Fact or Fiction: The Art of Metis

About a month ago we discussed "the art of metis," as described by Detienne and Vernant, and found numerous examples of metis in sport. Metis is the intangible trait that is separate from talent, athleticism, and other skills and lets a person seize the critical moment and make it his own. In class we named athlete after athlete who displayed considerable metis over his career. (Michael Jordan was the clear favorite.)

However, while most of us agreed that metis existed and was a critical part of sports, many decision makers in the sport of baseball seem to disagree. One of the major characteristics of metis is that "it is applied to situations which...do not lend themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation, or rigorous logic." But a growing number of baseball general managers try to break down skill in talent to a solely numerical basis. The sport was once dominated by old-school GMs with roots in scouting, and those people based their impressions on players on things they picked up while seeing them live; things like "going all out" or "being clutch." Although scouting remains a critical part of the game, many new-school GMs don't have their roots in scouting but rather are Ivy educated businessmen aiming to bring an objective approach to evaluating talent grounded in statistics. These two types of GMs can judge players in totally different ways. A scout's GM can judge a shortstop by saying "he reacts well, stays low, stays on top of the ball" while a new-age GM can quantify those characteristics with a number called "range factor," which is the number of chances fielded in a player's playing time.

History has proven that both of these methods can be successful. Although modern publications like Michael Lewis' "Moneyball" depict the old-guard scouting approach as outdated, GMs such as the Twins' Terry Ryan have been very successful building franchises the old-fashioned way. But no one can deny GMs like the Athletics' Billy Beane, the Red Sox' Theo Epstein, or the Indians' Mark Shapiro have been quite good at building teams based on a more statistical approach. What is undeniable though, is that this increasing emphasis on statistics is eliminating our idea of metis in baseball. Metis is unquantifiable, yet many GMs seek to quantify everything in the sport. Indeed, the aspect of the game many would consider the most obvious example of metis, clutch hitting, is considered a fallacy by many who look at the stats. It seems like in baseball metis is no longer what it used to be.