Imagine the dinner conversation at a Boone family gathering on a Sunday evening in November. I’m not talking about the idea that Bob Boone, the brilliant, long-time catcher, is an executive with the Washington Nationals and son, Aaron, is the manager of the New York Yankees, teams that could conceivably meet in the World Series. Their roles would be enough to fuel a long evening of spirited conversation.

But throw the word and the concept of sabermetrics into the conversation and you’d probably be wise to duck behind your chair at the dinner table.

With infielder Ray Boone having died in 2004, 60-year-old Bob Boone is the patriarch of one of baseball’s few royal families, those that have produced three generations of major leaguers.

I call on Boone occasionally to keep my views of today’s baseball in perspective. I have found over the years that our views are similar. Boone is younger than I am, but we’re close enough in age to have grown up and followed the game in the same era.

When I called Boone last week, I wanted to talk about strikeouts. It’s not a new subject, but it’s a subject that has become more pronounced. Everybody seems to strike out, and no one seems to care.

Why is this happening, I asked Boone.

“Sabermetrics,” he replied. “Talk to a sabermetrics guy. They say it doesn’t matter.”

Boone is obviously not a sabermetrics guy. I am certainly not. But Aaron, son of Bob, is, which is why he fits right in with the Yankees, who have built one of the largest analytics staffs, if not the largest, in Major League Baseball. Besides spending with abandon on players, the Yankees can sign up a bottomless pit of Ivy League graduates who majored in analytics.

And then they can all sit around and watch their players pile up the strikeouts. Entering Sunday’s games, only Joey Gallo (Rangers) and Yoan Moncado (White Sox) had struck out more times that Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Judge, but the Yankees’ pair had a combined total of 217, more than any other pair of teammates.

These were the leaders:

• Gallo               116
• Moncado       116
• Judge             109
• Stanton          108

As a rookie, Judge led the majors last season with 208 strikeouts. Gallo was second with 196. Playing for Miami, Stanton struck out 168 times and is well on his way to exceeding that total this season. It’s as if playing for the analytics-conscious Yankees has encouraged him to strike out as often as he would like.

Of course, last season he hit 59 home runs so he proved he was capable of hitting a lot of home runs without striking out 200 times.

Sabermetricians believe an out is an out however it is made so contrary to what we learned an out doesn’t have to advance a runner.

“Any older guy who played 100 years ago doesn’t understand it,” Boone said, perhaps exaggerating slightly.

“It’s total eyewash,” he added, then mentioned another questionable SABR creation: “R.B.I.s don’t count.”

“I need to have someone who can hit a line drive,” he said, exasperated with the SABR methods.

But then he got to what is probably the basis of our problem with analytics. “They don’t have to watch games,” Boone said. “My computer will tell me.”

Scouts, if they still have jobs, watch games. Their eyes have provided the foundation of the game for more than a century. Their eyes don’t lie. Their eyes and their instincts provided an element computers can’t. It’s called the human element.

When Marge Schott owned the Cincinnati Reds, she fired a bunch of scouts, saying they just sat around watching games. Somebody educated Schott, explaining the scouts were doing their jobs by sitting and watching games. I don’t know if she was convinced, but she rehired the scouts.

Now scouts everywhere are in danger of losing their jobs to computers. The analytics revolution is complete.

BUY A $15 MILLION PIECE OF DEREK JETER

In recent month Derek Jeter has sought additional investors for his team, the Miami Marlins. Now he has embarked on a more personal sales endeavor. He has a house he’d like to sell you. Cost: $14.75 million.

Here is a description of the upstate NY property:

A quirky, castle-like compound owned by retired New York Yankees superstar Derek Jeter in the quaint village of Greenwood Lake, N.Y., once a fashionable Upstate New York summer resort community that attracted the likes of Greta Garbo, Babe Ruth and Gypsy Rose Lee, is now available to be someone else’s home as long as they can stomach the monarchical $14.75 million asking price. A careful parse of tax records indicates the five-time World Series champion, now CEO and part owner of the Miami Marlins, acquired the two-parcel property in two transactions that totaled $1.625 million. The first recorded in October 2002 for $425,000, the second in January 2005 for $1.2 million and, as noted by The New York Post, it’s not such a terrific surprise

Jeter bought the estate given it has a familial connection. As the adopted son of John and Julia Tiedemann, who purchased the property in 1952, Derek Jeter’s grandfather Sonny Connor was raised on the idiosyncratic idyllic waterside spread.

PIAZZA IN, SOSA OUT

Mike Piazza got away with it; Sammy Sosa won’t.

Piazza is in the Hall of Fame despite his alleged long-time use of steroids, which he has steadfastly denied. Sosa is not in the Hall of Fame and is on the verge of becoming ineligible for lack of votes. Writers obviously don’t believe his denials, but his chemically aided home run production undermined him.

Sosa has taped an ESPN interview in which he talks about his life and his looks and says, “I never had a test positive, in this country.” Sosa, however, does not make a HOF case for himself, which is good because it would have been futile.

After hitting a career-high 40 home runs in 1996, Sosa hit more than 60 home runs in three seasons of a four-season span, 1998 through 2001. It was a feat unmatched in the long history of baseball, not achieved by Babe Ruth, not by Roger Maris, not by a steroids-fueled Mark McGwire. But we were supposed to accept Sosa’s production as legitimate.

Now that Piazza is in the Hall of Fame, I doubt that he cares if anyone thinks his presence is legitimate and deserved. It is neither. He was a steroids cheat and will always be known as the guy who got away with it. I would like to think the legitimate Hall of Famers would shun Piazza, as many said they would with players who cheated, but players have short memories and they will welcome him every time he shows up.

The Hall of Fame will welcome him, too, as it quietly celebrates its success in keeping Marvin Miller out. Miller gets another shot soon so Janes Forbes Clark and Jeff Idelson will have to get busy preparing their keep-out defense.

CANCEL PAPER, READ KEPNER; HOW PLEASE?

In an interesting coincidence, this e-mail arrived from Montclair, N.J. last week as this website’s column on the lack of baseball coverage in The New York Times was being posted:

Question: Why/when did the Times decide to no longer really cover the local teams and the major sports leagues? Curling, Soccer, Ping Pong, yes! But MLB, NFL games (not political issues), NBA, NHL, etc…? Not anymore.

No box scores, even for just Yanks/Mets, No stats, even weekly, just feature articles on obscure sports and events that so few care about.

It made me cancel my subscription after 30+ years.

Who/why decided that was a good business decision?

Was it because they decided Millennials were not interested?

I wish I could answer the reader’s questions, but I am as puzzled as he is. I can’t get answers from the Times because the editors don’t respond to my questions. If I ever get answers, I will be happy to print them here.

Now for something that fits right in to the puzzle department and I don’t mean crossword puzzle.

As a subscriber to the Times, I received this e-mail:

Tyler Kepner is your most read journalist.

Thomas L. Friedman is your most read opinion columnist.

I can believe Friedman. I am skeptical about Kepner, who writes about baseball, which seldom appears in the newspaper. And if somehow Kepner is the most read journalist, the Times must have a lot of Phillies’ fans for readers because Kepner has maintained his boyhood infatuation with the Phillies and writes about them repeatedly.

And how does the Times know who is the most read journalist? Did the Times take a survey? Did it take a survey during the World Cup? If it did, how did anyone find baseball, which was buried in the back of the sports section? I think we have more questions here than answers, and I’m not sure how we can get the answers. I’ll have to ponder this problem for next week.

Hmm. Tyler Kepner is my most read journalist. Fancy that.