More than any other sport, baseball always has been a game of numbers. It still is but what numbers are important seems to have shifted, although last week a most unlikely team went old school, figuratively speaking.

For decades, baseball has been about production and the measuring sticks were wins, losses, saves, batting average, home runs and RBI. Then came the advent of the laptop computer and suddenly wins didn’t matter, how you did in the playoffs didn’t matter, your batting average didn’t matter. Most of all, your eyes didn’t matter.

You watch Jackie Bradley Jr. play center field and do you conclude Mookie Betts would do it better? No, but something called UZR will argue with you, proving as we’ve long known that there are lies, damnable lies and statistics.

The problem these days is the “statistics” don’t even have to have a basis in reality. Some, like OPS and WAR, certainly have a place in baseball’s modern lexicon as well as in the evaluation process, but if a guy with Coke-bottle-thick glasses is deciding what “range” means among major league shortstops or center fielders, I’ll pass.

Yet none of those changes are as big as the growing importance of one number above all others: a player’s salary. Nothing made this more self-evident than the response last week to the Red Sox turning to Pedro Sandoval and Rusney Castillo and saying, “Get off my lawn!”

The fact that they were on the books to make $27.5 million between them was outweighed by a simple baseball reality: They haven’t played worth a damn since they got to Boston. Yet when manager John Farrell announced Sandoval would sit in favor of minimum-wage-earner Travis Shaw at third base and Castillo would start the season as a fifth outfielder, the media world and the baseball world lost their minds.

Sandoval being asked to take a seat was described by our Steve Buckley as “this dramatic announcement.” The Baseball Dude may look at it that way and baseball insiders may as well, but what’s dramatic about choosing someone with a .889 OPS and a spring training batting average of .339 over someone with a .733 OPS, .233 batting average and 46-inch waistline?

If it were only that one could argue a proven veteran like Sandoval has earned the right to start ahead of Shaw, a career. 261 hitter in the minor leagues until he came to Boston last year and pounded the ball at a .270 clip with a .813 OPS in 65 games, most of them starts from August to the end of a dismal year for the last-place Sox.

In contrast, Sandoval hit .245 with a .658 OPS and a penchant for taking wild cuts. By the end of the season, he’d given up switch hitting and this spring seemed to have given up hitting altogether. Yet the decision to replace him with someone who was playing better has elicited a baffling response locally and throughout Major League Baseball.

Apparently, the fact Sandoval was to make (earn remains in question) $17 million this season generally trumps a guy being paid the major league equivalent of a barista at Starbucks. Other critics have raised an additional issue, pointing out that because Brock Holt is now the left fielder in most cases while Castillo takes a seat in the hope he can learn how to play baseball by osmosis rather than by playing it somewhere like Pawtucket, it creates a hole at utility infielder.

What?

Pablo, the argument goes, can’t play any place but third base and Castillo can’t play anywhere, so there’s no one to take over Holt’s role as the Swiss Army Knife of the Red Sox’s infield. So what? Is that a reason to put Sandoval and Castillo on the field and Holt and Shaw on the bench? Have people in baseball lost their minds?

The very idea that Farrell and El Jefe of Beisbol Ops Dave Dombrowski are doing something radical here by playing the guys who have played best tomorrow in Cleveland is more an indictment on how baseball is now run than it is a commentary on their boldness.

Let me see. You finish last two years in a row. You pay your third baseman $95 million over five years and the first thing you say to him when he shows up is, “Hey, one guy to a uniform!” You pay a kid you never saw play a game $72.5 million before you realize he doesn’t play that game very well. You see two other kids hitting the ball hard, chasing it with gusto and looking not only fit but enthusiastic. So you decide to play the last two guys on your last-place team in an effort to do what?

Shake up the baseball business model? No, to win enough games not to get yourself fired. So why, exactly, is the baseball world looking at this as a “dramatic announcement?”

Beats me but the hope is it might help the Sox beat the Indians this week. If so, the 2016 Red Sox mantra should be an old school one: “Get off my lawn!”