Michael Lewis: The No-Stats All Star

I’m a great fan of Michael Lewis and own all of his books, with Liar’s Poker, The Blind Side, and Moneyball among my all-time favorites. He’s a sharp writer and social commentator and I imagine a guy it would be a lot of fun to grab a drink with and talk about the world. He has a real talent for iconoclasm.

He penned an interesting piece for the NYT on Shane Battier and the application of Jamesian sabremetrics to NBA basketball. It first came to my attention through Deadspin, but they didn’t really develop it.

Read it. Really read it.

You’re going to like it; whether or not you agree with everything in it. Then grab a beverage of your choice and let’s discuss.

Some passages that spoke to me:

…the big challenge on any basketball court is to measure the right things. The five players on any basketball team are far more than the sum of their parts; the Rockets devote a lot of energy to untangling subtle interactions among the team’s elements. To get at this they need something that basketball hasn’t historically supplied: meaningful statistics. For most of its history basketball has measured not so much what is important as what is easy to measure — points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots — and these measurements have warped perceptions of the game.

So, I build this article up and now will disagree with something right off of the bat. But I think it’s an important point.

No, Mr Lewis, a team is exactly the sum of its parts. We just need to account for all of the parts – not just the ones viewed solely through the narrow instrument of a box score. The point is that the parts being measured aren’t readily apparent and hard to document, but that doesn’t make them indefinable anti-matter. Don’t go all mystical on me and undermine your central thesis. As Einstein once said: “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.” In this case, the plus-minus system and its derivatives suggest that we can.

I love his central thesis though.

How can a team of seemingly inferior athletes (say Greece) whip a NBA All-Star team in the Olympics during the 90s? In fact, and I think Lewis would agree, European teams had a far more sophisticated understanding of what the game of basketball was really about: launching lots of shots from desirable places; limiting the opponent’s ability to launch shots from desirable places. They had a bunch of Shane Battiers running around.

But with outrageous accents and centralized healthcare.

This is learning and it’s application is a real skill. It made them better basketball players than our guys, vertical leaps be damned. The false metrics of the NBA in the 1990s had ruined our capacity to play and understand actual basketball. As evidenced by most bloggers. Scroll down for his thoughts on why the rankings are justified as to why Shane Battier is the most overrated player in basketball: his confusion as to why you’d send Battier to play elite international competition is amusing on about thirty nine different levels.

And here’s a local that should know better. The Mario Williams/Reggie Bush reference, too.

Enough, back to Lewis:

There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group. On the baseball field, it would be hard for a player to sacrifice his team’s interest for his own. Baseball is an individual sport masquerading as a team one: by doing what’s best for himself, the player nearly always also does what is best for his team.

Lewis just nailed the essence of basketball and baseball in four sentences. Very The Wealth of Nations. Lewis has just recently written a book on classical econ and I don’t doubt that he saw the parallels there.

Like Oakland GM Billy Beane, I’ve always been amused by baseball’s false communal mysticism when it is demonstrably the most individual of team sports. Just as George Will’s superstition-laden writing on baseball ignores its individualism and routinely mocks the Enlightenment (he may as well attribute the art of managing to phlogiston, chi, and small gnomes living inside the sternum and upper bowel) we still worship visionaries and mystics for their “depth” and revile and distrust the technocrat for their uninspiring rationalism. Compare:

“I did the numbers on Jones against fastball hitters, so I made the call for a DH. Gonzales had a nineteen percent greater likelihood of a positive outcome. I played the odds and it worked out.”

vs.

“I felt strangely compelled by my otter-spirit, Tchingach-touk, with whom I first gained acquaintance inside a sweat lodge while being flogged by a Huron shaman with a bat carcass. Gonzalessssssssss, he whispered. We were rewarded for our piety with a ground rule double and I felt the wa of our team grow commensurately.”

The first manager is a boring, emotionless codfish. The second manager is…just…so…inspiring!

Lewis writes:

It is in basketball where the problems are most likely to be in the game — where the player, in his play, faces choices between maximizing his own perceived self-interest and winning. The choices are sufficiently complex that there is a fair chance he doesn’t fully grasp that he is making them.

hi!

Further wisdom:

It turns out there is no statistic that a basketball player accumulates that cannot be amassed selfishly. “We think about this deeply whenever we’re talking about contractual incentives,” he says. “We don’t want to incent a guy to do things that hurt the team” — and the amazing thing about basketball is how easy this is to do. “They all maximize what they think they’re being paid for,” he says.

Bingo. Show me a person’s carrots and sticks and I’ll tell you their behaviors. Whether it’s a stripper, Tracy McGrady, or your congressman.

Tedious story: as a manager, I was once confronted with a national VP of Sales who decided to incent a product with a 125 million dollar ceiling equally to a product with a 600 million dollar ceiling within the same market to our sales teams. Hmm, OK. I’ll hear him out. He supported his decision with a series of rambling inapplicable anecdotes and wouldn’t hear dissenting opinions. He was a functional moron, a walking illustration of the Peter-Principle, the kind of suit you want to grab and wordlessly throw into the corporate swan pond.

Each moment of person-time spent on the lesser product was more than four times less productive than the greater, and it also had the capacity to cannibalize the high-ceiling product if not shrewdly promoted in its use. From an associated cost perspective, it was also massively more time-intensive and involved a lengthy certification process for the user and sales team that ate up entire weeks. Its impact was fairly obvious for all of us to see.

Yet, almost every manager in the company blindly followed the Plan-of-Action. I quietly steered my team towards an appropriate 80/20 mix while lying through my teeth to everyone else. I spent months on the wrong end of the corporate structure and beyond the safety of the flock – showing up on various naughty lists that measured everything but actual performance and having to talk down my nervous sales people who were being cautioned by their peers that this was career suicide; believe me, those social pressures cannot be ignored or easily dismissed and it was an introspective time for me.

When performance came back into vogue as national sales plummeted and my region’s sales spiked, my vindication and subsequent award-winning was less valuable than my learning: doing the right thing alone is significantly more difficult than doing the wrong thing collectively. Most would rather be wrong together than right by themselves. See Wall Street, government, Tickle Me Elmo hysteria, the pop culture notion that Alan Greenspan is a genius, Maoist China, Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany….

…and always, sports.

But we’ve got plus-minus, baby:

One well-known statistic the Rockets’ front office pays attention to is plus-minus, which simply measures what happens to the score when any given player is on the court.

Plus-minus is a shared parlance with the science of card-counting in Blackjack. A card counter tracks the value of cards revealed in a dealer’s deck and assigns likelihoods to future play – and when to bet big – based upon it. Of course, unlike basketball scouting, card counting only gives you a small advantage and you need many, many hands to see a positive effect. But the principle remains: to wager more and lose on a hot deck should simply elicit a shrug. You behaved correctly.

Basketball follows exactly the same principles. A guy hits an off-balance jumper from 23 feet where he shoots 18% on the year? Tip your cap. Then have the confidence to make him do it again. Most guys won’t – they use a n of 1 – an irrelevant statistical sample, to determine their behavior. Next time, they’ll body up on him and open up the drive. Where he shoots 59%. And increases offensive team rebounding opportunities off of a miss.

Not many basketball players say things like this:

“The numbers either refute my thinking or support my thinking,” he says, “and when there’s any question, I trust the numbers. The numbers don’t lie.” Even when the numbers agree with his intuitions, they have an effect. “It’s a subtle difference,” Morey says, “but it has big implications. If you have an intuition of something but no hard evidence to back it up, you might kind of sort of go about putting that intuition into practice, because there’s still some uncertainty if it’s right or wrong.”

hi!

