Atlanta Braves take full advantage of everything Jayson Werth is complaining about

As a fellow ‘get off my lawn’ guy, I can understand Jayson Werth’s rant.  But sometimes you do actually have to lay some new sod on that lawn.

The Atlanta Braves are doing a lot of new work with advanced baseball metrics – even ramping up previous efforts that were underway prior to the arrival of Alex Anthopoulos.  But to hear former rival Jayson Werth talk about such things, he believes that the sport of baseball is being ruined by such things.

In a wide-ranging interview held via the Howard Eskin Podcast (radio 94 WIP in Philadelphia), Werth talked about his attempts to play again this season and about some of the complaints he has about the current state of the game, which dovetailed off of a conversation about new hyper-Sabremetrically-inclined Philly manager Gabe Kapler.

Here (transcribed) are some of his key statements from the interview linked above:

"“I think it’s killing the game… It’s to the point where – just put computers out there…and let ’em play. – we don’t even need to go out there anymore.  It’s a joke.” “It’s crazy… when they come down – these kids… from M.I.T. or Stanford or Harvard… wherever they’re from… never played baseball in their life… the question [from Howard] was asked about the shift, well should I just bunt it over there [toward the hole]?  They’re like ‘no, don’t do that – we don’t want you to do that – we want you to hit a homer’… It’s just not baseball.” “We’re creating something that’s not fun to watch; it’s boring, it’s… we’re turning players into robots; they’ve taken the human element out of the game… I’m not a big fan of the instant replay…more rule changes in the past 5 years than in the first 120 combined.” “It’s worrisome – It’s a beautiful game and I think it’s getting screwed up.”"

This requires some discussion.