Has baseball become more selfish? Old-school players would probably say yes

Not long ago, a big-league infielder wanted to know if he should field a grounder and step on the bag himself, or wait for someone else to cover the bag and then throw him the ball so he could get an assist. Which method would improve his defensive numbers?

This is an extreme example of a player changing his game to improve his personal statistics. But in a sport obsessed with numbers, it happens more often than we think.

Fortunately for Royals fans, the player in question was on another team. But if you know what to look for, you can spot selfish play on almost any team in the big leagues.

Nobody is going to name names, but if you talk in general terms, players and coaches will describe how it’s possible to play selfish baseball and protect individual statistics.

If you’re bad at pop flies and it’s a sunny, windy day, avoid going as hard as you can to make a difficult play. Let someone else take the chance of making an error.

The reverse can also be true: If you’re good at catching pop flies, horn in on someone else’s area, make the catch and improve your fielding percentage.

If you’re fielding a difficult grounder, make the play off to the backhand side or dive even if it’s not necessary. If you don’t make the play, it’s less likely to be scored an error.

Try bunting for a hit if there’s a runner on first or second base and nobody out. If you make an out, but the runner advances 90 feet, it will probably be scored a sacrifice and won’t hurt your batting average.

If your starting pitcher had a long inning and needs time to catch his breath in the dugout, a team player will take pitches to allow his pitcher to recover. But if you’re worried about your batting average, you won’t want to fall behind in the count while taking hittable fastballs. So swing at the first good pitch you see.

If you’re a starting pitcher and have a lead after five innings, figure out a way to get out of the game. You’re in line for a win; keep pitching and something bad might happen.

These aren’t the only tricks a player can use to protect his numbers, but they show how it’s possible to do so.

What happened to fundamentals?

If you’re a high school player and you want to get noticed, two things will do the trick: hitting for power and lighting up the radar gun.

Do either one and the fact that you can’t bunt or throw a changeup won’t stop you from getting a college scholarship or signing a professional contract.

One of the reasons we see big-league players struggle against defensive shifts is they never had to learn to bunt or hit an opposite-field grounder.

Pitchers may have survived the lower levels of baseball by throwing fastballs past overmatched hitters, but then they struggle in the big leagues because they now have to learn to get hitters out by pitching to contact.

Skills that should have been learned in the minors have to be taught at the big-league level, because young players are often rushed through the system.

And if the marketplace pays for home runs, but does not pay for sacrifice bunts, opposite-field singles or getting the ball in play with two strikes, players have less incentive to learn those skills.

Has fantasy baseball warped our view of the game?

Matt Fincher is the head coach of the University of South Carolina Upstate baseball team. He has written a guidebook to hitting called “The Batter’s Mind.”

In that guidebook, Fincher says some of the first people to pay attention to sabermetrics were the people who played fantasy baseball. They were looking for an advantage when it came to picking players for their fantasy teams and believed sabermetrics could provide that edge.

But Fincher thinks some people went on to make a faulty assumption: A player you’d want on your fantasy team was a player you’d want in real life, and a player you wouldn’t want on your fantasy team was also a player a real team could do without.

The fantasy factor

If you play fantasy baseball, you want your players to be selfish.

Moving a runner with a productive out doesn’t do you any good. You’d probably prefer that your players hit with power, don’t care if they can’t play defense ... and if they’re clubhouse cancers, it’s no skin off your nose.

But in real life those things matter.

A catcher who can block pitches in the dirt or a middle infielder who keeps his double-play partner focused and in the game won’t do you a lot of good on a fantasy team, but those are attributes you’d want on a real team.

Fincher got to the heart of the problem when he pointed out that success in fantasy baseball depends on individual achievement, while success in real baseball depends on teamwork.

Good teams view the 27 outs they’re given for a nine-inning game as a collective resource; they use those 27 outs to move runners around the bases and score runs. Selfish players view their at-bats as personal property not to be shared.

And these days you’re likely to see selfish players use those at-bats to hit the ball as hard and far as possible, because that’s what gets them paid.

Ask old-school players if the game has gotten more selfish and a lot of them will say yes but then point out we’ve created a system that rewards those selfish players.

We pay lip service to team play and self-sacrifice, and pay money for good numbers.

This story was originally published August 23, 2018 at 6:08 PM.