Looks like Epstein realizes that turning baseball into a game that can be played in a simulator where the only things that matter are launch angle and spin rate has boiled the sport down into the most basic of battles.
Homerun or strikeout.
Baseball has always been stats crazy but at some point stastical analysis seemed to outweigh the value of the competition itself. Kevin Cash pulled Blake Snell from the 6th inning of a world series game in which he was completely dominant because the analytics told him it was the right thing to do. In doing so, Cash was just doing whatever the computer told him to do because he clearly had no confidence in his own intuition. My hope is that other sports do not go to far with this as baseball has. Basketball and football are more complex by nature so it will be tough but you already see some of it. In basketball, teams just want to take corner three pointers.
Its important that sports retain some nuance. Hopefully Baseball can find a way to bring some back.
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