Money Ball is Killing Major League Baseball.

What can save the world's greatest sport?

Now that Major League Baseball is back on schedule, I thought I would take a look at the real problem of Major League Baseball: Money ball, sabermetrics and Statcast is killing the greatest sport in the world! The lack of action and the length of games as well as team front offices that are using these enhanced stats to drive the game to a nearly unwatchable level, are the result of the movement to a total stat based approach to baseball. I fear that if this trend isn’t reversed, MLB, already the third or fourth of the four major sports, (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL) might disappear from the sports landscape altogether.

From the beginning of professional baseball until 1998 (When Diamondback and Rays joined the league making it the 30 team league it is now) and especially 2002 (when Billy Beane started using sabermetrics in Oakland) the way to win a baseball game was to get runners on base, hit behind the runner to move them to second. Then drive them in with a hit. Sometimes you might be asked to bunt or steal a base, whatever was best for the team. Simple, right? The job of the pitcher was to try to get the batter to hit a ball to one of the fielders. There is an old but still true axiom for pitchers: “pitch to contact and let the fielders do their job”. A pitcher with plus stuff or great control would strike out some batters too but that wasn’t the main focus for them. The pitcher also needed to keep any eye on any runners on base to keep them from stealing, thereby moving into scoring position. A pitcher was expected to stay in the game as long as possible. If he was getting knocked around then the manager would pull him and put in a relief pitcher, but if the starter was doing well he was supposed to stay in the game as long as he could. The fielders just had to cleanly field any ball hit their way and throw out the runners or catch any pop ups. Outfielders had to catch the ball and hit the cutoff man and keep everything in front of them. Batters were expected to wait for a good pitch to hit, even if he had to foul off a decent pitch because he wouldn't have been able to get a hit with it. They were expected to do what was best for the team, not just their own stats. They might even be expected to sacrifice themselves to move a runner into scoring position. A good baseball player was judged by the eye of an experienced manager, coach, scout or fan. You could watch a player for a while and see if he was good or not. Sure, there were stats used in the “good old days” but nothing like today. All the stats were either just a total of something (hits, walks strikeouts) or an easily calculated average (ERA, batting average) and were used to confirm what you saw and figure out who would win post season awards. The halfway knowledgeable fan could figure out who was an All-Star, a great player, a good player, a role player or a minor leaguer player.

That's not how the game is played anymore, gone are the days of small ball, of players stealing 100 bases and pitchers having fifteen or twenty complete games a season. Now the way to win is having as many hitters as possible hit a homerun. Every players comes up to the plate to hit a home run, every time, no matter what the game situation is. Defense is changed too, now pitchers might throw five innings and then the team starts trotting out relief pitchers, sometimes more than one an inning. In today’s game the shift has become the go to defensive alignment. This means having more than the usual two defenders on either side of second base depending on what side of the plate the hitter hits from. It seems like teams are shifting on every play. In fact teams are shifting so much that players have to have it written down on laminated cards like a quarterback, you can see them checking it after every batter, it’s either in their back pocket or taped under the bill of their hat. The shift makes it hard for hitters, (who have been taught since little league to pull the ball), to get a hit. The shift is not a new thing, you can find references to it dating back to 1886 but it was seldom used, so seldom that most people never knew it existed. Over the last decade the use of the shift has exploded. At first it was only used against a few well known pull hitters like Mo Vaughn, Prince Fielder and David Ortiz. However, before long teams were shifting against nearly every player and as the number of shifts goes up the number of hits goes down. Just in the timeframe of the last CBA (2016-2021) pitches thrown when the defense was shifted went from 97,451 in 2016 to 121,995 in 2021, an increase of over 125% (just for context there are usually around 510,000 pitches in a season). Now, one could say that there are still plenty of pitches thrown without a shift and these are professional athletes so why can't they just hit the ball the other way to beat the shift. That's true, but the modern player has been told to forget bunting and going the other way to get a hit. He has been told that pulling the ball and hitting homeruns is his path to the Majors and they have has taken those lessons to heart. IF a player tries to beat the shift, it is most often unsuccessful and painful to watch.

Because of all these changes, there is much less action in the game then there used to be. In fact in 1998 a MLB fan would have to wait an average of 2 minutes 09 seconds between pitches put in play, meaning a baseball that was hit in between the foul lines. A homerun, a single, a fly out, whatever. In 2021 that went up to 4:07, a 29% increase. In that extra 1:53 I can go to the bathroom or get a snack and not miss anything beyond a pitch or two or a foul ball. I could also change the channel to something else, an outcome that is happening more and more. All of this down time also effects the overall length of the game. In 1998 the average game time was 2 hours 47 minutes in 2021 it was 3 hours 10 minutes.

