Miller: What if Eric Wedge was right?

From Ian Miller at Baseball Prospectus on May 30, 2013:

Late on Monday, Greg Johns, the Mariners beat writer for MLB.com, posted a story that quoted skipper Eric Wedge on Dustin Ackley’s demotion to triple-A. We don’t have the full context of the discussion from which the quote came, but here’s what we do have:

“It’s the new generation. It’s all this sabermetrics stuff, for lack of a better term, you know what I mean?” Wedge said. “People who haven’t played since they were 9 years old think they have it figured out. It gets in these kids’ heads.”

Dropping this quote was like throwing chum in the water for the sabermetric community, and the response was quick and predictable. It was a decidedly non-diplomatic way for Wedge to get his point across and, unfortunately, that point was mostly ignored in the twitter firestorm that followed.

The point is not difficult to parse if you can look past the incendiary language in which it was couched: Dustin Ackley ain’t right at the plate, and the problem is mental. Wedge expressed this in maybe the worst way possible, but that doesn’t make him wrong, necessarily.

Read the full article here: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=20748



Originally published: May 30, 2013. Last Updated: May 30, 2013.