Now that the baseball season is in full swing, allow me to quote a couple of “impressive” achievements from early in 2025.
According to Underdog Fantasy’s Justin Havens, Tatis is the seventh player in the Wild Card era to record at least four home runs, six stolen bases, nine RBIs and 13 runs in his first 15 games of a season.
Then there’s this one.
According to OptaSTATS, the Padres are the first team in 149 years to throw at least five shutouts while allowing fewer than 12 total runs over the course of their first nine home games of a season. The St. Louis Brown Stockings are the only other team to achieve the feat, doing so in 1876 – the first year of MLB action.
Last season the San Diego Padres became the only team in MLB history to have had a triple play, a no-hitter, back-to-back-to-back home runs and a comeback win after being down eight or more runs in the same season. Is that a historic accomplishment? Statisticians have a word for such statistics–coincidence. The statistician’s adage is if you torture the data enough, eventually it will tell you what you want to hear–whether it’s true or not.
You can see how baseball’s excessive record-keeping can be used to create seemingly impressive statistics out of thin air. I can imagine a baseball broadcaster breathlessly announcing that Joey Rasputin is the first left-handed third-baseman to throw out a right-handed hitter on a ball hit at less than 82 miles per hour in extra innings of a rain-delayed game for the final out.
Now during broadcasts, we’re told the speed of every pitch, the speed (and launch angle) of every batted ball, how far, down to the inch, a player’s lead off first base is, and how many seconds it took him to go from first to second.
Sure I’ve always had problems with the old-style baseball statistics. Any actual fan could have told you decades ago that On Base Percentage is a better measure of a batter’s value to a team’s offense than mere batting average, since, in most instances, a walk is as good as a single. Or that slugging percentage is probably a better measure of a player’s value than Runs Batted In since RBIs depend on who’s on base in front of a batter. I’ve also always had a problem with “Earned” Run Average. If a pitcher hits a batter, putting him on first, then throws two wild pitches, advancing him to third, and balks to bring him home, sure, that’s not an earned run in the sense that the offense had nothing to do with it, but how is it not the pitcher’s fault? Likewise if a reliever lets in both runners that the previous pitcher left on base, but then no more, he gets a pristine 0 for his ERA calculation. I thought, “It’s not my fault, Ma,” excuses were relics of a whiny childhood.
These days you’re just as likely to be confronted with Wins Above Replacement (WAR) as you are batting average. I defy you to tell me how to calculate WAR. For all I know it’s from a proprietary ouja board, kept in a Sabremetrics safe that is ceremoniously opened every other Wednesday. The first response to the introduction of the new stats was to make baseball boring by rewarding only home runs and ignoring strike outs, so that’s all you got. That made everybody want to be a straight pull hitter, resulting in “the shift” not seen since the days of Ted Williams, where, against left-handed hitters, the shortstop moves to the right field side of second base and the second baseman plays shallow right field, while the 3rd basemen tries to somehow cover the entire left side of the infield. Baseball last year even introduced a new rule to limit the shift. Of course, the obvious solution to the shift is, “Hit it the other way, bozo!” With the shift, all you have to do is stop your swing half-way, and even a weak dribbler will get you on first if not all the way to second. I’m happy to report that the Padres are among the few teams bucking the trend and just trying to keep getting on base, run the bases smartly and aggressively, and leave it to the next guy to drive you home. Last year it took them just shy of the World Series, and this year they’ve been hovering in and out of the best record in baseball.
Despite it all, I’m still grateful for The Man Who Saved Baseball.
Musings of a Restless Mind 