The terms get advanced as you watch more baseball. It takes on a mind of its own and you’re down a rabbit hole of formulas, letters and numbers. You’ve caught the advanced analytics bug.
That’s OK. We’ve been waiting for you.
Gone are the days when we casually mentioned batting average and ERA and moved on. While those are imperative to discussions in the game, you can’t help but take a deep dive into barrel rate, WRC+, and anything else Baseball Savant has to offer.
When you cover the sport, how do you introduce these advanced terms to the audience? Not everyone understands them or salivates at what a player’s ISO is.
Eno Sarris writes and talks about baseball with an emphasis on analytics for The Athletic and FanGraphs. You’ll oftentimes see him gripping baseballs in a clubhouse with pitchers.
“It’s a fine line to walk,” Sarris said. “You may have a nerdy audience, but you may have newcomers. You always want to be inclusive and reach out to new people who may not know all the terms, all of the jargon that comes with baseball fandom these days.”
Sarris says thankfully FanGraphs has a glossary to link to such terms that might sound foreign to people, but it’s something he thinks about a lot — whether people are consuming his content in the written or verbal medium.
Sarris began his baseball media journey in written form on FanGraphs — where the approach to introducing advanced analytics is different.
Mike Petriello of MLB.com started his baseball media career on a keyboard as well, but when he transitioned to other mediums, the mission remained the same, despite the ever-changing world of baseball.
“I think it’s changed a great deal, because when I first started doing this — you know — I’ve been writing for 15 years, but the TV stuff really started going, getting going in like ’16, ’17, ’18. It was convincing people why any of it mattered, right?”
“Why do I need to know any of this? And that battle has been fought, right?”
Petriello, who specializes in stats analysis and Statcast, used the term “convincing” to describe an aspect of his analysis.
“I think that maybe now that you’ve seen not only teams start to make decisions based on advanced stuff, but the players themselves talk about it, right?
“Like you’ve got Chris Sale, who I consider to be one of the oldest school old-school guys, talking about how he’s learned seam-shifted wake, and it’s like, we’re done,” Petriello said. “You know, we’ve done it. We’ve gotten that into the game.”
Sarris said there’s an awareness to his audience when it’s in written form. Especially when he wrote for FanGraphs, a website for advanced (and not-so-advanced) stats and analysis in the baseball world.
“These are words people might understand,” Sarris said. “So I got kind of used to my audience knowing all these words and not really explaining them.”
When Sarris went to The Athletic, he realized he had a larger audience. He also realized he had the ability to explain it in long and short form.
Then he had players reaching out and asking about statistics. A’s designated hitter Brent Rooker asked Sarris about a stat on the site.
“And I didn’t have an answer for him, I was pretty surprised,” Sarris said.
“I had to find out what that stat was, so I mean the players are more informed I think than the fans are. At the same time, we can’t become so insular in baseball, where somebody drops into one of our pieces and says, ‘Oh, someone told me about this guy and I have to read him.'”
There are some who don’t want to dig that deeply into the numbers which is fair.
Tampa Bay Rays second baseman Brandon Lowe once told me he keeps it simple — he loves batting average. Oftentimes, you can find a happy medium.
“But, you know, players and people know OPS pretty well,” Sarris added. “They know it. They’re comfortable with it.”
Petreillo noticed an uptick in the way statistics are used in television programs as well over time.
“The primary game on ESPN once was a very traditional show at the time and what’s happened over the years is a lot of the cool stuff that we’ve sort of proven can work on television on the second screen has just gone over to the main screen. Our producer of that game, Andy Jacobson — who I love now — does the main Sunday show, right? Eduardo Perez is on the main show. David Cone talks about all this stuff.”
As far as the future for the sport and utilizing analytics in the coverage. Well …
“I think what’s happening, and we’ve already seen it happen over the last couple of years, is that the game, as the game has changed and as the way that the players who are in it have changed, you need to react to that,” Petriello said.
