It’s Time for the Sabermetric Revolution to be Televised

From the pastime’s earliest days, the media have played a critical role in delivering baseball to the masses. It dates all the way back to fedora-clad newspapermen weaving game stories onto ink stained pages, but even in the internet age we still rely on teams, radio affiliates, and national and regional sports networks to shape the way we experience the action.

Unless you’re lucky enough to travel to every game with your favorite team, someone else is likely responsible for filtering baseball games into your brain. For a large portion of us, that means our club’s television partner and the broadcast team it employs are responsible for helping us experience up to 162 separate contests a season.

To keep the sport relevant and competitive in a world with so many leisure options, MLB and regional sports networks need to deliver the game in a way that speaks to the modern fan. Things like high definition broadcasts, multi-device streaming options, and social media integration are some of the changes we’ve seen working toward that goal over the past several years. But in addition to the actual delivery of the broadcast, the content of the coverage should adapt as well.

Over the past two decades, public interest in sabermetrics has grown significantly and in recent years we’ve seen that start reflected on television broadcasts. Sabermetrics aren’t for everyone, but a growing portion of the major league baseball fan base is hungry for baseball commentary that goes beyond won-lost record, ERA, batting average and RBI, and television broadcasts should work to satisfy that portion of their audience.

It would be silly to suggest that everyone is interested in attending math class on a nightly basis while they watch their favorite team chase the pennant, but even the least statistically minded fans ought to be exposed to the principles of sabermetrics that teams use to evaluate players. Not everyone is going to be convinced that wRC+ is a better measurement than batting average, but broadcasts serve as baseball filters and should inform the broader public about the state of the game. Even if you’re not preaching the importance of spin rate, you should let you viewers know that it’s out there and gaining converts within the game.

In general, this shouldn’t be a terribly controversial concept. As fans and teams become more invested in sabermetrics, television broadcasts should as well. The challenge lies in creating a broadcast that is informative for statistically minded fans while also remaining accessible and compelling for people who don’t wish to think about the game through that lens. How can TV crews go about modernizing their coverage without alienating any of their key constituencies?

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In a perfect world, viewers would have several broadcast options, each catering to a different type of fan. As it stands, fans who live within their team’s market have one television broadcast option and fans who live outside of their team’s market can pay for two. You’re either stuck with your home crew or you can choose to watch the other team’s broadcast, but your choices are otherwise limited due to the nature of MLB television deals. If you don’t like the way your local sports network presents the game, you can’t take your business to a competitor because such competition is not permitted. The business model simply wouldn’t support it.

For this reason, broadcasts need to speak to their entire audience and that means they need to satisfy die-hard stat-heads, eye-test back-seat managers, casual fans, and everyone in between. Even though the number of saber-friendly fans is growing, most baseball fans don’t have FanGraphs saved as their homepage and any attempts to integrate the information found on sabermetrically inclined sites need to take that to heart.

At the most fundamental level, this is matter of language. When I spoke with Brian Kenny last August about MLB Network’s first advanced stats-focused broadcast, he suggested the key was to speak the language of the mainstream fan while bringing “our way of thinking” (i.e. sabermetrics) into the discussion.

MLB.com’s Mike Petriello, a key cog in the league’s new MLBPlus broadcasts, echoed Kenny’s sentiment recently. Even though Petriello notes that his audience tunes in expecting analytically focused coverage, he indicates you still can’t be sure that everyone will know what wRC+ is, for example. Petriello says when you want to use wRC+, you have to be ready to “explain that it’s an inclusive offensive stat that accounts for this and includes that where 100 is league average, etc, etc…and eventually it’s just easier to skip the terminology entirely and just say [the hitter] is 15 percentage points better than an average hitter.”

Kenny and Petriello, both devotees of sabermetrics, recognize that stopping to run through relatively simple explanations can pull the viewer out of the flow of the game. Instead of saying that a player has a 140 wRC+ and letting the viewers take it upon themselves to figure out what that means, Kenny and Petriello both seem happy enough to simply communicate what the stat is saying. A good announcer ought to explain the metrics every so often over the course of a long season, but it’s simply not practical to launch into a full description every time you want to mention how well a hitter is performing.

