Jayson Werth is the latest athlete to complain that data and analytics are taking the joy out of sports. Can numbers live alongside individual brilliance?
By Aaron Timms | The Guardian
re nerds ruining American sport? Recently retired baseball player Jayson Werth certainly think so. “They’ve got all these super nerds, as I call them, in the front office that know nothing about baseball but they like to project numbers and project players,” Werth, a decent player who earned more than $136m over a 15-year career with the Nationals and the Phillies, told a Philadelphia sports podcast last week. “I think it’s killing the game. It’s to the point where [we could] just put computers out there. Just put laptops and what have you, just put them out there and let them play. We don’t even need to go out there anymore. It’s a joke.”
This is by now a familiar rite of passage for a certain category of “old school” baseball player: spend years playing the sport, make millions, retire, then, happily ensconced in wealthy middle age, dump on the “nerds” and “propeller heads” who are ruining baseball. Until Werth’s tirade, probably the best example of the genre came from former Yankees relief pitcher Richard “Goose” Gossage, who said in 2016: “The game is becoming a freaking joke because of the nerds who are running it. I’ll tell you what has happened, these guys played rotisserie baseball at Harvard or wherever the fuck they went, and they thought they figured the fucking game out. They don’t know shit.”