This is at the core of athletic genius. Great players have no doubt. When a player loses confidence, they doubt their athletic intuition. Perhaps it was injury, but it may just well be that they ran into a bad statistical streak determined by chance. Rather than perservere through it trusting the odds will even out, they begin to tweak their stance, their stroke, their level of aggression. This is the stuff of slumps and the brutal downward spiral.

Maybe that’s the essence of good coaching: instilling your players with the confidence to fight through short term trends knowing that the correct behaviors win out over the long haul.

Talk to me….

Article Tags:

Chemistry, College Basketball, Michael Lewis, NBA, Rick Barnes, Shane Battier

100 Responses

dedfischer said:

February 15th, 2009 at 3:11 pm

“I felt strangely compelled by my otter-spirit, Tchingach-touk, with whom I first gained acquaintance inside a sweat lodge while being flogged by a Huron shaman with a bat carcass.”

Wow
glenn said:

February 15th, 2009 at 3:19 pm

i gape in awe.
ctex80 said:

February 15th, 2009 at 3:22 pm

This Texas team is a walking, talking, half court offense butchering example of the principles (or lack thereof) that Lewis talks about. The difference between this team playing as a team and playing for their draft stock is night and day.

With players like AJ and Damion, the contrast between playing for the team and playing for their draft stock is quite stark. In fact, I don’t remember any players at Texas whose personal goals were in more direct opposition to the team goal than these two guys.
Micky Rosa said:

February 15th, 2009 at 3:36 pm

The only thing worse than a loser is someone who won’t admit he played badly.

And don’t call me dude.
Bob in Houston said:

February 15th, 2009 at 4:05 pm

“With players like AJ and Damion, the contrast between playing for the team and playing for their draft stock is quite stark.”

Gotta disagree.

AJ is doing pretty much what Barnes tells him to do. We know this because AJ spends almost no time sitting beside Barnes hearing what he should be doing. (It’s also because he’s the only consistent outside threat, but that’s a different issue….) On his radio show on Thursday, Barnes said AJ has been the most consistent player all season, IIRC, “doing what we want to do.” I have to take Barnes at his word, because not only have we seen him petulantly pull players from the game (Dogus Balbay vs. Missouri, James vs. OU), but for him to be unhappy not do anything about it is contrary to his own interest.

As to Damion, some individual decisions seem selfish — most frequently when he shoots a three. But I don’t always equate bad decisions with selfish ones. Similarly to AJ, the times when James has been benched are more likely to be based on defensive lapses rather than wild shooting.
longhornmatt said:

February 15th, 2009 at 4:15 pm

Well, what Barnes wants and what Darryl Morey would want are probably pretty different.
the Bobs said:

February 15th, 2009 at 4:27 pm

thanks, great article and great post…

I really only have one question – why the heck is Battier not a San Antonio Spur??? Back when he was with the Grizzlies I argued with some guys from work that he was the perfect Spur and they needed to move heaven and earth to get him. This article would vindicate me if Battier had not already made it abundantly clear.
chitwood said:

February 15th, 2009 at 4:38 pm

If you like Lewis, I thought this was a pretty good article of his on the Wall Street collapse.
SlickStreet said:

February 15th, 2009 at 5:14 pm

Biggest ‘bingo’ moment: “doing the right thing alone is significantly more difficult than doing the wrong thing collectively.”

Also have started reading Moneyball (finally), per ‘someone’s’ recommendation. Great stuff
Joe Morgan said:

February 15th, 2009 at 5:32 pm

Michael Lewis is an idiot. I don’t even have to read his stuff to know that.
burnt orange dog said:

February 15th, 2009 at 5:51 pm

Scipio, as always, reading your stuff makes me feel dumber, and get smarter. I feel like I should send you a check.

I particularly enjoyed your “tedious story” segment. To me, this parallels Mack Brown’s recruiting strategy (or at least my interpretation of his strategy). We fans gnash our teeth about his lack of pursuit of out of state recruits; yet I suspect to land an equivalent out of state recruit, it requires significantly more man hours than it does to land the same talent-level in-state recruit.
TKO said:

February 15th, 2009 at 5:55 pm

chitwood:
Outstanding article; thanks for the referral.

Scipio:
After having read a few of your previous pieces, I actually googled “Tchingach-touk.” You fucker.
Bob in Houston said:

February 15th, 2009 at 5:58 pm

b.o.d.: I suspect not only that out-of-state recruits require more man hours, but also more man hours than they want to spend.

But this number also may vary by school and number of recruits in an area. Kansas, for example, probably puts more time into recruiting just because it has to go out of state.
ctex80 said:

February 15th, 2009 at 6:08 pm

Bob,

Was not implying that AJ and Damion are necessarily selfish, but rather that the things that NBA scouts have told them (or at least the general consensus has told us) to work on are in direct opposition to what Texas needs them to do.

We need AJ to spot up for 3′s and not try to run the point or create off of the dribble. We need Damion to work the low block, and not dick around on the perimeter. But that is exactly what they’ve been told they will need to do to get drafted. Hence the conflict of interest.

I think AJ has played admirably this year, most games, but he hasn’t helped his draft stock much.
chitwood said:

February 15th, 2009 at 6:24 pm

my pleasure TKO
Bob in Houston said:

February 15th, 2009 at 6:36 pm

ctex: But I think AJ is doing exactly what you say he needs to do… He’s off the ball, running constantly, trying to get an opening for a catch-and-shoot, or maybe one or two dribbles if he’s inside the arc. He runs the point rarely these days, usually only late in the half when they need to get a shot off, or late in the game when they don’t want the other team fouling Balbay or Mason.

Damion… well, he started the season on the wing, so RB must have been thinking at least a little along the lines of the scouts. If James had priorities other than the team, he surely would have pulled up for a jumper in the last few seconds yesterday… instead, he took it as far as he could and got fouled. He was a beast in OT, not a jump-shooting hero.

I don’t think that either guy is putting pro ball above the team right now.
Or I could have just said said:

February 15th, 2009 at 7:27 pm

Optimization of a system REQUIRES sub-optimization of its components.

But that wouldn’t have been nearly as fun.
Or I could have just said said:

February 15th, 2009 at 7:36 pm

I wish I could edit a post.

I meant to add “great read”.

Great leadership is often viewed as some sort of intangible, but sometimes it’s simply the ability to get people to see that their best interests actually lie in team (rather than individual) achievements.

Free agency has killed a lot of that. What the hell do I care if we’re setting up for a great year next year? If I get 20/10 this year, I’m set for life. I’ll get over not having a championship by counting my money.

Scipio, your story of the VP of Sales could be any company I’ve ever worked at or heard stories of. The funny thing is that they’ve all probably been to B school and therefore almost assuredly read “On the Folly of Rewarding ‘A’ While Hoping for ‘B’”. You don’t even have to read the article to get the point.
Scagnetti said:

February 15th, 2009 at 8:43 pm

I am curious if Lewis considered the statistics governing efficiency in the NHL. Plus-minus has been a metric used in virtually all aspects of the professional hockey game for a couple decades now, especially when it comes to incentive laden contractual negotiations between players/agents and management…
ATXHornsFan said:

February 15th, 2009 at 9:16 pm

You are a mad genius.
Nero said:

February 15th, 2009 at 9:56 pm

This can sort of be summed up with the words “comparative advantage”, can’t it?

