I’ve returned to the newspaper industry recently, doing some agate shifts for a wire service that assists the San Francisco Chronicle. To the uninitiated, agate is the small print located in sports sections where scores, stats, and other items of record can be found. It’s not generally a place for sabermetrics.

I went to college for journalism and did agate briefly for the Sacramento Bee six years ago. Writing about baseball online since my time at The Bee has shaped my perspective. In the last two years, I’ve made increasing use of sabermetrics in my pieces, tossing around stats like WAR, ERA+ and SO/BB. I think advanced stats are part of the future of baseball writing and that they offer a more comprehensive, less hyperbolic look at the game. Sabermetrics tells us things, like how one sign Barry Bonds dominated baseball from 2001 to 2004 was that he had an OPS+ of 256, meaning his adjusted offensive production was 156 points better than the league average.

Not everyone thinks in these terms, granted. While some of my favorite baseball writers have embraced sabermetrics, many more writers and readers have not. I assume they have little use for sabermetrics, and it’s of no consequence to them if stats even as simple as on-base or slugging percentage show up in a newspaper. As a writer, I strive to make sabermetrics accessible to the average reader, to show why the numbers matter. That said, I sometimes have to accept reader preferences for what they are and determine where to draw the line and how to engage the widest audience. It’s a balancing act, like a lot of things in life.

Part of me has wanted to slip OPS or WHIP into the Chronicle, though I haven’t wanted to rock the boat. It’s not my place, and I’m not sure if I could feasibly get the stats in even if it was. Agate is driven by what comes off the Associated Press wires, mostly an issue of grabbing items as they become available, inserting them into the next day’s paper, and formatting them for style. If the AP sends out sabermetric stat leaders, I haven’t seen them, which means I’d have to compile them by hand. Coming up against deadline, this can be a tall if not unreasonable order of china business, especially when the priority with agate is getting it done on time, not making mistakes, and helping ensure that every box score that needs to be in the paper gets in.

It’s challenging times for the newspaper industry, with advertising revenue dwindling and editorial staffs all over dealing with cutbacks and shortages. Expecting newspapers to tackle sabermetrics with scant help seems illogical. Resources are stretched thin, and it doesn’t make much sense for a newspaper to allocate manpower or dollars to provide a statistical service a niche of readers care about. Do I think it’s worthwhile for newspapers to start doing more with sabermetrics? Absolutely, though there are lots of things papers could be doing these days that there isn’t budget for. And while I doubt this would ever happen, I’d hate for sabermetrics to be implemented at the expense of another journalistic service.

I know of three papers that use sabermetrics in print. Two of them, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal seemingly boast sufficient writing talent and resources to explore ways to cover advanced stats; they also have broad and educated enough readerships for there to be demand for such material. The other paper I know of that makes regular use of sabermetrics, the Boston Herald does a trade-off with this website wherein the paper mentions us in print in exchange for statistical help. It’s a nifty arrangement, and I’d love to see more newspapers follow suit.