Fire Gardy

Tim Marchman usually isn’t totally off the mark, from what I can tell, but just because someone isn’t an idiot does not mean they can’t spew some idiocy from time to time.* Typically around this time of year, people post retrospectives on the year gone by, and what we can look forward to in the upcoming year; personally, I think that’s a bunch of crap. And it’s even worse since we finished a decade and are starting a new one.** That’s where Marchman comes in: he wrote an article about what we (as baseball fans) can “look forward to” in the next ten years.

* Triple negative? Yeah, we’re doing this thing!

** Don’t give me any of that “but the decade isn’t over yet, because what about year zero?!” mumbo jumbo. This is America, dude. The 70’s started in 1970, not in 1971. I’m just saying.

It will still be better than football

That was your title? Uplifting, and somewhat obvious.

The aughts generally were awful and a review of them could only have ended with a rope, a plastic bag, a bottle of wine and another of pills. What’s worse, the teens look to have potential in this line. We’ll hope the twenties arrive hurriedly.

Who’s trying to commit suicide here? Because it sounds like 3+ people just got handled. And as a matter of fact, no, we’re not hoping the next ten years go by in a flash. I’ll be an old man complaining about loud music and kids these days by then.

At least in the aughts we had good baseball to distract us, but I have five reasons to think the coming decade is going to be a crashing bore; you can surely add your own.

At least? So … the next decade will, as a whole, be extremely boring, and there won’t be baseball? Are you sure you meant to use the words “at least”?

1) Technological advances

Those are boring.

The installation of camera systems in ballparks that will, once refined, allow clubs to precisely measure every aspect of performance is not going to be a good thing. Every club looking at the exact same accurate information will lead to monoculture. Current evaluative metrics, which are quite crude, are already having a bit of that effect; truly granular ones will even more so.

What makes baseball a great sport is that there are shitty teams that are always doing stupid things! If it weren’t for the Royals and Pirates and Nationals and, occasionally, the Giants … well, baseball would just be boring. I mean, when the Twins have the day off and I flick on MLB.TV to check out another game that day, what do I say to myself? Do I say “Ooh, the Rays are playing the Red Sox, that could be good”? How about “Yankees/Angels, excellent”? No! Of course not! I eagerly flip over to the epic Nationals/Pirates showdown, because bad teams are what makes games exciting. Right? Wait, no? So … then what the fuck is Marchman talking about?

This won’t take the human element out of the game. When clubs have something near perfect information it will, if anything, make instinct and intuition much more important, as no team will be able to get an advantage just by noting that obviously good players are good, meaning teams will have to actually get creative.

Oh. So I guess what he was talking about was that the players would be better, the “human element” would still be there, and front offices will have to be more creative. Yup, sounds pretty shitty.

Still, the kind of smarts that allow one to read a boring actuarial spreadsheet properly are quite common

Are they?

while the kind that allow one to steal an edge on rivals by shrewdly picking out the drunks whose drinking won’t affect their development are quite rare.

So that’s why sportswriters and old people think scouts are so mystical and important? Because they have alcoholic radar of some sort?

I worry that just as the former were violently underappreciated in baseball for many years, the latter may come to be, which would be disastrous.

I actually agree with this. But rather than making up some doomeriffic crap, I’d actually think about this first. Just like most things, the stats/scouts dichotomy will eventually reach an equilibrium where both stats and scouts are seen as essential. For a long time, that equilibrium was nowhere to be found; there was a “technological” advancement that caused the popularity of stats to rise, and that continues to happen. In the upcoming couple of years, the see may well saw too far in favor of stats. Do not worry! It will only be temporary; markets always seek out an equilibrium, and I haven’t heard anything from the stats side of this argument saying “scouts are useless and should all be killed.” It’s not going to happen. By 2020, I’d guess that we’re close to a balance, and it’ll fluctuate year to year, but never very far. Not really much of a headline, I guess.

Far better a room full of drunk Bavasis than a room full of Wall Street washouts spouting MBA buzzwords, if you have to choose.

Why are those the choices? Because Bavasi was a pretty awful GM … and Jack Z has done a pretty tremendous job of replacing him and fixing everything he wrecked in Seattle in the short time he’s had there. I don’t know if anyone would consider Jack Z a “Wall Street washout spouting MBA buzzwords,” but if you do, that’s on you. Also, if owners continue to agree with Marchman about this choice, we’re guaranteed to continue with the “these teams are good every year” and the “these teams are terrible and getting worse and there’s no hope whatsoever” split that we currently have. But since having a significant portion of the league suck balls is good for baseball (see above), maybe Marchman’s got a point here.