A great rebounder should rebound, a great passer should pass, a great shooter should shoot. If you are relying on the great shooter to pass, your team really is less than the some of its parts. Trade the shooter for a passer.
mm said:

February 15th, 2009 at 9:58 pm

So, uhhh, you’re saying that Leinart was right
Nero said:

February 15th, 2009 at 10:57 pm

1. Will the Rockets retain this proprietary information long enough for it to make a difference?

I think probably yes. Basketball has a much smaller roster than baseball or football, so salary cap issues aside, the turnover of a roster to align with the new information should be a faster process. All new “sabermetrics” will eventually spread around the various leagues to the point that the posession of it by the originators isn’t as dear (ex: Jimmy Johnson’s NFL draft chart). However, in Basketball you can use it faster.

2. Specifically with the Rockets, will it make a difference with the regard to the ultimate goal (NBA championship)?

I think yes again. Les Alexander is not a cheapskate owner. In Oakland, the Athletics use sabermetrics, but have little money from the owners, and have not won a title. Same goes for Toronto. The Red Sox operate similarly, but additionally have the money to club free agents to death, and the combination has led to two titles recently. The Celtics strong armed their way to a title with free agents, just as the Florida Marlins did in 1997. The Yankees are still attempting to do this and it is not working. Sabermetrics may be the best way to skin a cat, but it isn’t the only way. And afterall, you have to have a cat to skin in the first place.
SkymonkeyHorn said:

February 15th, 2009 at 11:33 pm

Scipio T, Bravo! Kudos on this article, you hit a grand slam,with a 3-2count and 2 outs. Outstanding comments on your part.

“Maybe that’s the essence of good coaching: instilling your players with the confidence to fight through short term trends knowing that the correct behaviors win out over the long haul.”
Nailed it….in one sentence. A truism
SkymonkeyHorn said:

February 15th, 2009 at 11:44 pm

ST,
“This is at the core of athletic genius. Great players have no doubt. When a player loses confidence, they doubt their athletic intuition”

The great players never had doubts. The old Celtics, Alcindor/Jabbar,Jordan, Kobe, LaBron,West, Baylor, The big O.
That statement is a play out of my old school playbook. Brought a smile to my innerself.
Hawkeye would be proud of you !
CrazyJoeDavola said:

February 16th, 2009 at 12:18 am

I wonder how this goes in the other direction – namely, does it explain at least some of the reason why superstars of sports make such awful coaches/general managers, and to a lesser extent, awful announcers/analysts?
Hornin Hong Kong said:

February 16th, 2009 at 12:58 am

what is kevin duran’ts plus minus
Scipio Tex said:

February 16th, 2009 at 1:16 am

theBobs:

I think Battier is definitely a Spur guy but he’d have been redundant to Bruce Bowen back when he was trade bait. I also think Durant is a Spur, but that’s a post for another day.

chit:

Thanks, that was a good read.

Slick:

I think Moneyball was one of the most influential books I’ve ever read. It’s about applying human capital and that’s a subject I find fascinating.

Or I could of:

Thanks. It’s amazing how many successful people I talk to around my age group with very similar stories. I told one of my colleagues a long time ago: never confuse a corporation with an actual business. He said he didn’t know what the hell I meant by that until seeing that plan. Then it came together.

I may start a Fight Club.
Scipio Tex said:

February 16th, 2009 at 1:32 am

b.o.d -

Thanks, man. So, regarding OOS recruiting, I might differ slightly in that I was describing high activity-low reward behavior above.

OOS recruiting is a medium activity-high reward behavior that, if limited to its proper and prudent use, yields value.

I go out of state for 4/5 stars – not scrubs. And I go after just a few. Particularly when I can’t find what I want at home.

Scagnetti:

I wish I knew that. I’m not a hockey guy, but that’s a sport very similar to basketball. Lots of things a player can do to make his team better without padding the box score.

Nero:

Good point. Though economic comparative advantage suggests that we can measure outputs appropriately. The struggle is breaking down the game to tell the player what he can do to best help his team. Some do positive things without even knowing it. Or us even percieving it. How can we bridge the gap from +/- and link it to behaviors?

Your second post is freaking great, too.

Skymonkey:

Thanks! You know your hoops so I appreciate that.

CJD:

Great minds, my friend. I had a piece in my original post about how basketball greats generally can’t coach. I omitted because it was getting long. What’s your take on it?

horninhongkong:

I wish I knew.
Economics Pedant said:

February 16th, 2009 at 5:59 am

Nero:

It’s not quite that simple. Comparative advantge doesn’t actually refer to one party’s absolute ability to engage in production relative to that of another party. It refers to the relative costs of engaging in production.

For instance:

Suppose that Brazil can produce 8 oranges or 4 bananas per unit of input, and that Paraguy can produce only 2 oranges or 2 bananas per unit. Assuming that Brazil and Paraguay are the only parties involved, that bananas and and oranges are the only produce involved, and that resources used to make bananas and oranges are perfect substitutes, it would appear that if Paraguay approached Brazil and offered to swap bananas for oranges, Brazil should tell Paraguay to screw off and proceed to produce its own bananas. After all, Brazil can produce bananas at twice Parguay’s efficiency rate.

On closer inspection, however, it turns out that every input unit Brazil devotes to the production of 1 banana costs it the 2 oranges which it could have produced instead. In Paraguay the cost or producing 1 banana is 1 orange. In this case, Brazil would benefit by specializing in orange production and offering Paraguay anything up to 2 oranges in exchange for 1 banana. In this way, Brazil could obtain bananas at a lower cost than if it produced them itself.

The Paraguays would be only too happy to accept the deal so long as they received anything more than 1 orange in exchange for 1 of their bananas–as things stand, every time they surrender the production of 1 banana to make an orange instead, they receive only one orange in return–better to just surrender one banana produced to Brazil, rather than surrender it to lost production, and receive more than one orange in return.

All of which is to say that Justin Mason should never have played point, even if he was the most productive point on the team. I think Trips has made reference to this on more than one occasion.

Scip:

If the lesser product had higher associted costs to the sales team, then theoretically, the ratio of greater to lesser product should have been more than 4/1.
srr50 said:

February 16th, 2009 at 6:02 am

Great read Scip:

As for why great basketball players generally don’t make great coaches, I don’t limit that to just one sport. Ted Williams and Otto Graham come to mind as a couple of other transcendent players who didn’t match their on the field performance as managers or coaches.

Let’s be clear, we are talking about the unique talents, because certainly there have been players with great careers who were successful coaches.

I have always thought that the basic handicap was that these players see the game more clearly than others. Like a great running back with peripheral vision who sees a hole before it is completely open, great players anticipate — others often react.

As a manager or coach it must drive them nuts when they see something developing and wonder why their players don’t see it as well.

And since it comes naturally to them, it makes it harder to express to others what exactly it is that makes the game come easier to them — both as a coach or an announcer.

Short aside. My father was a gifted athlete, he was the first freshman to letter in varsity football as his high school in Michigan and was the point guard on a state championship basketball team. My brother and I loved and played sports in HS, and dad was supportive.

But both my brother and I were average athletes, and there were times when dad would get so frustrated watching from the stands, he would get up and leave for a few minutes. He didn’t undertand why we didn’t see what he saw. Now he never told us this (mom told us years later) but he just couldn’t understand why we — and our teammates — didn’t play the game the way he saw it unfolding.

Another thing. These great players all have terrific worth ethics as well. They see players not demanding as much of themselves and they see talent being wasted, and that drives them nuts as well. Just ask Magic Johnson.
glenn said:

February 16th, 2009 at 6:06 am

somewhere the ghost of ed deming smiles and nods knowingly.

thanks, scip.
Parlin Hall said:

February 16th, 2009 at 7:08 am

Any manager worth his salt would have terminated you for that 80/20 stunt, buster. And made an example out of your insubordination.
Tommy Lasorda would probably tell you said:

February 16th, 2009 at 7:39 am

that athletes who struggle to stay in the pros learn every trick, every shortcut, every technique to maximize what they can get out of their talents.

