the clear stupidity of those in charge who could not see that they should have sold off hope earlier.
In the past 48 hours, the Boston Red Sox fired the general manager of their team, who 10 months previous, helped to deliver them a World Series Championship. But one down year, and poof! He’s done. And baseball’s chattering classes are mostly fine with it, because within the current context, Dave Dombrowski went counter to the new orthodoxy to win, but as soon as he lost (in relative terms), it was time to dust him and his now counterintuitive approach to adding talent to his big league ballclub.
And we’re all cool with this.
Today, Ken Rosenthal posits that one whole year into his contract extension, the Rockies should be rid of Nolan Arenado, because the new order says that there’s no good sense in having a good player on your roster if you’re not going to win today. Never mind that the Rockies had been a relatively competitive team through Arenado’s ascendance.
Look, no one said that fandom had to be logical, and every night through the season, I increasingly feel myself giving over to my reactive brain in the middle of a game that is going poorly. (Oh, and there have been so many that have gone poorly.)
But maybe this is maybe what the goal was all along, when it comes to the possible oxymoron of “smart fandom”: It’s to have fun and root-root-root for the home team, but to also develop a greater understanding for the game so that when it is over, you aren’t sharpening pitchforks, nor are you immediately focused on how to arbitrage your way to being better on some day down the road as opposed to now.
It’s about wanting to see good, winning baseball, but not necessarily pinching every penny to be spent on something supposedly smarter on another day. It’s about being okay with your team trying to win, ESPECIALLY when it doesn’t work out.
In many ways, I’m probably more aligned with the work that the Toronto Blue Jays’ front office has undertaken in the past year than I am with that of the Cincinnati Reds. But some days, I look at that team and am envious that they at least took a shot this year.
Over the coming seasons, all baseball fans are going to be asked to tilt the balance of their emotions towards forbearance and caution, and away from ecstatic enthusiasm. Set aside your passion, and come with us on an intellectual journey of abstemiousness.
Don’t feel, just think.
Man, does that ever suck. Too much of our lives are governed in this manner. It would be nice to have baseball be a place where we can find joy outside of the crushing reality of everything else.