For sabermetrics to thrive on the air, announcers need to be comfortable translating statistics into language that everyone understands. The stat-head viewer loses nothing if the announcer describes the hitter as being 40 percent better than the league average hitter rather than saying he has a 140 wRC+, but the less analytically minded viewer has a strong preference for the former. An ability to communicate advanced concepts in a straightforward manner is a vital skill for the modern announcer.

Tigers radio play-by-play announcer Dan Dickerson is a shining example. I’ve rarely heard Dickerson utter the phrase “weighted on-base average” or “fielding independent pitching,” but it’s obvious he’s uses those stats when describing a player to his listeners. He tells the audience a batter is “hitting .300 with plenty of walks and good power” instead of saying he has a .385 wOBA. When he discusses a pitcher, he doesn’t say that he has a 3.75 FIP, he says something like “he’s striking out a batter an inning, walking about 2.5 per nine, and not giving up too many home runs.”

Petriello would likely be a fan of Dickerson’s approach, telling me that “it’s not about cramming new stats down people’s throats, it’s just about using ideas that make sense. Really, any broadcast that doesn’t focus on wins and saves and batting average over three games as being meaningful indicators of anything whatsoever is 90 percent of the way there. If they add on fancy new stats, all the better. Less dumb is more important than more smart, I say.”

Building a better broadcast starts with de-emphasizing information that isn’t important and focusing on information that is. No one has to say “xFIP” for the concepts that call for its usage to be on display. It’s easy for anyone to see why strikeouts are good and walks and fly balls are bad, and that information doesn’t have to be presented in a single metric with a funny name to improve the quality of a television broadcast.

Over time, flashing xFIP on the screen during a lull won’t hurt, but by then the audience will be primed that this is a stat that communicates the concepts the broadcast has been mentioning. It’s a lot harder to dismiss a metric after you’ve already decided the underlying principles make sense. The focus should be on the usage and acceptance of the principles of sabermetrics over the actual statistical product. You can talk about sample size, aging, batted ball luck, and a host of other important factors without ever posting an acronym that creates a barrier between you and your audience.

If I were creating my own personal chyron, there would probably be PA, BB%, K%, ISO and wRC+, but if you switch from average, homers and RBI to that overnight you’re likely going to alienating one group of fans for another. A slow transition in which the broadcast talks more about the value of extra base hits and walks relative to singles is the way to start that conversation rather than simply imposing a new statistical package right away.

But there are also structural challenges that extend beyond simply avoiding audience alienation. A television broadcast is not a blog post and you have to be able to integrate information into graphics and spoken words on the fly. If I want to convey something about a hitter’s power in writing, I have lots of time to think about it, an extremely flexible set of tools to display it, and at least one editor who can review it before deciding it’s ready to hit the web. Television doesn’t have that luxury for live events. Certainly you can plan ahead for the starter’s first inning, but You Can’t Predict Baseball and broadcasts have to respond to the events of the day.

On a basic level, this requires voices within the chain of command who want to bring this kind of information to the viewer. Announcers are the face of the operation and are vital to the process, but the production team, from the director to the graphics specialists, plays a major role. Someone in the chain has to have an idea and then has to be able to carry it out. It’s easier if the announcers are fully on-board (i.e. Dickerson, Kenny, Petriello, and many others) because they have the freedom to riff, but things can work just fine if the announcers are simply open to new ideas. It’s more of an uphill climb if someone in the truck has to first convince the announcer something is worth doing, but as long as the announcer doesn’t laugh off the idea of sabermetrics, progress is possible.

Even after the right people sign off, there is still a visual hurdle to overcome in some cases. If you want to talk about success against the shift, that calls for a spray chart or other graphic and that’s not the kind of thing you can code from scratch on the fly. Regional networks rely on stats and graphics packages from their parent companies or third parties and that can limit the information that makes it onto the broadcast. It’s much easier to present something to the viewer if you can rely on automated processes built into the system rather than having to look something up on FanGraphs, Baseball-Reference, or Baseball Prospectus and then find the right blank template to use.

In other words, the barriers to sabermetric integration on television are numerous. The network is a self-interested business and even if everyone on the inside is on board, they still have to think about how changes to the broadcast will affect their viewers. Additionally, any integration requires that the announcers have enough command of the metrics and a talent for communicating that type of information in way that makes sense to everyone. While there are many announcers who are skilled in this regard, there’s no guarantee that someone selected for poise and delivery will excel at speaking about advanced metrics, even if open to them as a tool.