And because any success they have comes more from the ability to outthink rather than outathlete their opponent, it is a process they can break down into its components and explain.

Star athletes who are able to do things just because they can do them…not so much.

Can you imagine Ted Williams coaching a marginal player? “Well, son, during the first third of the ball’s flight from the pitcher’s hand, you obviously have identified by the spin exactly where it will end up in the strike zone. So since that’s a given, what’s your fucking problem?”
Scipio Tex said:

February 16th, 2009 at 7:43 am

Economics Pedant:

Correct – because of the associated costs, I should have had more than a 90/10 split. However, I was not in the Ivory Tower looking strictly for the best and purest economics outcome. I had to generate enough associated activity (i.e. generation of certifications) with the low yielding product such that major alarm flags weren’t raised and I wasn’t fired on the spot – as Parlin Hall jokingly and correctly points out above. That was how I could stay around until rationality was restored months later. Make sense?

srr50:

Yep. That’s my take on greats attempting to coach as well. Intuition doesn’t lend itself to easy verbalization and it renders the great player inarticulate and frustrated when confronted with normal, average, mediocre.

Tommy L:

We’re on the same page, you and I.
Bob in Houston said:

February 16th, 2009 at 8:21 am

That *was* Ted Williams’s problem. That, and because he thought like a hitter he had no respect for his pitchers.
dedfischer said:

February 16th, 2009 at 8:48 am

Believe it or not, at one point in my life I participated in a competitive event against what is now world class talent. It was always intriguing to me the difference between guys who were considered novice and the guys who were considered pro. To the naked eye, the difference manifested itself into the end result of what you saw at live events, but the real difference was in how they practiced.

The goal of the novice was to improve and have fun at practice. Quantity was more valuable than quality. They had never asked themselves the “why” questions. Like why is Steve always money and I’m not? Or, instead of asking Steve what he did and what he thought about you, they simply said, “I need to practice more.” And, that’s what practice was, a numbers game, which can lead to a false sense of security and not understanding the value of each opportunity. Now, when you practiced with Steve, things were a little different. Novices weren’t welcome and the only guys worth practicing with were guys that were at your level. They wanted to be pushed at every practice to more closely simulate real time scenarios.

Every opportunity was a chance to get better and specific goals were established as pre-run routine. Things such as form, technique, delivery, mindset were picked at more than a meth-head scab. And every practice session ended with some kind of real-time scenario. That was it. Whatever progress you made during practice was measured on how you performed in the gametime simulation. These guys had broken their respective trade down into a fucking science. Physics, geometry, psychology, stuff you didn’t even know existed or mattered…they had it all covered. There were a few natural skills that they possessed, which had come in handy in achieving their success, but more than anything else, they were smarter and understood the importance of each intricate detail. I’m not sure what this has to do with this post. I’m just trying to kill some time until I get on this airplane.
Economics Pedant said:

February 16th, 2009 at 9:07 am

Scipio,

Absolute perfect sense. I included the term theoretically in difference to just such considertions.

I have a friend who instructs AP Economics at a local high school. I am going to recommend that he include your tedious story as an illustration when teaching profit maximization through resource allocation and your response as a caveat to the profit maximizing assumption. Great stuff.
TaylorTRoom said:

February 16th, 2009 at 9:09 am

I know what you mean, ded. I used to be a competitive pistol shooter. I was good, but my main advantage was having my dad (a former world champion in International Centerfire) as coach. It’s a sport like golf in many ways- very mental, with repetitive mechanical motions, and the vast majority of the rank and file spending way, way too much time worrying about their equipment. 95% of the sport was aligning your sights and bringing the trigger back smoothly, yet you kept hearing guys at matches yammering about their latest new 4 figure pistol or shooting boots.

Duffers would go out there and blow through a couple of bricks of ammo, and think they accomplished something. In contrast, my dad taught me that a quality practice included plenty of dry-firing (practicing the whole shot sequence, but without a bullet in the chamber), with a lot of mental focus on accomplishing and learning even when there would be no hole in a target to look at after the fact. You would think it very zen if the guys explaining it weren’t a bunch of beer-swilling NCOs from the south.

Yeah, ded, you’re right. It’s funny, isn’t it, to think that at so many athletic competitions, 80% of the guys really aren’t competing and maybe don’t even understand the game.
Nero said:

February 16th, 2009 at 9:27 am

Economics Pedant -

Thanks for the clarification.

I was assuming an “input” of salary. Presumably, a good scorer requires more salary on the market than a pure distributing point guard. A team can cut salary and optimize team performance by trading the scorer for a passer.

Scip – I have also read almost all of Michael Lewis’ books. He can dork it out with the best of them yet still tell a good story. Unlike say, Michael Barone or Antony Beevor.
dedfischer said:

February 16th, 2009 at 9:31 am

The day my dad figured out they had this new invention called a “camcorder” that you could film live events and re-watch on your TV through the VCR was the worst day of my mother’s life. I can’t count how many times we made her sit out in the blowing West Texas wind filming us practice. And, then a bonus of film breakdown over supper. YeeHaw!
The General said:

February 16th, 2009 at 9:38 am

Outstanding article and great post Scip.

““I did the numbers on Jones against fastball hitters, so I made the call for a DH. Gonzales had a nineteen percent greater likelihood of a positive outcome. I played the odds and it worked out.”

vs.

“I felt strangely compelled by my otter-spirit, Tchingach-touk, with whom I first gained acquaintance inside a sweat lodge while being flogged by a Huron shaman with a bat carcass. Gonzalessssssssss, he whispered. We were rewarded for our piety with a ground rule double and I felt the wa of our team grow commensurately.”

The first manager is a boring, emotionless codfish. The second manager is…just…so…inspiring!”

There is a balance, though. While statistical analysis can tell you many things, there is a reason that statistics are constantly, revised, improved, and discarded for new and better versions.

You can’t sell out plain old, eye balls on the product instinct.

I think a lack of eye balls on the product (live) is a source of alot of the AJ and Damion vitriol regarding their performance this year.
Regarding practice said:

February 16th, 2009 at 9:39 am

Dedfischer,

I played baseball for one year with a guy who was a phenomenal high school hitting talent. The type of guy who went 4-5, including the game winner, and beat himself up afterward over the missed opportunity of 5-5.

Now I was 99.99% certain to not go pro in baseball (I gave up the game and a couple of opportunities to play college ball, but odds is odds), but I was a pretty good pitcher.

I remember the hitter taking the time to thank me after a round of BP. I was a bit taken aback as to why he was thanking me for a straightforward round of belt-level fastballs. It turns out that no teammate he’d ever played with had done anything other than try to throw everything they had at him in an effort to “prove” themselves. In fucking BP.

No wonder stars want to structure their practices.

By the way, that hitter had a reasonably distinguished college career. Probably could hit pro pitching, but he was a one tool player.

No speed, no HR power, average arm… mofo could just hit.

Brian Cisarik-esque.
glenn said:

February 16th, 2009 at 9:57 am

parlin, i’ve worked for many managers in many situations and have quietly gone against the grain on numerous not very humorous occasions. i’ve yet to be fired and have never been complimented for that behavior, unless you consider adopting your approach to be such, which has happened a couple of times.

really good managers are results-driven and aren’t that concerned about being right or being wrong.

it is very dangerous to go your own way, and you’d better be right, but any manager who fires a productive employee — given how many employees really aren’t — isn’t worth working for, anyway.
glenn said:

February 16th, 2009 at 9:59 am

dunno where that last comma came from.

that there al’s hammer kicking in.
Scipio Tex said:

February 16th, 2009 at 10:09 am

El General:

There is a balance, though. While statistical analysis can tell you many things, there is a reason that statistics are constantly, revised, improved, and discarded for new and better versions.

