The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking

by Russell A. Carleton

Baseball can be such a tease.

“the plural of anecdote is not data.”

There are plenty of other baseball myths, and they all share the common thread of being based on fear and overly simplistic ideas that “sound right” rather than deep engagement with the data. This isn’t a problem unique to baseball. Politicians of all stripes have relied on similar arguments for centuries to advance their own agendas.

There’s part of me that realizes that being a baseball fan makes no logical sense.

You learn to be a fan of the game itself, even if you still feel a little tug to cheer for the hometown team because it’s still part of who you were growing up. The truth is that no one ever really finishes growing up.

Even after more than a century of what we have come to know as “Major League” baseball, the game is still consistently writing new line scores (i.e., the numbers of runs that each team scored in each inning).

in 2017, nearly 80 percent of all games ended with line scores that had never happened before in baseball history,

Nearly every game has its own fingerprint. Mathematically, it’s not all that shocking.

there haven’t been enough games played to get to all of the possibilities, and that’s before we allow that two runs could score in an inning.

There are new things to discover and appreciate every day in the game of baseball, much more territory than I or anyone else will ever be able to cover. Baseball is at once familiar and novel, same as it ever was and constantly shifting.

religion without a sense of humor is the most dangerous thing in the world.

There’s a false sense of security that comes with “doing the numbers”

Numbers are especially comforting specifically because they place a level of separation between a person and responsibility for giving bad advice. Despite the fact that I chose the data set, the variables, and the statistical methodology, it’s easy to pretend that the numbers somehow represent an advanced form of knowledge that is completely free of bias, one somehow superior to mere humanoid assessments.

The truth is that I am fully capable of asking the wrong question and getting the correct answer to it. The fact that I got my answer from a spread...