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What matters now isn’t your baseball-card stats, your Baseball Abstract stats, or your Baseball Prospectus stats. We have come full circle to a place where your stats don’t really matter at all. Your skills do. Though instead of having those skills observed and evaluated by humans, with all their flaws and biases, the work is done by the cameras, who see everything on every pitch and spit out exactly what the player did, independent of what the batter, umpire, or fielder did next.
It makes sense, of course. A pitcher doesn’t really go 11-7 or post a 3.78 ERA or 2.99 FIP. A pitcher throws pitches. We can now evaluate how well he throws those pitches and project how well he’s likely to continue doing that. That’s why Dylan Cease and Devin Williams got paid.
