by Amaury Pi Gonzalez

OAKLAND–The great thing about baseball is you really never know what’s going to happen. Unlike the NFL where coaches write plays on their game plan to execute the quarterback, in baseball a manager has to think on the spur of the moment, and then accept the results as they happen.

During the Wild Card game last night in Kansas City, between the #1 Wild Card team Royals and the #2 WIld Card team Athletics, Ned Yost, manager of the Kansas City Royals took his stellar #1 starting pitcher James Shields out with just 88 pitches, winning 3 to 2, with runners in second and third and nobody out in the sixth inning, to bring a 22 year old rookie who has been a starter during the season, Yordani Gallardo, he promptly served a three-run home run to Brandon Moss to deep center field, who already had hit a two-run homer in the first inning.

The five runs that Moss drove in, will be forever just a trivia question, since the Royals won this exciting game 9-8 in 12 inning.Yost made an inexplicable move that could have cost him the game, but his team bailed him out.

For the Oakland Ahtletics, who were “all in”, now they have to go “all out” and rebuid the engine of this car for the 2015 season. The Jon Lester for Yoenis Céspedes trade did not worked out. It is as simple as that. Yes the A’s were plagued with injuries, but they put themselves in this situation of a one game elimination, after they backed into the playoff, for one night in KC.

The A’s still have a good young pitching staff, headed by Sonny Gray, who in 2015 should have some very nice duels against Jon Lester, who will be back with the Red Sox, his favorite team, the one he has won two World Series rings. By the way, Tuesday night John Lester was charged with 6 earned runs in the A’s defeat.Put that in your Cybermetrics.

No, we will never know if the trade was not made, how would the A’s have finished this 2014 season, but we do know that when Céspedes left, the problems began for the Athletics, nobody can refute that. We know that with Yoenis Céspedes (the best athlete they had the last two seasons) the Athletics won consecutive western divisions. No, the A’s collapse was not all because of that trade, but sometimes you have to look for the obvious. I am not a guy that believes a lot in the Cybermetrics.

Cybermetrics is a new baseball statistic that seems to be invented every year, measuring another variable in the game and attempting to measure value in a different (sometimes better) way that takes the human element out of the argument. Take the human element? Hey, why have umpires then? Let’s just have four computers inside each base, to tell you if the runner was out or safe. Sounds funny? Don’t laugh, this could also happen as “changes”continue in the best game ever invented. When the runner is out, the base will turn solid red, when he is safe it will be solid green.

Many of these stats can be attributed to “sabermetrics,” which were born in the 1980s, grew in the 1990s, and really gained traction in the 2000s as many of baseball’s front-office decision makers became disciples of some of these statistics, and make consider them Gospel”. Well, I am not one of those that just go by Cybermetrics.

Imagine some GM in 1941 asking for the Cybermetrics stats of Ted Williams? For Ted Williams “WAR” (Wins Against Replacement), the only WAR Ted Williams knew was the Korean War were he served with distinction as a pilot.

My friends, if your catcher can’t catch the ball, or cannot throw anybody out at second, and your hitter cannot hit with runners in scoring position, and your outfielders can’t throw anybody out at the plate, what good are your Sabermetrics, Cybermetrics or the Metric Decimal System?

Amaury Pi Gonzalez is the Spanish radio voice for A’s baseball and does News and Commentary each week on http://www.sportsradioservice.com