You can’t sell out plain old, eye balls on the product instinct.

Right. However, the point of Moneyball and a number of other books on human capital is that most people believe themselves to have better instincts than they do and that they often pay attention to the wrong things because of tradition, peer pressure, and “that’s the way things have always been done.”

IMO, the best coaches are the old salts who have learned have learned a lot that is tried and true and internalized real experience, but still open themselves up to new inputs and ideas.
dedfischer said:

February 16th, 2009 at 10:12 am

The only thing I can figure that might make my diatribe relate to basketball is that the pros I knew didn’t practice making every shot. They practiced making sure every shot was the ideal opportunity that gave them the highest percentage of being successful. Which could correlate to the hardwood as the art of moving without the basketball.
glenn said:

February 16th, 2009 at 10:13 am

wow, just read about parlin. hall, that is.

it was named for hanson tufts parlin, a professor and administrator, whose mother was mary goodwin (hall) parlin.

do you realize that if mother mary had kept her name, the good professor might have worn the moniker hanson tufts parlin-hall, whereupon the esteemed building would be, of course, parlin-hall hall?

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/PP/fpa32.html
Economics Pedant said:

February 16th, 2009 at 10:15 am

Sorry Nero,

Being a pedant, the mispplication of the term comparative advantge sent me into economic prosetylizing overdrive mode which caused me to overlook the perfectly valid pointl you were actually trying to make.
Scipio Tex said:

February 16th, 2009 at 10:22 am

I was reminded during this discussion that Kevin Durant wasn’t allowed to play street ball growing up. It was drill, drill, drill, and play under only controlled conditions. They didn’t want him to adopt bad habits.

I don’t think that’s coincidental when you consider the purity of his game.
Nero said:

February 16th, 2009 at 10:41 am

I don’t think Tim Duncan had much exposure to street ball in the Virgin Islands, either. He has pretty good fundamentals.
The General said:

February 16th, 2009 at 10:48 am

Street ball is an urban art, like good graffitti, hip hop music, capoeira, etc.

The League is a business.

The two do not often coexist well in any industry.
The General said:

February 16th, 2009 at 10:52 am

“Right. However, the point of Moneyball and a number of other books on human capital is that most people believe themselves to have better instincts than they do and that they often pay attention to the wrong things because of tradition, peer pressure, and “that’s the way things have always been done.”

IMO, the best coaches are the old salts who have learned have learned a lot that is tried and true and internalized real experience, but still open themselves up to new inputs and ideas.”

Good point. I meant to include it really matters whose eye balls are being utilized.
LonghornScott said:

February 16th, 2009 at 11:02 am

I think there is a balance as well between statistical analysis and “gut”. However, a statistical understanding must be a basis for gut calls. The human brain has an ability to take experience and sensory data and make judgments in a way that no statistical analysis ever can. Like a great poker player who knows the odds but something itches about the other guy’s body language… so he goes against the numbers. Refined intuition is the hallmark of any great decision maker and when presented in the right way its what makes people “believe” in their leaders. In all sports there is a trend to try to quantize the most valued traits, which begs the question, “What are the most valued traits!?”

I think that’s the stage that basketball is at right now. I think that the NBA has really missed the point the last decade… constantly pondering, “Who’s the next Michael?” Further, I think NBA interest has suffered comparatively because the game has been butchered in an effort to produce stars rather than teams.

A basketball team that can play together is one of the most satisfying representations of “team” that exists in sports. It’s fluid and cooperative at every moment and its balanced between offense and defense.

I think the NBA has realized it’s error and is working to correct it, (hence the age limits and developmental league). Hopefully there will also be a revolution in the way that the NBA is covered and I think that starts with player statistics.

So what are the important stats? How can you track them, weigh them and present them to an audience? Can they be backward tracked?

Enough to make me want to hire Trips and Huck and start a consulting firm :)
chitwood said:

February 16th, 2009 at 11:05 am

I’m sure I’m not telling anything new to the poker players here, but the very end of the article really hits on a concept that is crucial if you are going to have any success in poker.

You can not have results oriented thinking. All you can do is make the correct decision and be happy with that–take luck out of the equation. You get it all in preflop with AA and someone calls with KJ and beats you, you have to smile and know you made the right decision–that is the kind of player you want in the game.

I can’t count how many players say “I hate aces (or kings). I always get sucked out on, I’d rather not get them.” Or “I always play 10-7 offsuit from any position–it’s my lucky hand (i.e. he remembers one miraculous suckout with those cards, but he is now down big lifetime playing them–all he remembers is the big win).

Take all the info you have, process it, and make the correct odds based on probability/expected value. If you get hung up on the results, you’ll never make it.
chitwood said:

February 16th, 2009 at 11:07 am

clarifying my above point–I agree with Scott in his comment in the first paragraph that physical tells and reads on the other players are a huge part of the live game. Those factors go into the calculus–but they are not hunches. They are skills developed over time.
chitwood said:

February 16th, 2009 at 11:09 am

last paragraph of first comment should be “make the correct PLAY based on probability/expected value.
Vasherized said:

February 16th, 2009 at 11:12 am

Rest easy chitwood, that edit function is coming any day now …
~ Sailor Ripley
Gene Claude said:

February 16th, 2009 at 11:23 am

Scipio, just fantastic, fantastic stuff. While it mostly will be a redux of things you know and/or learned previously, I highly recommend The Drunkard’s Walk, by Leonard Mlodinow (co-wrote a Brief History of Time with Stephen Hawking). It is a history/explanation of probability theory and should be required reading for every executive, sports or not, in America.

It is interesting to read some of the new evolutionary psychology stuff out there as well. We should all constantly remind ourselves that our brains did not evolve in a manner designed to handle large numbers. We have anecdotal “small number” brains that are very easily fooled. Twenty thousand years ago, it wasn’t a good survival strategy to consider “well, yes, the lion did eat Bill, but I’ll need to see a larger data set before I decide he is truly a ‘man-eater.’” We are blessed now with a surfeit of data from which to learn and determine when our eyes are deceiving us. Sure, you don’t ignore the eyes, but you need to train them to know what they are good at versus what statistics are good at. I’d wager a very large percentage of decision makers in sport (and business, for that matter) still think their eyes are better than the data.
chitwood said:

February 16th, 2009 at 11:56 am

no kidding Vasherized. I do enough to look like an idiot even with an edit function. Without one, I’m a barely functional mongoloid.
Doperbo said:

February 16th, 2009 at 12:32 pm

I don’t follow basketball and I found the article and discussion fascinating. Great work.

BTW- Without the edit function we are never going to catch Huck making a mistake (the fallibility of Huck is central to my personal core spiritual beliefs) or scally getting drunk off num-nums and recounting piquant memoirs from his year-long affair with mileslong.

There is a certain charm in the indelible… ness. Don’t you think?
Facebook User said:

February 16th, 2009 at 12:54 pm

We’ll turn his off.
Bartoncreek said:

February 16th, 2009 at 1:48 pm

Thanks for the post and the link, Scipio. Interesting stuff for someone like me. Math/statistics freak who also played ball at a high level through high school. A strange combination, I have learned.

I watch sports differently from anyone that I know or talk to. I don’t watch the ball all that much. I watch how the ball got to where it is. It is not the td/basket that matters to me, it is how they came to be. Who did what to whom away from the ball that helped make the score possible.

The Rockets are trying to quantify the way someone like me watches the game. It is fascinating and I wish that I would have thought of it.

