Because my beloved Orioles flamed out early, the 2015 baseball season may seem utterly forgettable. But someday even I may look back on it as the dawn of a new era: The year stats took over.Baseball has always been ultra stat focused—even old-timers who disavow the SABR statistical revolution detailed in Moneyball used bad stats like RBI and batting average (doubtlessly culled from the backs of old Topps cards) to win arguments. But even new age advanced metrics like VORP, ERA+, and WAR have a lot of flaws when it comes to evaluating players. It's always been impossible to say just how hard players hit the ball, how fast they run, how quickly they react to balls hit in the gap, the routes they take, etc. Not anymore.Statcast was introduced in a couple stadiums last year. But this season every stadium got the technology, which relies on radar, cameras, and optical tracking technology borrowed from rocket science to turn the field into something that's essentially totally digital. Motherboard and VICE Sports teamed up to go behind the scenes with MLB Advanced Media to find out how it all works.With Statcast, we can tell just how hard the ball leaves Giancarlo Stanton's bat (and at what angle). With that information, we don't have to estimate tape-measure home runs—calculating distance traveled becomes a simple physics problem. By the same token, it's possible to tell in real time exactly where a ball will land as it's hit (again, a physics problem), so we can measure defensive plays, allowing us to say whether a catch was truly impressive or whether a diving fielder was simply making up for a bad route or slow reaction time.It's very cool tech, and you can imagine how front offices might use it to pick up players who are underutilizing their skills or a good defender who is poorly positioned by old school managers who still think their gut instinct is a better way of making decisions than the cold disaffection of a machine.The play that really made me a Statcast believer was this one by Lorenzo Cain in last year's ALCS. A perfect route, .24 second reaction time, top speed of 21.2 MPH, full extension dive—it's entirely possible that Cain is the only centerfielder in the league who can make that catch.So, have the stats nerds won? Legendary Sports Illustrated reporter Tom Verducci says the system is "not trying to get rid of the mythology" of baseball, but really, that's a fair concern here. We might not know if Bob Feller actually threw harder than Jacob DeGrom, but that's kind of the point, isn't it? Many a mid-ballgame discussion have centered on these kinds of questions, and it's admittedly part of the fun.This tech probably won't filter out the crotchety old men on message boards who insist that, let's say, Derek Jeter is good at defense. But at the very least, it'll make us enlightened ones all the more smug in knowing we're right, and that's not a bad consolation prize.
Advertisement