Gary Seymour, sports@wolfrivermedia.com
With their league-low payroll of $63 million, the Milwaukee Brewers are the Dollar Store of Major League Baseball.
By contrast, the Los Angeles Dodgers are forking out about four times as much, and not coincidentally, the Dodgers are considered among the favorites to win the World Series. The Brewers, meanwhile, are a 200-1 long shot, with the next closest weak sisters checking in at 150-1.
There is a long-held belief that in business you have to spend money to make money. Baseball’s corollary is that you have to spend money to win titles, and in most years, that has proved to be the case.
But the arrival of advanced statistics altered part of the conventional wisdom, re-directing the conversation to which type of a player’s performance numbers to consider while building a team.
In past years teams would reflexively seek the big-numbers guys who knocked out 35 homers or saved 40 games.
Then came “Moneyball,” a book and then a movie about the low-budget Oakland Athletics in the early 2000s.
Their strong 2002 and ’03 seasons were attributed to general manager Billy Beane’s wily use of “sabermetrics” in putting together the bargain-basement group that won 199 games and 2 division titles.
Sabermetrics, a term to describe statistical analysis, comes from the Society for American Baseball Research and are used in an effort to quantify a player’s overall value.
In this vein, statistical categories such as Wins Against Replacement, Linear Weights and Extrapolated Runs complement and occasionally supersede the traditional standards like runs batted in and strikeouts.
Sabermetrics became a hot item with not only front offices but also the agate-page junkies, who found exotic new stats to pore over.
More recently in baseball’s evolution came Statcast to further the analytical picture. Statcast is a state-of-the-art device that combines radar and optical tracking technologies to record every element of every play in every game. The velocity of the pitch, the angle of the bat at impact, the speed of the defender getting to the ball and his arm strength in throwing it are all there, in 3D pictures, for the edification of each MLB team.
Just as Moneyball had its Billy Beane story to validate the merit of sabermetrics, Statcast was proved useful by the career arc of Houston pitcher Collin McHugh.
McHugh was a washout with the Rockies and the Mets, going 0-8 in two seasons, but through the use of Statcast it was revealed that despite the lousy won-loss record he had something special going for him: a fantastic spin rate on his curve ball.
The Astros claimed him off waivers and urged him to make his knee-buckling hook the centerpiece of his repertoire. They’ve gotten a great return on investment so far. McHugh has gone 43-26 in three years, including a 19-win season two years ago, and is an important part of Houston’s being regarded among the top five or six teams to win the World Series.
Cutting-edge breakthroughs like Statcast are exciting stuff, and like many of the advances in technology, they lead you to wonder what’s next. Given the ever-improving technology and computer applications, nothing is out of the question.
Neurological analysis of players’ fight-or-flight response could become a trend, for example, to better guess which ones will or won’t choke at crunch time.
Maybe there’s a remote, real-time MRI around the corner that measures wear and tear on a pitcher’s arm after every pitch. Such a machine would have been useful to the Astros, who recently put the curveball-snapping McHugh on the disabled list for six weeks with an elbow injury.
Whatever the future holds, the science of baseball has come a long way in unraveling the mysteries of the game. Once upon a time, it was all explained away by saying it’s a round ball, a round bat and you’ve got to hit it square.