I love baseball. Now I can’t sit down here and tell you that I have been a fan of baseball for my entire life. I liked baseball growing up. I played when I was a kid. I went to a Detroit Tigers game or two when I was younger back at old Tiger Stadium (Rest in peace) but I was not fanatical. I was mostly just a fan of sport. That love for sports didn’t really change, but I know the exact year that my love for baseball bloomed. It was the summer of 2008. I had recently turned 21 and I moved into a house with one of the biggest baseball fans I had ever met.
He and I would hang out on the porch, drinking the cheapest beer possible and he would always want to listen to the Tigers game on the radio. I was not opposed, I mean it felt like the right thing to do. However, as it is with anything you continuously put yourself around I started to learn a lot about the game. The differences between the hitters in the batting order, the power pitchers and the finesse guys. The base stealing and the bunting. Shifting the infield, walking a guy to load the bases with 1 out. A pitcher that throws for contact versus a guy just trying to strike you out. There was so much more complexity than just swinging and trying to hit the ball as far as you could. There was an immense amount of chess that went on between the players and most importantly the managers of each club.
Anything with that much complexity really struck me, so I dug even deeper. Upon digging I found an entire world of stats, I found a world of theories. You go from the way a game is played to the way a team is built all the way back to the way a player is evaluated. You can get down to the real data nitty gritty, like Billy Beane did with the Oakland Athletics as is depicted in the book and then movie “Moneyball” or you can go the old school approach of the feel, the look of a guy. Is he a five tool player? Is he someone that is going to be able to last a while, does he have confidence? Looking at all of this recently it made me realize something. This world of baseball, these averages and numbers. This LONG season that something is too long, this world is exactly like another world I am in. The world of Social Media.
When you are in the world that I am in professionally you learn pretty quickly that from the outside it looks like you are just playing on Facebook and getting people to read stuff on Twitter. However, you know that deep down there is a whole world, theories upon theories and strategies everywhere. Emotions run high and there is a push for the data of everything. It is the world of baseball and it is right in front of us. I think that there is a lot to learn about this world and I think that looking at it through the lens of baseball is going to help us decipher social media a bit. So that is what I am going to do. I am going to be writing a “series” of posts weekly that is going to touch on every aspect of the game from bunting to front office trades.
I am excited to be bringing you into the stadium for this. Feel free to grab a hotdog and a beer.
Play ball.
