Today's NYTimes reports that increasingly baseball announcers are being asked to use and interpret analytical statistics during their broadcasts.
Statistical analysis has swept through baseball over the past decade, becoming part of the fabric of the game and an object of growing fascination to its fans.
It's about time.
Back in the days of internet newsgroups and rec.sport.baseball, those of us who used analytical statistics referred to announcers who wouldn't try to understand them as "mediots" for good reason. They would trot out cliches and useless measures over and over again. Meanwhile, we screamed at them through our computers.
Then, when I had the chance to do radio play-by-play of (AA) London Tigers games and then both radio and television play-by-play of the independent league London Werewolves, I got my chance to change things a bit. I continually talked about and used "on base percentage" [OBP] and "slugging average" [SLG]. And I refused to discuss RBIs. I even had it written into my contract the last year that OBP and SLG had to be shown on the screen and that they would not show RBIs. Here's a story about my efforts back then.
Slowly I had an impact on some of my co-announcers and even on some of the players. The big change came, though, when Billy Bean of the Oakland Athletics began to employ some techniques using baseball analytical statistics, and Michael Lewis wrote about his success in Moneyball.
It has still been a long road; old-school announcers resisted the change. But it is slowly occurring. This year I have seen some telecasts that show a batter's OPS [a good, simple indicator of both power and the ability to avoid making outs: OPS = OBP + SLG]. And it looks as if some are going even further:
As players, managers and front office executives embrace the esoteric statistics, teams increasingly want their radio announcers just as fluent in the language of WAR, VORP and B.A.B.I.P. (Those stand for wins above replacement, value over replacement player and batting average on balls in play, for those of you dusting off your radios as the season begins.)
The use of statistical analysis (as opposed to just relating numbers) in baseball has come to be known as "sabr-metrics" [sometimes spelled "sabermetrics"], after the group SABR [the Society for American Baseball Research]. I was a member of the group back then.
Addendum: I was once asked on air by a visiting-team announcer what I thought were the most ridiculous statistics. I told him the Triple Crown stats: batting average, home runs, and runs-batted-in. I tried to explain that OBP and SLG capture and reflect the ability of a player much better, but we really didn't have enough time for me to go into lengthy discussions about it all.
Doc Palmer in the broadcast booth at Labatt Park