When I was younger, there were semi-pro softball teams that featured entire line-ups of huge guys who weren’t really good athletes but could hit the ball a long way when they made contact. I recall that a meat-packing company in SoCal sponsored a national champion team comprised of big galoots who looked like their endorsements of their sponsor’s links and ribs were wholehearted.

But then along came Sabermetrics and steroids, and guys who were naturally cut out for beerball started getting 8 figures a year to play major league baseball, such as 6′-6″ 285 pound Adam Dunn, who earned $112 million dollars for hitting 462 homers and leading the league in walks twice.

Dunn, who just retired at the age of 34 and looked like a sort of larger version of Mark McGwire, was not a “five-tool player,” he didn’t “look good in a uniform” (his nickname was “Big Donkey), he just hit homers and got walks when he wasn’t striking out. He looked like a poor baserunner and disgraceful defensive player, but it was only recently that sabermetricians finally got good at measuring those skills, so they mostly advised paying little attention to them compared to Dunn’s homers and walks.

Dunn retired last week without ever playing in a single post-season game, which is hard to do these days with four rounds of playoffs. From FiveThirtyEight:

AN OUT IS AN OUT A Farewell To Adam Dunn, Sabermetric Bellwether OCT 2 By NEIL PAINE … Dunn’s most prominent place in the fabric of the game, then, is symbolic. Spanning the “Moneyball” era almost perfectly, Dunn’s career served as a bellwether for the growth, acceptance and, ultimately, the maturity of sabermetrics. … Because he provided value with walks and power instead of contact hitting, Dunn was initially highlighted by statheads as the type of player who would frequently fall through the cracks of traditional analysis. Before sabermetrics became mainstream, strikeout-prone players like Dunn were disparaged — just take a trip through Fire Joe Morgan‘s Adam Dunn-tagged posts for a taste of the aspersions cast in Dunn’s direction over his whiff-happy ways — while statheads kept countering with the mantra that (for batters, at least) strikeouts are essentially no worse than any other out. … But the great irony is that as sabermetric principles became so mainstream that Dunn’s batting value was properly evaluated, the state of analysis also improved to the point that baserunning and defense could be appraised with far greater accuracy than ever before. This was bad news for Dunn, a very large, very slow man who was of little use when holding a glove instead of a bat. Whether you look at Baseball-Reference.com or FanGraphs, Dunn was worth something in the neighborhood of 20 runs below average on the basepaths, making him one of the 40 or so worst baserunners of his generation. And defensively, Dunn’s value takes a major hit. Despite frequently playing low-difficulty positions at the far left end of the defensive spectrum (leading to a negative positional adjustment), Dunn was comically below-average relative to his positional peers. To wit: In 2009, Dunn somehow posted -43 Defensive Runs Saved while splitting time between first base and the two outfield corners, giving him the worst defensive season relative to positional average in baseball history. And between the twin factors of position and performance relative to positional average, Dunn rates as MLB’s worst defensive player ever in the estimation of Baseball Reference.

Sabermetrics giveth and Sabermetrics taketh away.

But in the case of Dunn, Sabermetrics mostly gaveth. From 2006-2014, he got paid $107,000,000 while, according to the latest advanced statistics, costing his teams 15 wins compared to a league average player. In 2011, he had one of those amazing off-years that seem more common during the racheting up of PEDs testing: Dunn batted .159 with 11 homers and 42 RBIs. It wasn’t quite as bad as Andruw Jones’ 2008 — .158 with 3 homers and 14 RBIs — but it was still one for the ages.

In the end, Dunn’s career represents the maturation of statistical analysis in baseball. Originally, it was thought that a player’s defense was of little consequence as long as he was productive at the plate; in “Moneyball,” there’s a passage quoting former Oakland A’s consultant Eric Walker as saying fielding was “at most 5 percent of the game” — a statement that rings particularly ludicrous in today’s age of BABIP and rampant defensive shifts.

Let’s make clear here that the notion that fielding was at most 5 percent of the game was the view of a sophisticated Moneyballer of a decade and a half ago, not of a baseball traditionalist.

If the first stage of sabermetric proselytization was convincing the public that Dunn-esque hitters who rarely put the ball in play had value, the second stage was persuading them to look at the value driven by factors beyond hitting.

In other words, the supergeniuses of advanced baseball statistics have progressed all the way to the point where their computers can now tell them what the much-derided old scouts could have observed just by watching: Adam Dunn wasn’t a very good major league baseball player.

It’s interesting to compare Dunn to Dick Stuart, a 1950s-1960s slugging first baseman who attracted memorable nicknames for his bad fielding: Dr. Strangeglove, the Boston Strangler, Stonefingers, the Man with the Iron Glove, they just go on and on. Stuart was even worse at first base than Dunn, with a career .982 fielding percentage compared to Dunn’s .988. Bill Buckner, who made the most notorious error by a first baseman since Merkel’s Boner of 1908 (which was a baserunning lapse) had a career fielding average of .992. Steve Garvey was .996.

Dunn got to the majors at age 21, but it took Stuart until age 25. One reason was he did two years in the military, but his fielding must have slowed him down because his minor league homer totals are eye-popping. At age 23, Stuart hit 66 homers. The next year he hit 45. And they still didn’t call him up. In the first half of a AAA season at age 25 he hit 31 homers, so they called him up to the Pirates and he hit 16 in 67 big league games. I have to imagine that Stuart’s late arrival in the majors had to do with his bad aesthetics.

A future challenge for Sabermetrics will be getting a handle on the psychological costs of bad fielding. I suspect certain types of bad fielding are worse than other types.

I rag on Sabermetrics not because I’m an old-fashioned anti-numbers guy — I’ve been a True Believer in it for 29 years — but because it’s now The Establishment so its braggadocio and shortcomings are important to examine critically, especially because Moneyball is held up as a model to learn from.

I especially don’t like the common assumption that Science with a capital S (and baseball statistics are a form of social science) opens the door to a lot of gnostic knowledge that is utterly inaccessible any other way. No, the social sciences aren’t, say, quantum mechanics, they are instead summaries of human behavior and humans aren’t bad at noticing patterns in what other humans are doing. Sabermetrics is good at summarizing baseball behavior conveniently so you don’t have to spend huge amounts of time watching. As Bill James said many decades ago, most of what he is doing is tearing away the influence of bad statistics. The goal of his new statistics was to reflect with fewer biases what you can see happening on the field.

Obviously, that has broader implications. For example, the most sophisticated statistical analyses of who commits crime in the U.S. don’t reveal some unknown gnostic reality only known by adepts: instead, the Ph.D.s validate the stereotypes.