If my house was on fire, I’m fairly certain that the New York Yankees’ manager Aaron Boone would be confident that I still had the nicest place on the block. Living in denial is certainly one way to manage a baseball team, after all.
I celebrated Fourth of July weekend this year at the monuments, dolled up in red, white and blue and peacefully unaware of my baseball team’s failures 200 miles away. The Yankees celebrated by being lifelessly swept by their division rival, the Toronto Blue Jays, falling out of first place in the American League East in the process. In a press conference after the series, Boone reiterated that he still considered the Yankees to be “the best team in the league.”
Did Boone and I watch the same four games? Did we both watch the Yankees make four errors and a handful of other should-be-errors? Or was he too busy looking at pages of acronyms and decimal points to find some evidence for his absurd claim?
In all fairness to Boone, if you look hard enough at a screen full of baseball analytics, you are more than likely to find some statistical crumbs to support any position.
For example, I opened Baseball Reference to find that the Yankees have amassed 12 Rtot, far above MLB average of -1. Never heard of Rtot? Me neither. It stands for “total zone fielding runs above average” — although it doesn’t, really — and it measures the runs saved by a team’s defense as compared to a replacement-level player. Apparently.
Baseball Reference also tells us that the Yankees are 9th in MLB — again far above average — in a statistic called “DefEff.” Da eff is DefEff? Good question. Defensive Efficiency refers to “the percentage of balls in play converted into outs.” Great, so the Yankees play good defense.
Except they don’t. I know that because I have eyes.
I’ve watched a hundred Yankees games this year, give or take. I’ve seen second baseman Jazz Chisholm, Jr. airmail a throw 12 feet over the first baseman’s head into the camera well. I’ve seen shortstop Anthony Volpe throw to the wrong base to try for a double play and end up making no outs at all. I’ve also seen utility player José Caballero pull off sparkling defensive plays and then ride the bench for multiple games at a time because… I have no idea why, actually.
Why does Caballero sit while Volpe makes error after error? Because Boone’s analytics says Volpe’s defense is somehow perfectly fine?
If managers dictate who is in the lineup based on the results of overcomplicated mathematical formulas, why have a manager at all? The Yankees might as well take Boone’s $4.5 million salary to employ a few more analytics consultants from MIT.
I’m not saying that analytics have no place in the dugout. Of course, managers should not rely exclusively on the eye test to determine which players are productive. But as in all areas of life, baseball teams should strike a balance. If Volpe — who fans have kindly nicknamed “VolpE6” because a shortstop’s error is notated as an E6 — makes a boneheaded error once a week, then spreadsheets shouldn’t be enough to save his spot in the lineup. Yet for some reason, they are.
This is all not to mention that spreadsheets cannot distinguish between a defensive miscue when it doesn’t matter and one when the entire season hangs in the balance. Last season, Yankees’ $360 million outfielder Aaron Judge made zero errors during the regular season. Zero, until the must-win Game 5 of the 2024 World Series, when a routine fly ball bounced into Judge’s glove… and then flopped right out in his first error of the season. Is there a place in Boone’s spreadsheets to code which errors made me cry?
If Boone spent his time watching baseball instead of switching frantically between spreadsheets — and one of those sounds a lot more fun than the other — maybe he would realize that the house is on fire, and the spreadsheets aren’t going to tell him how to extinguish it.