THE CHEAP SEATS with STEVE CAMERON: Baseball is all about the numbers

Hiya, nerds.

(Just kidding!)

OK, we’re going to spend some time in baseball’s musty attic today — but not really for the joy of Moneyball maniacs, or advanced metric junkies, or analytics lifers.

As you’re surely aware, our National Pastime has more stats, and subsets of stats, and stats that lead to other, super-convoluted stats that induce piercing headaches.

More than any other sport.

Maybe more than all other major sports combined.

The crazy thing is that MLB is trying to build (or rebuild) an audience, especially among young people.

The game had become so long, so tedious, that instead of debating the notion of a hit-and-run play between pitches, fans have begun chatting about their favorite movies.

To the credit of those fossils who run the sport, however, they’ve apparently seen the iceberg before this particular Titanic makes solid contact.

Beginning last season, the game was changed.

Dramatically.

The pitch clock led a raft of new rules and mechanics that chopped about a half-hour off normal games, and gave fans more action for their buck — or their time, for those watching at home with a cold one.

THERE’S no question that baseball is an easier sport to sell than it was a year ago, and soon we may see robot umpires calling balls and strikes.

Why not?

Even in this age of AI, pitchers and hitters still go bananas when a sweeper (the hot new pitch that practically starts in the direction of one dugout and finishes aimed at the other one) gets called a strike when it’s a foot outside.

All these upgrades will make the sport more fun, and widen the fan base — not to mention making it more profitable for TV.

Anyhow, the oddity now is that while baseball is getting quicker, and baserunners are off and going, and fewer relief pitchers come trudging from the bullpen with the enthusiasm of slaughterhouse workers heading for a 16-hour shift … while all these neat things are improving our sport, we’re simultaneously being buried in more and more statistics.

There’s no escaping them, either.

If you were watching the Mariners at home Tuesday night, each pitch that Luis Castillo delivered caused all sorts of flickering numbers on your screen — velocity of the pitch, offensive information on the hitter (during the game and for the season), and exactly where every pitch crossed the plate.

There’s even a helpful little box to show you PRECISELY whether that slider nicked the outside corner or not.

Then, if batter puts the ball in play, a boatload of info is instantly updated, and you learn the velocity of the batted ball, the launch angle it left home plate and the distance the ball traveled.

All this information, delivered in real time — with a replay arrow to give you the section, row and seat which was that homer’s destination — can be a bit overwhelming.

Back when I was a kid reporter and interviewed future Hall of Famer George Brett, I asked about his approach to hitting.

“Get a good pitch to hit and kill it,” George said.

I guess my point here is that baseball needs to find a point halfway between endless stats and Brett’s beautiful simplicity.

I LIKE statistics.

Some of them.

I want information that actually tells me something useful about the player, the game, the pitch this guy can’t hit (it’s anything spinning that’s thrown at the Mariners, FYI), and the overall context of what’s happening.

Plus, what I’m likely to see next.

Basic stats for a batter — on-base percentage, slugging extra-base hits (then combining them to create OPS), strikeouts, walks and so forth all make sense.

However, the analytics gurus now insist that most everyday stats we morons scan are useless, and they produce mathematical equations that look like props from the movie “Oppenheimer.”

They can give you a pitcher’s effectiveness with a particular third baseman behind him on a windy spring day at Wrigley Field, as opposed to throwing that same pitch with the roof closed in Phoenix, but with a backup infielder playing third.

Sorry.

I’ve covered more than a couple thousand major league games in person, so I do know what’s going on out there — and I do NOT need to process all that science.

Learning Logan Gilbert’s grip on his splitter, as opposed to Bryce Miller’s, sure.

Being able to identify and explain that difference between two-seam and four-seam fastballs, yep.

If you send me a sensible question about baseball, or about the stats that logically go hand-in-hand with it, I’ll be happy to answer you.

Trust me on this, though.

Baseball might BE applied physics somewhere down at its core.

But, hell, nobody wants to worry about splitting the atom in the ninth inning.

How about a soft little single to center?

Email: scameron@cdapress.com

Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns appear in The Press four times each week, normally Tuesday through Friday unless, you know, stuff happens.

Steve suggests you take his opinions in the spirit of a Jimmy Buffett song: “Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On.”