Failure of Bob Ryan’s anti-stats column isn’t his opinion, but incuriosity

Let’s agree on three things together.

1. Bob Ryan is a great sportswriter. In his prime he was part of an amazing sports department at the Boston Globe, and was in no way a weak link on a team that included Peter Gammons, Leigh Montville, Will McDonough and Bud Collins. He’s a Hall of Fame kind of writer.

2. Everyone is entitled to a bad day once in a while, especially after they retire, which Ryan did two years ago.

3. Finally, let’s agree not to write pieces like Ryan’s latest for the Globe, Do baseball fans care about new breed of stats?

By that I don’t mean we won’t write opinion pieces, or that we won’t criticize the “new breed of stats,” which, full disclosure, I care about. What I mean is let’s agree not to be lazy and incurious, as Ryan unfortunately was here.

Ryan begins with a couple of questions. Alas, he admits in the second paragraph, after posing the first question, that all he’s going to do is ask the questions. He’s not going to try to answer them.

Aside from people who make a living out of disseminating and analyzing said data, who else pays attention? Just asking.

A little later, Ryan elaborates on this question:

My question is, does the average person care? Is the average fan still content with batting average, runs batted in, and earned run average being the Holy Trinity of baseball stats, even though the modern Smart Guys have discredited all three?

And he asks another:

I wonder if the New Breed Stat Guys ever actually enjoy a game, because they are so obsessed with what the manager is or isn’t doing, based on the data in front of them.

Here’s the thing: These are two perfectly reasonable questions. I think the second one’s a little silly: Why would people be interested in diving into the murk of advanced analysis, mostly as a hobby, about something they don’t enjoy? But maybe I’m too close to the subject. And after all, many interesting things have sprung from the asking of silly questions. No one should be afraid or embarrassed to ask a dumb question.

But here’s the other thing: These questions are easy to get the answers to, and isn’t that the job of a writer, not just to ask good questions but to try to find out the answers to them, whenever possible?

I asked a couple of New Breed Stat Guys of my acquaintance if they actually enjoy watching baseball games. “Of course,” said Eno Sarris, who writes for FanGraphs and other sites. “Absolutely,” said Jason Collette, who also writes for FanGraphs, as well as ESPN and Rotowire.com. I have sat next to Baseball-Reference.com founder Sean Forman and Grantland baseball writer Jonah Keri, both advanced-stat guys, at baseball games, and I can say with confidence that they are people who enjoy watching baseball games, even when they’re sitting next to me.

Collette and Sarris, both via G-chat, had some interesting comments about the way New Breed Stat Guys watch and enjoy baseball.

“I guess there are two modes for watching the game, right?” Sarris said. “One is relax, wash it in, don’t think about it, enjoy it as it happens. The other is, get into it. Put your hand in it, argue about who’s best, who’s better, what will happen here. I’ve found way more of the latter than the former, but I also know my space. Doesn’t it seem like if you were the former and you watched enough ball that way, you’d eventually want to get into the minutiae?”

Collette said, “I think the interest in advanced stats makes me more passionate while viewing games rather than apathetic.”

These comments might have made interesting additions to Ryan’s story. Similarly, rather than wondering what “the average fan” thinks, Ryan could have put a little effort into trying to find out. It’s not that hard to find “average” people in the sense Ryan means it here, which is lay people, non-experts. Another way to put what he’s talking about is “the vast majority of people walking around.”

Why not talk to them? Trawl the stands at a Red Sox game. Ask your thousands of readers in the Globe or your 64,000-plus followers on Twitter. Look at the popularity, or lack of popularity, of books, magazines, websites, TV and radio shows that focus on advanced stats. ESPN has experimented with programming around advanced baseball stats. Ryan works at ESPN. Ask how that’s gone.

Good writing moves the conversation forward, adds something new. These questions Ryan asks aren’t particularly new, but the answers he got to them, and his thoughts about those answers, could have been.

Sometimes as a writer you ask questions that you won’t be able to find the answers to. That actually happens a lot. It’s fine. If the questions are too easy to answer, you end up with a boring story. Should the Home Nine try to steal more bases? No, all their runners are slow. End of article. Next question.

But even if we won’t be able to nail down the answers, we owe it to readers to try. Otherwise, what do they need us for?