BlackieThunders

Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” I’m not against analytics. They’ve made baseball smarter. But when one metric becomes the goal, coaches and players naturally start gaming the system instead of maximizing long-term player development. We saw this outside of baseball with the Wells Fargo fake accounts scandal. Employees were rewarded for opening new accounts, so some started opening accounts customers never asked for. The metric improved. The mission suffered. Baseball should be careful not to confuse optimizing a metric with developing a player. So has analytics made baseball smarter outside the lines… but dumber between the lines?