I coach various sports at various levels in little leagues as I have a number of kids that play and I can’t stand to see them get poor instruction/coaching. Instead of bitching, do something. So I coach.

One of my sons is below average in athletic ability. Our teams have gone 32-3 over the last four years. If you have coached, you know the only way to have a good team year in and year out is to have a son that is among the leagues best. But, he plays defense at a level closer to a college player than an 11 year old. Not from a physical standpoint but from a mental one. He identifies mismatches and shades his man to the mismatch when that player gets the ball. He uses angles rather than speed to cut off penetration, he forces the ball into the sidelines. He takes players out of their comfort zone by forcing them to go where they don’t want to go. And you know what? Nobody notices except me. Every coach wonders how we are so good. They smirk when I yell to my team to switch my son onto their best player. Then they can’t figure out how they lost and how their player averaging 14 points a game just got held to 4 by an inferior athlete.

I took an assistant coach on this year for the first time. He goes to the first two practices sees everyones ability and thinks he knows who are best players are. In the first game a big kid with a good handle and quicks blows right buy our best athlete the first two trips down the floor and scores easily. I yell for my son and the athlete to switch men. The coach looks at me like I’m crazy. I said, “Watch this, don’t watch the ball, watch how he plays defense. Watch how he uses angles, denies, harrasses, forces him into bad spots on the court.”

At the end of the game, after another win, after holding the opponent’s best player scoreless for the remainder of the game the assistant says to me, “He is unbelievable.” From now on, I will call him Battier.
But WTF Do I Know? said:

February 16th, 2009 at 3:51 pm

The article is fantastic, but I just might like the comments on this thread even better.

Count me as a big fan of analysis, as long as the analysis is tempered by critical thinking. Critical thought as a starting place for analysis? Beautiful.

I’m constantly at war with the Finance guys at my company, because much of what they measure is immaterial at best, and contrary to good results at worst. I’ve used that Einstein quote a bazillion times.

And even where I concede that “The Numbers” have a valid contribution, as they very often do, I insist that if numbers can make the decision without you, why do I need you?

If you make decisions in a vacuum, don’t be surprised when they suck.
srr50 said:

February 16th, 2009 at 4:19 pm

IMO, the best coaches are the old salts who have learned a lot that is tried and true and internalized real experience, but still open themselves up to new inputs and ideas.

Darrell Royal, first with the flip-flop formation, and then the wishbone.

I find it interesting that with both innovations, after he accepted the idea of them, he used ordinary folks in the athletic departmen (that is non-football players) to set them up and walk through them.

He figured if the non-athletes could handle the concepts then he could teach them to his players.
TaylorTRoom said:

February 16th, 2009 at 4:32 pm

Here’s an old example of baseball lunacy from the pre-Moneyball days- Pete Rose was a terrific player his first 14 or so years. After that, not so much. He hit .300 regularly, but rarely walked, had lost his power, was slow, and a defensive liability (no range or arm). He spent his last few years playing 1st base, and insisting on batting 3rd. After all, he was Pete Rose! He wasn’t about to swing the bat to defend a base stealer, and really added very little to the offense. He’d finish the year hitting .320 and everybody would rave about the amazing Pete Rose. Meanwhile, he wasn’t half the player Willie Stargell was.
Gene Claude said:

February 16th, 2009 at 4:40 pm

Taylor, I vividly remember when I bought some odd looking book in 1997 on the recommendation of Rob Neyer. It was the second ever Baseball Prospectus. I read it about 10 times and it ruined baseball for me, and definitely baseball internet and bar debates, forevermore. It has been fun to watch those guys evolve as well, they certainly incorporate more scouting data into their analysis than they used to.

The idea of confidence intervals on a players projections, a’la their PECOTA system, is incredible.
TaylorTRoom said:

February 16th, 2009 at 5:19 pm

82 Games

Question- this shows Kevin Durant as a mediocre (for his team) plus/minus performer. However, in a recent game where everybody else was his age, he dominated (46 points). My question: “Is Durant progressing into a truly elite player, or is he developing into just another prolific scorer?”
Justaguy said:

February 16th, 2009 at 5:23 pm

Curious on one point. How many “money ball” MLB teams have won World Series Titles in the past 10-15 years versus teams constructed in the more conventional methods?

As far as basketball, Red’s Celtics dominated by being a team of pieces that fit perfectly together with each many fitting a role. Russell’s season averages often pailed compared to Wilt’s and yet Bill and the Celtics ran Wilt’s Sixer and Laker teams off the court more times not with the help of role players.
Gene Claude said:

February 16th, 2009 at 5:26 pm

All teams have some moneyball components in the last 5 or 10 years. In any event, the WS is such a small sample size, the outcome is mostly arbitrary. Look at regular season wins if you want a data set worth analyzing. I’d submit that the A’s and Red Sox have done quite well using a more objective analytical framework.
Justaguy said:

February 16th, 2009 at 5:36 pm

So is the point to win Divisional Titles or to ultimately a World Series Title? I always felt the A’s were built to get into the play-offs and no more much in the way Doug Moe’s Nuggets and more recently the Suns. When it got to a point that the efforts of individuals could determine not only the outcome of a game, but a series those teams seemed to unravel.

I could be wrong, but I have wondered why Billy hasn’t been able to replicate his success. Is he the MLB equivalent of Gil Brandt? A guy ahead of his time who became a victim of his own “genius”.
Gene Claude said:

February 16th, 2009 at 5:54 pm

I’m sure the goal is to win the world series. The point is that the world series is so short that the winner is not necessarily the best team. Billy Beane has remarked on numerous occasions that the playoffs are a crapshoot.

The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow (a theoretical physicist who has written books with Stephen Hawking) recently noted about baseball’s world series:

In the case of one team’s having only a 55-45 edge [in each game], the shortest statistically significant “world series” would be the best of 269 games, a tedious endeavor indeed! So sports playoff series can be fun and exciting, but being crowned “world champion” is not a very reliable indication that a team is actually the best one.

In other words, if you play a 7 game world series, you won’t really have any idea if the winner is the best team or not. This whole “not built for a short series” stuff about the A’s kills me. How many times have you heard the same talking heads say that starting pitching wins short series? Um, like Mulder, Zito and Hudson? It is all smoke and mirrors. Over any 7 game stretch, any MLB team can win 4 from any other team, so you don’t actually learn anything from the playoffs.
TaylorTRoom said:

February 16th, 2009 at 6:49 pm

Before “Moneyball” was written, before Bill James started writing his annual “Abstracts”, there have been baseball managers who understood what the odds really were. Casey Stengel may have been the first. He understood the need for pitchers to throw strikes, to build a lineup around the home park, and to trade older big name veterans players for unknown high potential players.

Earl Weaver built his teams around pitching, fielding, high on-base and slugging average guys, and didn’t care about batting average. He agonized over selecting the 23 – 25th roster members, trying to figure out who might fill a role and help win a game.

Dick Williams famously built his teams around his ballparks. He played in large, astroturf parks, and wanted speed on defense, and his pitchers to throw strikes. He knew that if they would just throw strikes, the odds were on his side.

None of these guys were Ivy leaguers, but they were all canny and shrewd in looking for the real meaning of the stats. They also won a lot of World Series.
Justaguy said:

February 16th, 2009 at 6:50 pm

GC,

I am not disagreeing with you and agree that in theory the A’s pitching was as strong as any team they faced. It always seemed to me that it was their refusal to do things like advance runners because they didn’t want to give up outs or never had that guy who could carry the team (i.e. Manny or Howard) that they seemed to struggle for runs.

