We shelved our trade plans, not because we thought there was anything wrong with Johnny JuCo — Doesn’t everybody wear compression sleeves? Isn’t bunting often the sign of a selfless or smart player? — but because our team would never accept him. Johnny JuCo couldn’t control his story, and these otherwise neutral details became what defined him.

Our story — before we knew we were telling a story — had been similarly distorted. To us, “experts in statistical analytics” meant we were competitors, open to any data that would give us an advantage. But to the players it telegraphed elitism, self-certainty, nerdery.

Sure, we were nerds. We had built a database of statistics that were unheard-of in the Pacific Association. We could tell a batter that the home run he’d hit had come against an 85.26 miles per hour cut fastball, .847 feet from the center of the strike zone, and traveled 95.39 m.p.h. off his bat.

Yet most of our work was dedicated to the oldest of old-school disciplines: scouting. Every night, one of us would watch our next opponent and chart pitches. We’d note patterns, like the starter who tipped his lethal split-finger fastball by wiggling his glove. I condensed this information into scouting reports, written on whiteboards and propped up on our dugout bench each game.

This is not nerd stuff. But to many of our players, it was ignored as such simply because we, the nerds, were doing it.

We sold our story as something imposing — “data analytics” — and we made it about us. We should have sold it as providing them information, and made it about the team. That would have fit into their view of the sport — that we were trying to give them the same resources major-league players like Miguel Cabrera and Clayton Kershaw get. With other sabermetricians, more data wins arguments. In the dugout, a good story does.

We didn’t figure out our mistake until too late, and it cost us. Some of our team’s veterans ignored the video that we offered, or belittled our whiteboard scouting reports. We fought our manager for six weeks over how he used our bullpen. “This is Baseball 101 because you haven’t played it!” he yelled as he stomped out of one meeting.