I proclaim a deep hatred to these analytics. I declare a deep distaste for these techno-industrial stats! I will tell you a story of baseball - it takes place in my country (Russia). Many do not know that in Russia during the communist era we have baseball team. My uncle was selected to be baseball player (he was an athlete and we hastily put together a team in the 1980s to compete in the Olympics) because he was an athlete and the national team was starting from scratch. None of the players on the Soviet team could play baseball, and many had not heard of it until then! My uncle, like many, became enthralled by this game. To him, it was a pastoralist game - and what else can speak to the soul of a man born outside Yekaterinburg? Of course, my uncle, just as my family, has a deep agricultural tradition - it is in our blood. Baseball has become mythologized as a sport of the soil in America and this myth of baseball was brought to Russia through the Soviet team's study of American baseball history. Abner Doubleday is the legendary founder of the sport. Not only did he codify baseball, which he showed to men in the American Civil War, he did so in the rural village Cooperstown. Yes, this is a myth and in reality baseball was founded in urban New York City in the mid 1800s. But what moves the hearts of men? What beckons man forward so that he may give every last ounce of his being to a cause? It is the romanticized and the mythic past of all that exists! While baseball was developed in the cities it has a rural and pastoral soul simply because we have created such a myth for it. And now, that myth is in our hearts and we must defend that myth! And how false is this myth? Proto-baseball games has been popular in western new york villages since the 1820s! Regardless, baseball has a mythology of the pastoral and the rural! It has been one piece of the formula of American identity. To me, it has been a family affair where in our dacha my uncle taught the game to me. And when I went to visit family in Tyumen and beyond I brought the game to them and we played it on a football pitch. Why does baseball speak to me and us? Because of the ruralism within this game! What is the risk of the analytic movement? THE TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF THE IRRATIONAL ASPECTS OF THE GAME! The human aspect of simple men - human men who act so called "irrationally" (this is simply a slur by the "enlightenment" thinkers to defame men who think outside the zeitgeist of our decadent era of civilization).

I DECRY THESE MACHINES! I DECRY THE ABOLITION OF THE IRRATIONAL, THE EMOTIONAL, THE SPIRITUAL IN BASEBALL! WE MUST SECURE THE CONTINUATION OF THE SPIRITUAL, THE MYTHIC, THE HUMAN ELEMENT! NEXT THEY WILL TELL US NO PLAYERS, ONLY SIMULATIONS!

And, this is just yet another way the vast techno-industrial system has stripped humanity bear and turned us into standing reserve. May I refer you to the works of Heidegger on his essay "The Question Concerning Technology"? What does he say in this essay, my friends? Well he decries that the Greek notion of what is technology (techne) has been replaced by our modern form (gestell). Techne, the work of craftsmen for a human purpose but also to fulfill the craftsman's life purpose (Ie: a bridge across a river) does not enframe humans or nature as standing reserve. Gestell, however, does. Humans are now nothing more than standing reserve in this wretched techno-industrial system. Where there was beauty and spirits to be experienced now we see nature only in terms of it's resources, and we see ourselves only in terms of how we can be used as resources for the techno-industrial system (gestell --> human resources). What do we risk in baseball then? That the players are no longer craftsmen of the game, we see them less in the form of techne and more as gestell, or standing reserve. The result? The depersonalization of the game, the destruction of the beautiful myth that is pastoral baseball, the abolition of the spiritual aspects of the game in order to serve the insatiable appetite of the "machine" (by this I mean modern man's unquenchable drive to push forward innovation even if it turns man into a cog in a soulless machine. This drive is the Faustian nature of modern man wherein our large strides for perpetual motion, to outdo nature, lead to our undoing via genetic replacement through somatic gene editing or AI merging not to mention the dehumanization of us all through an increasingly impersonal and meaningless world where our only purpose is to buy into and support "progress" for the sake of a few Fausts who want to push the limits and who have the power to force us to do so. Mass PR firms do the rest by convincing us this is in our best interests.). MY POINT: Sabermetrics makes sense only from the business standpoint, of course. But as lovers of this game we must recognize this is the start of the total destruction of the human element of the game. Notice how the Dodgers played in the world series due to sabermetrics, their manager could have been replaced by a machine. Where is the irrational elements, the elements we as humans naturally love because we can relate? What will become of the pastoral myth of baseball when it has become technologised and rationalized to the point where events can be so simply predicted? WE MUST DEMAND THE TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF THE TECHNO-INDUSTRAL SYSTEM. ANALYTICS IS ONLY ONE SIGN OF THE PROBLEMS BROUGHT UPON THE WORLD BY THE FOOLISH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION!!!! WE MUST PRESERVE BASEBALL, THE GAME WE LOVE!