But in an era in which Bill James, who is considered to be the godfather of baseball sabermetrics, wonders if we have become too dismissive of the baseball card stats his work went a long way to discredit, I wonder if we have become too dismissive of strengths not measured by Statcast.
Increasingly, we are told that a team’s momentum is a figment of the imagination. We are told that a player’s “clubhouse presence” is overrated. We are told to resist anything measured by the outdated “eye test.” And often, this is sound advice. Nothing pushes back against poorly formed opinions or inaccurate biases better than indisputable data.