I try to scrutinize some of the conventional wisdom about the sport, including the idea that it been totally transformed by the rise of data analysis. "Baseball has always been a game of numbers, averages, data, and probability," I argue. "Recent trends in game strategy and player evaluation do not reflect a new statistical approach, ideology, or discovery." I argue that "the popular impression that until the twenty-first century, when the nerds had their revenge and management consultants ascended to power, the business and pleasure of baseball were exclusively a matter of hunches, ineffable instincts, and superstitious beliefs ignores" a long history of "preoccupation with numbers and statistical averages."
Similarly, I put some pressure on the idea that money has corrupted the sport from its traditional pristine state. "Ironically, the familiar lament that today's game has been degraded beyond recognition over the span of a generation by the forces of commercialization is one of baseball's oldest and most persistent features." Though I do note many of the striking changes that have taken place along the way, both in the sport's economic structure and in its legal system, I also point to longstanding themes and dilemmas that connect baseball's present state to it past – and to other forms of popular culture.
The goal throughout is to get readers (fans and nonfans alike) to think about baseball in subtler terms, and to take the clichés surrounding the sport as part of its rich history rather than as guides to its essential meaning.
