Jayson Werth, who said he was “done” with professional baseball in June, has this advice for front-office types who use sabermetrics to determine the paths of franchises: It doesn’t compute.
Werth, known for his long hair, big beard and aggressive style during his playing career, is not the first to launch a verbal assault at baseball “nerds. But many don’t ever speak out against the new Kings of baseball
“When they come down, these kids from MIT or Stanford or Harvard, wherever they’re from, they’ve never played baseball in their life,” Werth told Eskin. “When they come down to talk about stuff like [shifts] … should I just bunt it over there? They’re like, ‘No, don’t do that. We don’t want you to do that. We want you to hit a homer.’ It’s just not baseball to me.
When you’re trying to make money off a product like baseball, of course you’re going to try and do everything you can to maximize your efforts. I feel like Sabermetrics isn’t all bad, but it has to be a balance. Gut instincts in baseball are still very much needed.
