The forefather of baseball analytics believes the reliance on data has gone too far in the sport.
Bill James, the sabermetrics pioneer who authored the widely influential “Baseball Abstract” books in the 1980s, took to X on Tuesday to discuss the state of sports, focusing on the analytics-driven mindset in baseball.
The former Red Sox advisor said he started his venture in sabermetrics to focus on the “large-scale issues” in baseball and other sports, and he added that he and others had great success in this field of study.
However, the 74-year-old now believes the current iteration of the game has been “hijacked” and that there has been too much of a focus on “details.”
“We studied those with some success for a period of time, and then the field was hijacked by the computer guys,” he wrote in a thread on X. “The vast proliferation of (and fascination with) small measurements (exit velocity, pitch counts, pitch movement, launch angle, etc.) represents not the success of sabermetrics, but its failure. We have fallen back into details. It is like our clothes have been caught in the machinery.“
James did not specify exactly which “computer guys” he meant.”
Despite the rule changes — chiefly, banning infield overshifts, implemented by the league in 2023 to increase balls in play and thus, in theory, have more hits, the major league average heading into Tuesday’s play is .242 — lower than the league-wide average in 1884 (.243).
This downturn in offense has come amid pitchers focusing on harder velocities and better spin rates, among other data points — with many Statcast numbers publicly available online.
The three true outcomes (strikeouts, walks and home runs) have become ubiquitous in baseball over the last decade, bringing less action on the field.
James, in his analysis of the sport on social media, believes people need to go back to thinking about bigger questions and not get bogged down in the minutia.
“The fact is that the development of real understanding about the essential questions that form the game — all games — has essentially stopped,” he added. “No one really works on them or writes about them. At some point, our field must find the courage to set the decimal points aside, and return to the study of basic, large-scale questions about which we know no more now than we did in 1970.”
James, who was written about at length in Michael Lewis’ book “Moneyball,” left Boston’s front office in 2019.
