THE STORY OF A LONG SEASON.

THE STORY OF A LONG SEASON. The use of statistics represented by MONEYBALL changed sports journalism as much as it did baseball on the field. There was a flood of baseball writing by newcomers writing from a different point of view. Baseball writers had been beat writers, who turned a baseball game into a story. But there had always been people like me, who would read about a game by checking a box score, and the new writers wrote as if the box score was what was important. The story that the new journalists influenced by sabermetrics tell is not about individual games. The story is about average performances over 162 games. Ron Shelton wrote Bull Durham. In the Slate article, Allen Barra quotes Ron Shelton: “They always end these sports movies with a ‘big game’….. In real life, there is no big game. There’s always a game coming up after.”