Dustin Ackley was a college star at North Carolina and the No. 2 overall pick in the 2009 draft, one spot after Stephen Strasburg. He moved quickly through the Mariners’ farm system, had a solid rookie season in 2011 at age 23 ... and has hit .221 with a .600 OPS in 198 games since then.
Yesterday the Mariners demoted him to Triple-A and in discussing the move afterward manager Eric Wedge more or less blamed sabermetrics for Ackley’s struggles. Seriously, via Greg Johns of MLB.com:Wedge was talking about Ackley’s demotion to Triple-A and his mental approach, and he intimated that Ackley might have been too concerned with pitch selectivity and high on-base percentage, leading to a one-liner that hit on one of baseball’s most intriguing ongoing philosophical battles.
“It’s the new generation. It’s all this sabermetrics stuff, for lack of a better term, you know what I mean?” Wedge said. “People who haven’t played since they were 9 years old think they have it figured out. It gets in these kids’ heads.”
That’s particularly amusing in contrast to all the articles about how so many people within baseball don’t pay any attention to sabermetrics.
Wedge is 164-211 (.437) in three seasons managing the Mariners and also had a sub-.500 record in seven seasons managing the Indians, so apparently a lot of his players pay tons of attention to “people who haven’t played since they were nine years old.”
(Complicated handshake to David Cameron of FanGraphs, who alerted me to this silliness and is no doubt personally responsible for the majority of the Mariners’ struggles during Wedge’s tenure.)