What I love is that no other sport seems to allow itself to be broken down in numbers by baseball and yet the great moments of the sport are not number moments, but instead a guy or guys finding a way to win more times than not.
Justaguy said:

February 16th, 2009 at 6:52 pm

Scipio,

One thing I find interesting about the comment about the Rockets is that their starting five is a dysfunctional set of players that don’t mesh for many of the reasons that can’t be measured on a chart.
hopefulhorn said:

February 16th, 2009 at 7:32 pm

Thanks, Scip, for posting this terrific article and your thoughts on it. Thanks to all for comments that have used the article and its concepts as a jumping off point for a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion. This blog is the best source of intelligent commentary on the Horns anywhere and one of the best on the ‘Net of any kind. Thread like this are a prime reason.

Battier has been a favorite for a long time and it was a treat to get inside his head. He is intelligent enough to know what set of “numbers” matters in guarding the best players in the league. He then has the discipline to commit completely to making his opponent beat him doing what he is least likely to do successfully.

The best golfers I have watched did the same thing (great players in most other sports probably do as well). They reduce the game to the essential skills that they have to execute and evaluate their performance more by that execution than by particular scores knowing that, over time, such execution results in better scores.

As for intuition, I was also intrigued by a part of the article that Scip did not mention (probably due to length). Battier talked about his formative years and the dominant theme of feeling like a misfit.

“…the inner-city kids with whom he played on the A.A.U. circuit treated Battier like a suburban kid with a white game, and the suburban kids he played with during the regular season treated him like a visitor from the planet where they kept the black people.”

His desire to “fit in” based in this experience of isolation led him intuitively to do so on the court.

“Losing himself in the game meant fitting into the game, and fitting into the game meant meshing so well that he became hard to see. In high school he was almost always the best player on the court, but even then he didn’t embrace the starring role…Even when he was clearly the best player and could have shot the ball at will, he was more interested in his role in the larger unit.”

Similar things have been written about the influence of MJ’s being cut from his HS team and childhood battles with his older brother in honing the ferocious competetive drive that maximized his talent. Ditto for Tiger Woods, his Special Forces Dad and apparently even tougher mother.

Psychologists will tell you that we are all responding, in direct or symbolic terms, to such childhood experiences. Fortunate is the adult who finds a way to funnel this struggle into productive and rewarding adult pursuits.
Facebook User said:

February 16th, 2009 at 10:43 pm

Gene – Exactly.

I was going to pull this quote from the Battier story:

In this probabilistic spirit we watched the battle between Battier and Bryant. From Hinkie’s standpoint, it was going extremely well: “With most guys, Shane can kick them from their good zone to bad zone, but with Kobe you’re just picking your poison. It’s the epitome of, Which way do you want to die?” Only the Rockets weren’t dying. Battier had once again turned Bryant into a less-efficient machine of death. Even when the shots dropped, they came from the places on the court where the Rockets’ front office didn’t mind seeing them drop. “That’s all you can do,” Hinkie said, after Bryant sank an 18-footer. “Get him to an inefficient spot and contest.” And then all of a sudden it was 97-95, Lakers, with a bit more than three minutes to play, and someone called timeout. “We’re in it,” Hinkie said, happily. “And some of what happens from here on will be randomness.”< /em>
Huckleberry said:

February 17th, 2009 at 5:41 am

Getting to a real final player value figure in basketball is a daunting task, and probably an impossible one given our current constraints. You would need to analyze an insane amount of data (play-by-play of every game), account for the 4 teammates on the court with the player in question, the 5 opponents on the court, game situation, etc. There’s a reason sabermetrics took off in baseball before anywhere else. As Scipio mentioned somewhere on this page, baseball is by far the most easily analyzed sport because it’s played mostly in series whereas every other popular sport is played almost completely in parallel.

The end goal of basketball analysis would also require multiple factors in that total player value so that a theoretical best lineup could be determined. Obviously it’s possible that two 5s and three 4s could end up as the five most valuable players in the league via the calculation but there should be a way that the analysis shows you that rolling those five guys out there certainly isn’t the best lineup choice.

Essentially, everyone will end up happy. I don’t see any way that basketball (or football) analysis will ever catch up with baseball. So there will always be not just more room, but more need for intuition in basketball coaching and gameplanning.
jc25 said:

February 17th, 2009 at 7:52 am

Taylor, I’d venture the crude guess that it’s difficult to be a strong plus/minus performer when your team loses an inordinate amount of games, no matter how many points you put up on the board individually.

Justaguy, the point in baseball is to obviously win a World Series, but each of the playoff participants has more or less an equal shot at winning, which is why you see so many Wild Card champions. That’s untrue in basketball, where the odds are stacked in favor of certain teams. For example, the Rockets will make the playoffs, but there ain’t no way they’re pulling down the trophy. In regards to Beane being unable to replicate his success, it comes down to a number of factors. First, he was absurdly lucky in drafting a stud trio of pitchers, and he rode them as long as he could. Second, the rest of the league starting catching up to his “Moneyball” way of thinking, and with half the league drafting and fielding teams smarter, Beane started losing a little bit of competitive advantage. Third, nowhere is this more obvious than with the Red Sox, which has a front office with Beane’s intelligence but far more resources. Whereas Beane had to pick one of his 6 studs to resign (Chavez over Mulder, Hudson, Zito, Tejada, and Giambi), Boston has free range to sign all if they so chose. Meanwhile, Beane’s successes have come in the form of good supporting players (for example, Houston Street, Mark Ellis, etc.). The only star he’s had is Dan Haren, who he felt like he was forced to deal since his team wasn’t competitive enough. Unfortunately, all this came at the peak of the Angels’ success, and so the A’s have missed the playoffs for the last few years. However, with amazingly limited resources (relative to the Angels), he’s been able to stay relatively competitive, which is a testament to his brilliance as a general manager. Whether he can get over the hump again will largely be determined by if some of his draft and prospect acquisitions turn out to be stars, a la the Big Three. And like GeneClaude points out, it’s a crapshoot after that.
TaylorTRoom said:

February 17th, 2009 at 7:56 am

I should have phrased it better- Durant has a mediocre-poor +/- compared to his starting teammates. Thoughts?
Callkevin said:

February 17th, 2009 at 8:45 am

Taylor, I’m willing to bet that it’s a factor of minutes played for a crappy team. If it’s crunch time, Durant’s playing, and OK City is sucking.

Looking at the generic numbers, I’d say it’s also possible that Durant’s defensive weaknesses relative to Westbrook or Green (his only team-mates with similar minutes) explain the difference between Durant’s -.186 per minute number vs their -.120 and -.084. Collison and Watson, the next two “most minute” players are both lower than Durant.
jc25 said:

February 17th, 2009 at 1:00 pm

A theory is that Durant played significant minutes early this season, while Green and Westbrook partook in a little more benchwarming. This was when Durant was generally not good. As he and the team improved, it coincided with Green and Westbrook getting more PT. Thus, the higher +/-.

Or maybe Green and Westbrook are just more Battier-esque players, while Durant gets more kudos since he’s such a prolific scorer.
BatesHorn said:

February 17th, 2009 at 2:01 pm

This post is way down on the page, and my comment will likely be missed, but outstanding work. This is, quite simply, some of the best blogging, on any topic, I have read in a long, long time.

Well Done, Scipio.
BatesHorn said:

February 17th, 2009 at 2:03 pm

Baseball is where I know the numbers best, but I believe it was Earl Weaver, when commenting on sacrifice bunting: “If the other team wants to give you an out, take it.”

