Jul 28, 2018 By John Steigerwald for The 5 min read

Are defensive shifts killing baseball?

Maybe, but the stats that help managers and scouts devise the shifts may be killing the game just as much. Hits haven’t been this rare since before the designated hitter was introduced in 1973 and you won’t find anybody in Major League Baseball who will deny that shifts are a major reason for that.

Let’s be clear. I think MLB’s ridiculous revenue disparity ruined baseball a long time ago, but I think the shifts and the new stats are making the inevitable slow death move a little more quickly.

In a piece in The Athletic on Andrew McCutchen’s first 100 games with the Giants, the writer, Andrew Baggerly, pointed out that, while McCutchen is only hitting .256, he has put 123 balls in play with an exit velocity of 95 MPH-plus and his line drive rate is 26.1, the highest of his career.

There was a time when a manager or a scout could be aware that a guy was making good contact and hitting the ball hard without knowing the exit velocity.

Maybe those tools make it easier for managers and scouts to evaluate players but a large number — maybe the majority — of the geeks who write and talk about baseball will laugh at you if you mention a player’s batting average and RBI in their presence. They’ll tell you those are meaningless stats and suggest you come into the 21st Century.

Their fancy-schmancy analytics might give them a more precise evaluation of a player’s production or value but they’re putting the average sports fan to sleep.

A kid in the third grade used to be able look at the back of a baseball card and get a pretty good read on how good a player was. He probably knew how to figure out his own batting average.

They didn’t put a guy’s hard-hit rate on the back of baseball cards. McCutchen’s is 46.4 percent according to the Athletic, by the way. That’s the best of his career and sixth in the National League.

Whatever happened to hitting ’em where they ain’t?

McCutchen’s chase rate is his lowest since 2010 and I’m sure you remember how well he chased back then.

I think the stat geeks’ favorite stat is WAR. That’s wins above replacement. It’s supposed to give you the number of wins a player is worth compared to a triple-A player or a bench player who might have to replace him.

I always knew that Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, and Barry Bonds were probably worth more wins than who would replace them without WAR.

Are you ready for the formula for WAR?

This is for a position player: Take their batting runs, base running runs and fielding runs above average and then add in a positional adjustment, a small adjustment for their league and then add in replacement runs so that we are comparing their performance to replacement level rather than the average player. After that, you simply take that sum and divide it by the runs per win value of that season to find WAR.

Got it?

That’s taken verbatim from a Fangraph’s explanation of WAR.

Don’t ask me what batting runs, fielding runs and base running runs are. I don’t know and don’t want to know and neither does the casual baseball fan. You know, the kind that baseball teams are trying to get to buy tickets.

Maybe fans should be allowed to form opinions about players that don’t have to be backed up by a stat. Maybe they’d like to think that they know when a hitter is hitting a lot of atom balls. That’s what Bob Prince used to call line drives hit “Right at ’em.”

The scary thing is that somewhere there are real humans watching baseball games and recording a hitter’s hard-hit rate and chase rate? Who does that?

What’s the suicide rate among that crowd?

Show me the back of a pre-analytics era guy’s baseball card and I’ll tell you how good he was.

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Just wondering: Do kids still collect baseball cards? And do they come with bubble gum? It’s a shame if the answer to both questions is no.

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One-handed catches in football are fun to watch but they’ve also become one of the most overrated things in sports. The sticky gloves have been a game changer. It’s not nearly as tough as it once was.

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Good of the Steelers to put pre-Noll era players like Buddy Dial into their Hall of Honor. He was a star wide receiver in the early ’60s. Averaged 20 yards per catch for his career.

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The Browns will not be a pushover this year.

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Bryce Love, Stanford’s Heisman Trophy candidate, skipped PAC-12 Media Day last week and was criticized by Dennis Dodd of CBS Sports. Love had a lame excuse. He chose to go to class. That should tell you a lot about how many in the media really feel about “College” Football.

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Antonio Brown took some heat for showing up for the first day of Steelers training camp in a helicopter. I give him credit for beating Rt. 30.

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Mike Tomlin gave the media one of his best answers at his first training camp press conference. When asked about James Harrison’s comments about the team’s lack of discipline, Tomlin said, “That soap opera stuff, I’ll let you guys handle that.” Smart.