Yes,
it feels like just yesterday when Mr. Clutch and millions of others got their
baseball news on Saturday afternoon watching the great show "This Week in
Baseball" hosted by the legendary Mel Allen. Who won the Met game? You
either called "Sports Phone" (976-1313 if memory serves me
correctly), or waited for the daily news to be delivered to your house by a
"Paperboy". Extinct of course is the Paperboy, and the newspaper is
not too far behind it. To keep with the anthropology terms, the newspaper is an
endangered species.
Now, the news is
instant. Tweets come in about a walk off home run as the player in question is
still rounding the bases. You can read a pitcher's MRI before Dr. Andrews does.
It's just the nature of the times we live in. Not only does the public
want news and information immediately, they want to know everything about
everybody. The concept of "Following", "Friending" and
"Linking" to strangers to know their every move is just commonplace.
The point of all this
and it's relevance to baseball is that the sport has gone from checkers to
chess. What? It's all about strategy based upon gathered information and data
and no longer about just playing the game. Case in point, MLB teams now send a
stat nerd on the road with teams. They crunch numbers and literally call down
to the dugout to tell the manager to move the left fielder two steps in or out,
left or right. This is because the data analytics tells him so.
What ever happened to
instinct, feel, a whim or good old using of the noggin to figure these type of
things out. We are not too far away from their being no reason to actually play
the games. Just run the lineups through a simulator and spit out the results.
Kind of like the MicroLeague computer baseball game from back in the day. You
set the lineup and the game played itself. Or in an analog world, the great
Strat-o-matic.
It's just a matter of
time until the machines totally take over. It's Cyberdyne systems in the
making. John Connor where are you?
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