That simple phrase sums up the importance of listening to the numbers more than just about anything else.
Justaguy said:

February 17th, 2009 at 5:23 pm

Easy to listen to numbers when you have a great defensive infield (especially on the left side), a great defensive centerfielder to cover the allies at old Memorial Stadium, Boog Powell and Frank Robinson to hit those 3-run home runs Earl loved, and starting pitchers such as Palmer, McNally, Cuellar, Dobson, Flanningan and Denny Martinez.
glenn said:

February 17th, 2009 at 7:30 pm

bates got it right.

best place for sports conversation on the web. actually goes beyond sports often.

scip wears the mantle of phxhorn as well and lightly as a mortal can.
TaylorTRoom said:

February 17th, 2009 at 7:30 pm

justaguy, you’re not getting it. Weaver had all those pieces because he knew which numbers were important, and which weren’t. Case in point- Cal Ripken at SS. For years, SS were judged on fielding % and outs. Weaver realized that an infielder with a rifle arm could throw out 50 more guys in a year than an average one. He also realized that he didn’t care about fielding % that much- was a SS who made 15 errors really more valuable than one who made 25, but threw out a lot more runners? Weaver answered that question correctly, after scores of managers before him got it wrong. It’s about asking the right questions, and noticing when changes in the game structure are making revisions to “the book”.
Justaguy said:

February 17th, 2009 at 7:58 pm

Weaver also had one of the great farm systems in MLB system that from the lowest level taught how to play baseball the Oriole way. Long before he had Cal Ripken at shortstop he had Mark Bellanger. The epitome of all field and not hit playing next to possibly the greatest defensive third baseman of all times in Brooks Robinson. Robinson’s range was unparalleled covered any deficiencies Bellanger might have had concerning his range. Was that a product of Earl’s decision making or Robinson’s talent and the scout who found him?

I am not trying to be an ass Taylor as you yourself point out about Stengel, Williams, and Weaver. They didn’t use mathematical formulas to tell them that a successful team was made of pieces that fit together in a specific system. They knew the game and how it was played and found their type of ball player. They also benefited from strong farm systems and in the case of the Orioles it was the end of teaching the Oriole way to do things in the minor league that led to the decline of Baltimore.

Just curious jc25, if Beane doesn’t hit the lottery with his three star pitching prospects does anyone really care about the Moneyball concept? Is that the system they have used in Minnesota to continually develop young talent in a tough economic situation?
TaylorTRoom said:

February 18th, 2009 at 5:11 am

No, they did use math. These were crude, unsophisticated men who could not handle anything more complex than division, yet they used the math they could handle to gain an advantage.

Mark Belanger was a .220 hitter with no power. Do you know why Weaver had him batting 6th against Nolan Ryan? Because he had the stats to show that Belanger hit Ryan better than his other players.

What kind of manager has Belanger at SS for 10 years, and follows him up with Ripken, the exact opposite kind of player? The kind of manager that thinks critically, rather than just follows “the book”.
Huckleberry said:

February 18th, 2009 at 5:25 am

They would have cared if they were paying attention. The Oakland park adjusted runs scored per dollar of offensive player salary numbers were excellentduring their run. It wasn’t just their pitchers. Don’t be fooled by the fact that they played in a superb pitchers’ park. Here are the Oakland numbers for runs per game on the road during their great run.

Year RR/G AL Rk

1999 5.33 5

2000 6.01 2

2001 5.69 2

2002 4.60 8

2003 4.77 9

The last two years their pitching carried them. The first three were outstanding offensive teams. And the point of the philosophy isn’t about one stat or another. It’s all about analyzing the statistics and the market to determine which abilities are undervalued in the marketplace compared to their actual contribution to a team’s success. When Beane first got started, OBP was vastly undervalued in the market, for example, while stolen bases were vastly overvalued. It’s not impossible that someday OBP will be overvalued and stolen bases will be undervalued relative to their true worth.
Bateshorn said:

February 18th, 2009 at 1:28 pm

“The key to winning baseball games is pitching, fundamentals, and three run homers”

Earl Weaver.

Again, SO far ahead of the sabermetrics revolution.
Scipio Tex said:

February 18th, 2009 at 2:33 pm

Great discussion and thanks for the compliments. It’s fun to write something and see the audience take it down so many interesting avenues. I definitely learned some stuff as well.

Justaguy:

Consider reading Moneyball. It’s good to challenge your assumptions. I think the paperback is $10 or so on Amazon now.
Justyaguy said:

February 21st, 2009 at 1:47 pm

Taylor,

I think I haven’t done a very good job of expressing my thoughts which isn’t unusual for me. There is no doubt no sport lends itself more to statistics than baseball due to the large sample size of data. Using charts and numbers is nothing new which is part of what I have been trying to say. Neither is the concept of talking pitches, walking, and putting the ball in play. The game moved away from those concepts.

Bellanger faired well against Ryan and Weaver had the numbers, but my disagreement is that. My position is simply that the game isn’t decided by numbers, but in the end the physical and mental ability for a guy to do something that he shouldn’t be able to do. Mays shouldn’t have caught that ball hit by Wirtz anymore than Bellanger should be able to do what he did against Ryan or Gibson hitting the home run of Eckersly.

Scipio, I read the book and recognize the value in things like drafting college kids who are a bit cheaper and further developed or not paying too much for a closer. Many of the principles of how to play the game though are not new. Much like the article by Lewis gives Morey credit for valuing things aside the stat chart when coaches like Auerbach and Knight built their legacies on those very type of players.
Shoe said:

February 26th, 2009 at 1:10 pm

Something worth discussing is whether or not basketball should look at adding a few more trackable categories, especially on defense. Baseball stats have continuously evolved, e.g. adding saves, holds (ludicrous stat), OPS, etc. in order to better quantify the true effectiveness of the players.

I think things like shots contested, box-outs, opponent FG%, are all relatively easy to track and they all certainly have direct impact on the game. While some would argue that these new stats are simply too subjective, but fact of the matter is that so are strike zones, and what constitutes an “assist” in basketball. I haven’t actually done the analysis, but I would be willing to wager a handsome amount of coins that NBA PGs’ assist totals differ fairly widely at home versus on the road.

Fundamentally, Lewis’ assertion assumes that defense wins championship. By giving more statistical data points to the defensive side of the basketball game will unveil a more probable formula to winning more games. Frankly, I agree.
Facebook User said:

March 12th, 2009 at 9:01 am

Kobe.
The General said:

March 12th, 2009 at 10:48 am

“saves, holds (ludicrous stat)”

How are holds a more ludicrous stat than saves?
Facebook User said:

June 1st, 2009 at 10:16 am

For the Michael Lewis fans.
Barking Carnival — Blog — MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference said:

March 9th, 2010 at 9:43 pm

[...] 6th, headlined by luminaries like Rockets GM (and ‘00 Sloan School grad) Daryl Morey, author Michael Lewis, Colts GM Bill Polian, Mavs owner Mark Cuban, and ESPN Bah-stahhnophile Bill Simmons. It attracted [...]
Barking Carnival — Blog — said:

April 6th, 2010 at 2:20 pm

[...] the “no stats all-star,” adapting moneyball principles to today’s NBA. Scipio covered this on BC about a year ago. Battier, Lewis wrote, made his team better and the other team worse, [...]
Barking Carnival — Blog — Maurice Cheeks would like to thank the hall of fame voters... said:

April 6th, 2010 at 2:42 pm

[...] the “no stats all-star,” adapting moneyball principles to today’s NBA. Scipio covered this on BC about a year ago. Battier, Lewis wrote, made his team better and the other team worse, [...]

Year	RR/G	AL Rk
1999	5.33	5
2000	6.01	2
2001	5.69	2
2002	4.60	8
2003	4.77	9

Basketball Articles

Michael Lewis: The No-Stats All Star

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