Analytics – Are we losing the FEEL for the game?

A while back I wrote a post called “The four levels of competence for players.”  Click on the title if you want the full nuts and bolts of the levels. 

When players work their way through the game of baseball, they also work their way up through those levels of competence.  Eventually, some special players move into the top tier which is called Unconscious Competence.  At that level, they have developed the ability to play very well without having to put much thought (or any thought) into it.  They just intuitively play the game. When you ask these “masters” why they are so good, often you will get the very unsatisfactory answer of “I don’t really know.  What I do just feels right.”  Incidentally, this is also why premier players often do NOT make premier instructors.  They often struggle breaking down the game in order to explain it to young players because they never really gave much thought to the technical details of playing.  It came so naturally to them that very little thought was needed on their part.  In fact, if they DID give it a lot of thought, their performance probably would have suffered.  If you’ve seen the movie Bull Durham, you may remember the advice Crash Davis gave to his pitcher.  “Don’t think. It can only hurt the ball club.“

Analytics is all the rage in sports today, especially baseball.  I am frequently asked what my thoughts are on the subject.  I have mixed reviews.  As the saying goes, “You cannot have progress without change.”  Change is hard but it is also inevitable in the game and any other area of life.  Those who reject change fail to adapt and fall behind quickly.  Argue against analytics in the game and you are likely to hear something to that effect in return. That being said, many people forget, or never heard of, the second part of that earlier quote about progress and change.  The full quote goes like this … “You cannot have progress without change.  However, not all change is progress.”

Let’s look at a master chef.  A master chef has worked their way through the levels of competence and are at a point where they intuitively know how to make meals without having to do much measuring at all.  They have eliminated the cookbooks and the math and now rely almost solely on their sense of taste, sight, feel, and smell and make adjustments accordingly.  They are on a creative level that is not guided by rational thought, logic, math, or sequence.  They just intuitively know what to do.  It just “feels” right and they usually are correct.

And this is where analytics can be a problem.

Analytics, by definition, forces the player’s brain to be more analytical about what they do, like hitting. Analytics naturally get hitters thinking about things like …  Where should my hands and elbows be to create more exit velocity?  What bat path angle (launch angle) do I need to hit for more power? What was my bat speed or exit velo in that last at-bat?  This is fine but at some point, like the master chef, you need them to “feel” instead of being so analytical. In fact, if you get a top-tier player to be more analytical, they may actually move backwards to the Conscious Competence level which one can argue is the wrong direction to be moving. Others may argue that 99.99999% of players we work with (ie: amateur players) are NOT master players like a Mike Trout or a Freddie Freeman.  However, there is something to be said for leaving a player alone if he is currently having success at whatever level they are currently in, whether that’s Little League, high school, or college.  Let them just “feel” and not over-think things through analytics.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am NOT against analytics.  It certainly has a place in today’s game and there are certainly instructional benefits to the new science of baseball.  Personally, I have learned a lot of new things and have adjusted some of my views as a result.  That’s healthy.  It’s also healthy to keep analytics in perspective and continue to realize that a “one-size-fits-all” in any aspect of coaching, even the use of analytics for every player, can lead to unintentional consequences. 

Master chefs add spice sparingly and only as needed.  Analytics should be the same.

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