MLB Network’s Brian Kenny to appear at Browseabout Books

After a 30-year career in sports broadcasting that has included long runs at ESPN and currently MLB Network, Brian Kenny is set to fulfill a dream Sunday, Aug. 21.

Kenny will be appearing at Browseabout Books beginning at 8 a.m. to promote his new book, “Ahead of the Curve: Inside the Baseball Revolution.” Kenny has vacationed in Rehoboth for 30 years, and said he always likes to stop at Browseabout for book shopping. Seeing advertisements for upcoming author appearances, Kenny said, “I’d think, maybe it will be me someday. It’s a dream of mine.”

Kenny discovered Rehoboth through friends Michael and Cynthia McGee and said he comes to meet up with them every summer with his wife, Nicole, and their five children.

“Rehoboth Beach is great for families,” he said.

The book is about baseball’s sabermetric revolution, in which teams use advanced statistics to look at the game in a different way. Sabermetrics gained fame - and within the old-school world of ex-baseball players, some measure of infamy - through Michael Lewis’ seminal book, “Moneyball.” That book chronicled the early-2000s Oakland A’s use of overlooked stats like on-base percentage, slugging percentage and walks to build a competitive team with a limited budget.

Kenny has been one of the fiercest proponents of sabermetrics during his time on MLB Network, having many a sparring match with ex-players married to numbers such as pitcher wins, batting average and runs batted in. Kenny said his book is about resistance from the baseball establishment to new information as he contemplates how we learn and why we think what we think.

Kenny said he did not know why there has been so much resistance to the use of sabermetrics, but baseball has been a focal point for their use, mainly because of baseball’s unique way of basing player value on individual statistics. While advanced metrics have begun creeping their way into other sports, such as basketball, football and ice hockey, baseball is where the wars have been fought, Kenny said.

Older thinking about the game, Kenny said, has been calcified since the game’s beginnings in the 19th century. In that version of the game, he said, there was value in stats like errors and batting average because not a lot of runs were scored. When Babe Ruth of the New York Yankees came along in the 1920s, the game changed to the power/home run-based game of today, but thinking related to the value of batting average and errors did not change, Kenny said.

One of Kenny’s biggest crusades has been against the perceived value of pitcher wins. He once started a Twitter hashtag of #KillTheWin, and he discusses the topic in his book. He said pitcher wins are a misleading statistic whose value has gone down with the modern use of specialized bullpens. Kenny said wins do not factor in variables such as run support, defense and luck but people still think of wins as valuable statistics. He said people have clung to wins because they are a simple numbers.

Kenny said major league teams have at least begun to recognize the arbitrary nature of wins.

“It’s already been devalued because no major league team is going to value a player because of win-loss record,” he said.

Another overvalued statistic Kenny discusses is the Triple Crown, an award given to a batter who leads his league in batting average, RBIs and home runs. For one, he said, RBIs are a team-based stat heavily dependent on other players getting on base.

The debate over the Triple Crown heated up in 2012 along with debate over who should win the American League Most Valuable Player award: Triple Crown winner Miguel Cabrera of the Detroit Tigers or Mike Trout, the all-around star of the Los Angeles Angels. Kenny said both players put up similar statistics, but despite Trout being a better baserunner and defensive player, the vote went to Cabrera, largely because he was the first player to win the AL Triple Crown since 1967 and was playing for a better team.

Kenny said the Cabrera-Trout debate was a case of tradition eliminating critical thinking. He said while old-school writers will often talk a good game about defense and baserunning, they cling to traditional numbers. Kenny’s book includes a chapter on how that thinking has affected votes for the baseball Hall of Fame, making the case for four players he says should be in the hall but are not: Keith Hernandez, Alan Trammell, Dwight Evans and Tim Raines.

In the cases of Hernandez, Trammell and Evans, Kenny said these players had nuanced skills  that go unnoticed by hall voters obsessed with traditional statistics. As for Raines, Kenny said the former Montreal Expos star has similar stats to Tony Gwynn, but Gwynn was elected to the hall on the first ballot, largely because of his high batting average, while Raines is on his 15th and final chance. He said Raines’ skills, stolen bases and walks, are undervalued by voters.

Kenny said one of the biggest disconnects he sees is in ex-players, who he often interacts with on-air. He said while watching the game, ex-players will see the nuances brought out by sabermetrics, but once the game is over, they begin to use the traditional ways of thinking. He said his book was a way of using baseball to ask why we do the things we do.

Browseabout Books is located at 133 Rehoboth Ave.