Exit Velocity Can Only Hurt You If You Are Standing In Its Way

Michael Wilbon called its existence the 'ruination of watching sports'.

Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports

Oneil Cruz, truly one of the more exciting young players in Major League Baseball, torched two of the season's hardest-hit balls in the same game on Tuesday night and people talked about it because, to steal a line from Ricky Bobby, we want to see things go fast. The hits didn't do much to help the Pittsburgh Pirates score runs because what difference does it make if a single is a laser or a broken-bat bleeder into shallow right field?

Michael Wilbon, who make no mistake is an all-time great at what he does, used this as a jumping off point during a discussion during Wednesday's Pardon The Interruption in which he put a lot blame on the existence of exit velocity as the avatar of new-fangled stats that are apparently stealing his joy.

Michael Wilbon says MLB exit velocity tracking has "started the ruination of watching sports for me" pic.twitter.com/UQzZWwcHLM

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) May 22, 2024

“It angers me,” Wilbon said of the rubbernecking at Cruz's ultimately fruitless liners. “He’s a .260 hitter, so why do I care about the exit velo? I don’t, and so I guess people need this to become interested and more fascinated and go, ‘Oh wow.’ Not only do I not go, ‘Oh wow,’ it has started the ruination of watching sports for me, numbers like this put up on the screen repeatedly, day in, day out.”

Even as someone who shares Wilbon's disinterest in advanced metrics and mainstreamed Sports Science information, this seems like a bit of an overreaction. The old school vs. new school battle continues to rage on with both sides cartoonishly simplifying the other group's philosophies. But we all understand that fans don't face a binary choice. People can pick and choose what they value or care about like they are attacking a buffet, loading up their sporting plates to their liking.

One of the great parts about fandom is that it can be created on individual terms and there's no imperative to justify it to anyone. Unless one's job is creating content, which unfortunately for Wilbon makes it harder for him to clutch batting average and RBI to his chest and tell all the other advanced stats to get lost.

There's no right or wrong way to go about attacking Baseball Reference and deciding what has importance and what's extraneous. I've personally proudly retained a bit of crank and still love to see traditional average, home runs, and RBI on a graphic instead of anything supposedly more indicative of performance. But over time the stat that seems most important to me is OPS because it's a rough snap shot of how often a player gets on base and how much damage they do with the bat. There can be shades of gray and everyone's gray can have a different hue.

Many people will dunk on Wilbon and throw around the luddite word. Instead let's acknowledge that there's some truth to what he's saying. There is entirely too much information being thrown around on broadcasts and on the internet to ever hope to keep up.

Being a sports fan in 2024 is learning to simply ignore more stimulus than has ever been available and not let it anger you. From the incessant gambling updates to aggregator accounts codifying extraordinary specific numbers together for standalone graphics with small sample sizes, it's maddening to interact with everything poking at the brain. There's also no shortage of Please Like My Stat people with microphones and they're as annoying as the Please Like My Sport faction.

The lesson, if there is one, is that indifference can be an incredible weapon. Not combative you're wrong indifference but honest-to-goodness couldn't care less until maybe one day I do indifference. At the end of the day both camps have more in common than friction points. Lots of times they are speaking a difference language. Those saying a hitter ranks in the 87th percentile of exit velo and the tobacco-chewing scouts from Moneyball saying a player stings the ball are the Spider-Man meme — only Peter Parker is wearing different costumes.

No stat can hurt you unless you let it. And it's a bummer that anyone would ever ruin the timeless art of firing up the game on television.