The real problem isn’t in the dugout, though. It’s with the way the game is discussed off the field. I grew up on vivid reporting that teased out details from the day’s action to give us a more flavorful and insightful narrative — not just by accomplished magazine writers like Roger Angell, but by the scores of beat reporters covering the game nationwide. These days there are some great baseball beat writers, but too many — especially among the younger ones — are so awash in stats that they can’t seem to see the game beyond the numbers.

In any press box, most reporters are texting, tweeting or Googling stats. This doesn’t work. You can go to the symphony and hear the music even as you’re texting with a client to close a deal. As your thumbs fly and you try not to be distracted by the dirty looks of the guy next to you, you might note the orchestra is playing Mahler’s Ninth. But with your attention so cratered, are you really listening to the music? Are you enjoying it?

The importance of being fully present for a game, shorn of distractions, lies not in sentimentality about the nobility of baseball (even Mr. Angell once groused that “The ‘Field of Dreams’ thing gives me a pain!”), but in continuously deepening one’s understanding of the game.

The art of hitting a baseball starts with emptying the mind. As Jonathan Fader, a psychologist who works with Mets players, told me: “Essentially, what we’re trying to do in sports psychology is helping people to not think.” Fans and writers need to adopt a similar attitude. An overly analytical approach, centered in the cerebral cortex, is a distancing mechanism that puts a fan at a remove from how the players — and most fans — are experiencing a game.

There’s no question that, as baseball general managers get younger and better educated, much of the fresh energy in baseball today comes from putting analytical tools to work in rethinking old assumptions. Often the greater rigor that results can be readily understood and applied, to exciting ends. For example, the shift of the game toward flame-throwing, late-game relief pitchers makes it natural that we’d be more focused on a previously obscure statistic: batting average against relievers. In trying to decide last season between two underperforming young first basemen, both left-handed batters with power, the Mets looked to a telling number to see who would be the more dependable slugger: the velocity of the ball just after being struck by the bat.