Michael Kay Says Yankees Lost To Red Sox Because Math Can't Account For The Soul Of A Baseball Or Whatever

You are going to groan so loudly that everyone within a five-mile radius will hear it and several of them will immediately call the police when you listen to this conversation from The Michael Kay Show, about the failures that caused the Yankees to lose to the Red Sox in the ALDS. It’s unbearable.

It’s really when the word “soul” is substituted for “heartbeat” that this goes from standard day-after grumbling to actually mortifying. “You can’t quantify it, and that frustrates the people with the computers, because they can’t get an algorithm that puts soul into the equation.” The conversation quickly devolves into the boring old Joe Morgan crap about probabilities breaking down in one-game or one-inning scenarios, as if what cooked Giancarlo Stanton in the bottom of the ninth was anything more esoteric and hypothetical than a pretty mean Craig Kimbrel slider. And it neglects entirely that the teams left in the playoffs represent four of the most analytically focused organizations in baseball. If analytics did the Yankees in, it could be because the Red Sox are better at analytics! Also they are better at baseball, as their regular season record demonstrates.

But arguing with this crap gives it more credit than it deserves. It is the hot, moist air of angry radio goobers. The thing to do is point and laugh.