Baseball has a long history of players and managers downplaying advanced stats and metrics that call into question how good a team or player really is. Even as front offices grow more and more advanced and statistically driven, many managers and players still come from a more old-school perspective.
A fine example of this is Seattle Mariners manager Scott Servais. The Mariners sit at 69-58, but their run differential is -56, having allowed 589 runs while scoring just 533. The fact that the Mariners are 11 games over .500 despite a negative run differential could be used as evidence that the team is overachieving, and some regression may happen before the end of the season.
Servais, however, isn’t buying any of that. After Tuesday’s win over the Oakland Athletics capped a 6-2 road trip, Servais blew off the run differential talk by saying the Mariners have their own metric: fun differential.
“Someone told me that our run differential was -9 on this trip,” Servais said, via Corey Brock of The Athletic. “But our fun differential was about +90. So we are going with that.”
The “fun differential” comment immediately garnered a lot of amused mockery in some circles of social media, particularly among the more sabermetrically inclined. That includes Baseball Reference, which made an amusing reference to the new “stat” that the Mariners promptly embraced.
Some players have said they don’t like to rely on more advanced metrics because it causes them to overthink things. There is no overthinking fun differential. As long as the Mariners keep winning, it’s presumably going to keep going up. Simple as that.
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