2) Postliteracy

Do you mean “after becoming literate,” or “no longer literate,” or perhaps “more literate than ever”?

The beat writer’s job is devolving into the maintenence of a Twitter feed, ‘hits’ on TV and radio and quickly turned ‘takes’ on the issue of the hour,

Which is exactly what beat writers would have been doing since the beginning, if they were able to instantly publish to millions of people.

more substantive writing is supported by a half dozen or so outlets that probably won’t exist in recognizable form in 10 years,

Yeah, and they’ll be replaced by just as many (if not more) new outlets.

and for all I know the coming generation of writers will have grown up doing immense neurological damage to themselves by reading too much off screens.

For all you know? For all you know, the previous generation of writers did themselves immense neurological damage by looking at crappy newspaper pages while sitting under fluorescent lights too much. Or for all you know, screens might be so good in ten years that it’s far easier on your eyes than paper ever was.

Of course there will still be good writing—today’s average column or game story is incalculably better than one from 50 years ago—but there will be less of it than there is now and the best of it likely won’t be as good.

So you’re saying that the explosion of baseball-related content in this decade proves that all baseball-related content will disappear in the next decade? Wouldn’t it make more sense that, as the cost of publishing stays at zero, more people would create baeball-related content? Posnanski emerged as a national force during this decade — would he have become so ludicrously famous while writing only for the Kansas City Star? No, it would have been impossible. More access for more people will create both the demand for more content, and the supply of it. Why is it so hard for people to figure that out? Baseball writing will go away because technology makes it too easy to produce and consume baseball content? No.

And the constant need to feed the beast in an age when a print model has essentially been replaced by a broadcast model will have other effects as well. I can’t, for example, be the only one to think that the rightly admired Joe Posnanski is courting burnout by dropping multiple five to ten thousand word blog posts every week in addition to his real writing, though we’ll continue to hope he’s Iron Joe McGinnity.

You’re right, Posnanski should do less of what he loves. Fuck off, I love those Posnanski posts. And if he ever stops doing them, it won’t be because the internet killed his love of baseball with its inability to recognize which kind of drunk will get too drunk.

3) Death of television

Tasty.

This is a big one. If you thought the death of newspapers was ugly, wait until you see the death of cable as it converges with online, much to the latter’s advantage.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall, I suppose. But isn’t it possible that the television companies won’t be as comfortable with burying their heads in the sand and demanding that the world stop advancing as the newspapers were?

Do you really think baseball has a better answer for all that lost revenue than the Times did?

Well, MLB Advanced Media has this thing called MLB.TV, where they directly charge their customers for live video of the games. I gladly pay for it, as do millions of other people … and that’s just right now. Baseball is pioneering the post-television live video industry.

4) The economy

Yup, there’s no chance that improves in the next ten years.

If the economy has really turned Japanese we’re probably in for some hideous effects:

We’ll see.

A labor stoppage out of the next CBA negotiations for one,

Why would you assume this? Because of the unusually long stretch of labor peace we’re currently experiencing? Is this another one of those “the evidence proves the opposite of itself, therefore whatever I’m saying is proven” arguments?

and the death of some major league towns for another. No matter how wealthy its suburbs are, a city like Detroit where more than half the residents are unemployed cannot be reasonably expected to support competitive baseball.

This might happen. But it’s more likely that a city like Detroit will simply no longer be able to support all four sports; why assume it’s baseball that would lose out here?

5) Doping scandals

Yet another current problem that won’t go away in the next ten years? Creative.

I don’t know or really care what guys are on these days, but it isn’t nothing, and we’re in for a repeat of the world’s least interesting scandal once people figure out that various famous players held up as admirable because they claim not to use drugs actually do use them.

That’s it? That’s your whole analysis of the “upcoming” drug scandals? What if people realize that the old-fashioned fearmongers in the dead-press were the only ones screaming about this? What if the drug testing that’s in place continues to work (as it already has been)? What if once the newspapers are finally dead, baseball fans get their analysis from writers who think about their positions rather than just being angry that things are different from how they were in the 1960s, when people didn’t know about the drugs the players were using? I’d say this is another one that’ll just go away, rather than being one of the top 5 biggest reasons we should all stop being baseball fans within the next 10 years.

So in case you read this article and were worried about baseball dying, you can go ahead and relax. I’m calling bullshit on this whole thing.

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