Strikeouts used to be a Major League player’s quickest way to get a ticket back to the minors but now teams just don't care. In 1998 there were 75 players that struck out 100 times or more, with Sammy Sosa at the top of the list with 171. In 2021 there were 147 players with 100 Ks and Joey Gallo was first with 213 (Sosa would have come in seventh on that list). If we look at it another way, there were 31,893 strikeouts for all teams combined in 1998. In 2021 there were 42,145, that is a 32% increase. Since the teams today don't care about the large number of strikeouts their players are racking up there is no push to change anything as long as the players keep hitting homeruns. The focus on homeruns has actually made baseball less exciting not more. A player that is trying to hit a homerun swings hard and uses an uppercut swing. Those two things don’t add up to consistent success at the plate. This manifests itself in two connected ways for the baseball fan. First there are more strikeouts , which is good for the defense but bad for the fan, as it is both boring and slow. The average MLB at bat the ends in a strikeout, takes eleven minutes. Last year there were an average of nine strikeouts per team, per game. In 1998 it was seven. That may not seem like a lot, but that means four less balls in play per game and additional 44 minutes added to the game. The second way it shows up in the game is the increase of pop ups and easy fly balls. That batter swinging up at the ball is more likely to pop it up. Since 1998, the rate of infield flies and shallow to medium depth fly balls have increased 37%. Sure, those are balls in play and you never know what will happen, but more than likely it's an easy out.

This horrible trend started in 2002 when Billy Beane the General Manager of the Oakland A’s a “small market team” with a limited budget, was trying to figure out how his team could complete against the “big market teams” with a seemingly endless supply of cash to sign free agents. He ran into Peter Brand, a Yale economics graduate with radical ideas about determining player value. He maintained that statistics such as stolen bases, RBI’s and batting average, typically used to gauge players, are relics of a 19th-century view of the game. Brand said that the sabermetric stats like on base percentage and slugging percentage, perfected by Bill James, are a more accurate measure of a player’s value and these qualities were cheaper to obtain on the open market than more historically valued qualities such as speed and contact. The concept has caught on and even though the A’s never won a World Series using the method, it now is the prevailing thinking in all MLB front offices.

Today’s sabermetrics stats have categories that you need to have an advanced degree in statistical analysis to understand. One of the sabermetric stats that is really in vouge right now is Wins Above Replacement or WAR. WAR measures how many more wins Player A would get for his team over a AAA player brought up to take his place. A WAR over 8 is considered MVP level and 2 to 5 is a MLB starter. The upper limit is theoretically 162 but the highest ever calculated is 14.2 for Babe Ruth in 1923. I don’t like this stat because it assumes that every AAA player brought up is exactly the same and will perform at the bare minimum level. It also assumes that there will never been any unexpected occurrences in a game, like a normally good hitter grounding into a bases loaded, rally killing double play or an unforeseen homerun or error, all the things that make baseball a great game.

There are a whole host of ridiculous stats that measure all sorts of things, Runs Grounded into Double Plays, Runs From Positional Scarcity, Runs from Base Running (which doesn’t actually measure how many times someone crossed the plate but is essentially a measure of how good a baserunner you are) and a bunch of other strange things. There are just a few saber stats I think are worthwhile like; On Base Percentage and Slugging Percentage for hitters as well as Walks and Hits per Inning Pitched, Hits per 9 innings, walks per 9 innings and strikeouts per 9 innings for pitchers. I like these because they measure something that can be easily translated into something you can see on the field and explain to a player or another fan.

You can see all the silly saber stats here just scroll down to Value Added Hitting.

Statcast is just as bad, not for the absurd stats, but for the amount of data available for teams and how they have used it to change the game. In 2015 when all 30 stadiums received the Statcast technology, it was a neat thing for fans to see. It measured projected homerun distance, catch probability, exit velocity, baserunner speed, and cool stats like that. Fans could more easily see how fast and powerful their favorite players were and how hard baseball really is. The teams, on the other hand grabbed onto those stats and along with the saber stats changed the way they played the game.