But it’s not just about the announcers. They’re frequently the ones who receive praise and ridicule for what happens on the air, but there is a team of people who take the action on the field and pipe it onto your screens. If they don’t have the right production tools or people within that structure don’t see the value of bringing advanced metrics to the viewer, it’s a much heavier lift. Having announcers who inject sabermetrics into everything greases the wheels, but there is more to it.

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Once broadcast teams begin to clear those hurdles, there is still the matter of deciding what information works well on television. Of course we want to see more holistic offensive metrics used instead of average and RBI, but there are a number of metrics and tools that are well-suited to live broadcasts.

The obvious one, which we’ve seen come on line recently, is Statcast. While there has been some internet mockery about the rise of exit velocity as a standalone point of interest, bringing a more complete set of Statcast metrics to television viewers has significant potential. You probably wouldn’t expect to see spin rate displayed for every pitch, but using spin rate and other pitching measurements to communicate whether a home run occurred on a bad pitch or was the result of a good piece of hitting could be very informative.

Should the third base coach have sent the runner? We can look at the runner’s speed, distance he needed to cover, and measurements about the outfielder’s arm strength and accuracy. Did the fielder get a bad jump/take a bad route or was it hopeless from the start? Statcast can hopefully tell us that.

In the same vein, one of the easiest additions should be a shot of the defensive positioning before each plate appearance. This is becoming more commonplace with the rise of shifting, but it’s something that takes two seconds and can fill the time between pitches that is often used on uninformative closeup shots of players. Whether you are for or against the shift, getting a heads up about where the players are standing is really informative. Directors could mandate this tomorrow league-wide and no one would complain.

Further, stats such as run expectancy, win expectancy and leverage index are perfect for the live viewing experience. Fans are constantly frustrated by their team’s seeming inability to deliver with men on base and using run expectancy to communicate how many runs a team should expect versus how many it scores would be a huge improvement over average with runners in scoring position. As a bonus, it might even help kill the sacrifice bunt.

Win expectancy and leverage index go hand in hand, especially when the game is close late. Broadcasts might not want to show a 92 percent win expectancy in the third inning, but using win expectancy and leverage index to demonstrate how significant big moments are has a lot of value. If a player is at the plate with the bases loaded, down two runs in the seventh inning, that’s a huge moment and being able to tell the viewer how important it is relative to the average moment can build excitement. And if the batter doubles and changes the win expectancy in a big way, all the better.

While many of us find WAR, wRC+ and FIP to be intuitive, there is nothing more intuitive than leverage and win/run expectancy. Run and win expectancy are also presented in a really straightforward way already and would be easy to work into the common parlance of the game. Leverage index might need to be converted into a percentage to make it easy to understand, but the concept is straightforward and even if you don’t know how it’s calculated, it’s one of those stats that passes the sniff test in virtually every instance.

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Regional networks should give advanced metrics a place on television not only to speak to a group of fans who they haven’t spoken to in the past, but because sabermetrics are an important part of how the industry operates and it’s a disservice to all fans to pretend otherwise. Teams don’t look at RBI when building a roster and it’s the media’s job to pull back the curtain and tell the public what they use instead.

I have an obvious bias, but I’ve found that people in my life have responded really well to this kind of information when presented in the right way. Being a Tigers fan in Michigan is a good test of this concept, as Fox Sports Detroit has added Kirk Gibson to its TV rotation over the last two years. While Rod Allen, the network’s other main color commentator, is popular for his delivery and enthusiasm, Gibson has been extremely well received and commended for his insight into the game. While many of you probably think of Gibson as an old-school type based on his days as the Diamondbacks manager, he’s shown himself to be a believer in sabermetrics. People I know who aren’t likely to ever visit FanGraphs have remarked to me how much they like Gibson in the booth.

As a last small point, there’s a broader value in welcoming more scientifically rigorous thinking onto television. We live in a society that isn’t great at working through problems scientifically. In some cases, evidence is ignored and people doubt things that should be obvious. Sports have an important place in our culture and moving the needle on small things can lead to progress on larger issues. No matter what, there will be growing pains and angry tweets from people who are resistant to change, but bringing television into the modern era will improve the viewing experience and lead to better informed baseball fans.