As soon as the teams saw how launch angle and exit velocity equated with homeruns they started preaching those things to their players day and night. As they did, homeruns went up, but so did strikeouts and game times. In 1998 the average game lasted two hours 52 minutes. In 2021 it was up to three hours 11 minutes. Doubles, triples, RBIs, batting average and fan enthusiasm went down in that period as well. It didn't end there either, because Statcast also measures pitch speed, drop rate and spin rate for pitchers. Now pitchers are made and broken by how their pitches spin and how much they drop, rather than how fast they are and how hard they are to hit. There are plenty of examples of successful pitchers that didn't have the fastest pitches or the best stuff but instead, were able to put it right where they wanted to, seemingly at will. Hall of Famer Greg Maddux is a prime example of this, he was never at the top of the list for fastest pitch and there were other pitchers with better stuff but he got them to hit easy grounders and struck out more than a few batters, because he could move the ball around the strike zone and get batters to swing at pitches that were marginal at best. In today's MLB, I wonder if he would get a chance to prove himself?

To drive home my point, let’s look at some more stats.

Since 1998, runs per game has gone down from 4.70 to 4.53 and On Base Percentage has gone down from .335 to .317. Slugging Percentage has gone down from .420 to .411 and Total Bases have gone down 5%. Homeruns are up 17% but strikeouts have gone up 32%. Singles have gone down 12%, doubles 11%, triples 34%, RBIs 5%, runs scored have gone down 6%, walks 4% and stolen bases have gone down 48%.

For the defense, ERA was actually .16 runs a game better in 2021 than in 1998. Strikeouts are way up and walks are down (see above). Complete games have gone down 83%, complete game shutouts have gone down 72% and saves have gone down 6%. Batters hit by the pitch have gone up 25% and wild pitches have gone up 14%. Chances for fielders have gone down 8%, putouts have gone down 2%, double plays have gone down 17% but there were 27% less errors in 2021 than in 1998, this can, at least in part, be attributed to the lower number of chances for the fielders.

You can see that even though homeruns are up, every other offensive category has gone down and most defensive categories have gone down as well. I’m sure that there are people out there who want to see a game with an occasional homerun surrounded by a unacceptable number of strikeouts but I’m not one of them.

The modern day reliance on sabermetrics and Statcast, which is almost at a religious level at this point, has moved away from Billy Beane’s original intentions of putting together a winning team on the cheap. Teams today don’t care about the basic tenets of the game, they are just in a single-minded pursuit of the home run and the almighty dollar and it will be the death of the game if they don’t see the error of their ways. This style of play is not making the long-term fans very happy as it goes against everything they had known and believed about baseball from the beginning and that presents a real problem for the MLB. It has recognized for some time that their fan base is getting older and new younger fans aren’t taking their place. Right now baseball has the oldest average fan base of the four major sports at 57 years old. (NBA is 42, NHL is 49 and NFL is 50 for comparison). Major League Baseball has tried to shorten game time and increase excitement with rule changes but not only are they failing to attract younger fans, they are alienating the current fans with ridiculous changes like not having to throw four pitches for the intentional walk, seven inning doubleheaders and the international tie-breaker for extra inning games.

Unfortunately, the only solution to this problem is the hope that Major League teams will see that their attempts to make the game better is actually making it worse and they will get rid of the current crop of sabermetric gurus and “numbers guys” and get back to traditional team personnel who can turn the current trend around before it is too late. I don’t understand how these supposedly stat-centered people can look at the stats I have detailed above and not conclude that the game has a real problem. If they actually love the game how come they are not be doing everything they can to fix it? The answer to that question is simple. They don't care about the long and storied history and traditions of the game, they only care about money, fame and putting “their mark on the game”. The majority of the front office staff of Major League teams are people who consider themselves the “smartest people in the room” and believe that they know the best course for not just their team, but the Majors as a whole. I fear, however, that as long as they are making money that they are not going to change a thing and revenue is up across the league. In 2001 (the first year I could find stats for) the average team revenue was $119.4 million. In 2019 (the last year there were stats for) the average was $348.5 million and it will be even higher this year. In 1998 each team made $14 million from the league’s television deals, in 2022 it will be $100 million per team. So, the teams believe that profits will go up every year even though attendance from 1998 to 2019 (the last year with real attendance) has gone down 4% and team payroll has gone up 68%. We only have real data from two teams, the Atlanta Braves and Toronto Blue Jays and it is only because they are owned by publicly traded companies and have to release earning statements, so the actual profits are murky but with the average MLB team valued at $2.07 billion, according to Forbes, the profits must be high.

Read the whole report here.

If MLB doesn’t pull their heads out of their wallets and really start looking at the state of the game, they are going to find themselves without fans and once the fans go away the TV deals will be right behind them. When that happens the two main revenue stream for baseball will dry up and the greatest game in the world will cease to exist as we know it.

That’s the end of my rant today. Next time I think I’ll change it up and go light-hearted. Please share this post with your favorite baseball fan. Click the buttons below to subscribe, share or comment on this post.