The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking
368
The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking
368Paperback
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Overview
Positioned at the crossroads of sabermetrics and cognitive science, The Shift alters the trajectory of both traditional and analytics-based baseball thought. With a background in clinical psychology as well as experience in major league front offices, Baseball Prospectus' Russell Carleton illuminates advanced statistics and challenges cultural assumptions, demonstrating along the way that data and logic need not be at odds with the human elements of baseball—in fact, they're inextricably intertwined.
Covering topics ranging from infield shifts to paradigm shifts, Carleton writes with verve, honesty, and an engaging style, inviting all those who love the game to examine it deeply and maybe a little differently. Data becomes digestible; intangibles are rendered not only accessible, but quantifiable. Casual fans and statheads alike will not want to miss this compelling meditation on what makes baseball tick.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781629375441 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Triumph Books |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2018 |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Most Dangerous Thing in the World
When I was in high school, there was a quiz-bowl show on one of the local TV stations, which was hosted by the weatherman for their evening newscast. During my senior year, my high school was invited to send a team to compete on the show. I was the captain of that team. It was the closest I ever got to being varsity anything. Like any team, we felt the need to practice our craft, so we met a couple of days a week after school in Brother Dave's classroom and we watched old episodes of the show. It seemed like the thing to do. This was a show about trivia questions, so we sat around answering trivia questions. Cross-country runners ran around the neighborhood together. Chess-club members played chess against each other. I tried to be faster than my friends at remembering the chemical symbol for lead.
The show always started out with a rapid-fire round where Weatherman Guy asked 10 "buzz in to be called on" questions to the three teams on the stage. The game alternated between these rapid-play lightning rounds and more relaxed rounds in which each team got a chance to answer questions with no competition, but in the lightning rounds, every question that one team answered was a question that the other teams couldn't. At the end of the show, the winning team got to shake hands with Weatherman Guy, and maybe they got a spot in the playoffs.
The TV station taped a couple dozen episodes over the course of a year, so that a bunch of schools from the greater Cleveland area could have their one shining moment. According to the rules, the nine schools that scored the most points during these preliminary matches earned a playoff spot. Looking back, it probably meant that getting into the playoffs had more to do with the quality of the competition, rather than a team's own smarts, but that wasn't the way I thought of it at the time. On the day of taping for our preliminary round, I got on that stage, listened to Weatherman Guy ask questions, and hit that buzzer just like we practiced. We won! Not to brag, but we also finished with the seventh most points overall for that year. Turns out that knowing random pieces of information could take you places in Cleveland. We were headed to the playoffs!
A few weeks later, that first playoff match went according to the plan. Weatherman Guy asked us about minutiae. We buzzed in. We got it right. We squashed the other two teams. After our victory, I was exhausted, but pleased with the thought that at some point in the future, we'd be coming back down to Channel 5 to tape the final. What I didn't know was that "some point in the future" was scheduled for 10 minutes later. The station wanted to tape all the playoff shows in the same day. It seemed that Weatherman Guy had other plans for next weekend.
Despite the exhaustion, this is what we had practiced for, and adrenaline started kicking in. How often does one have the chance to win a championship in anything, even if it was the nerdiest thing possible? We got situated and the camera operators pointed their cameras at us. Weatherman Guy did his "Welcome to the show ..." introduction that I was now hearing for the second time that day and informed us that the opening round of questions would be about geography. He would say the name of a famous landmark, and we had to identify the country in which it was located.
"Let's get started."
I was ready for this. Our team had already won twice. We were good. We were going to win this one too.
That's when things ran off the rails. Before Weatherman Guy even started asking the first question, someone from one of the other schools rang the buzzer. I knew we were going up against some smart people, but how could someone know the answer before Weatherman Guy had even said anything? That's when it happened. Weatherman Guy still read out the name of the landmark, because even if it was technically a quiz bowl, it was also a television show, and the people who would eventually watch this at home needed to hear the question. Because the other team had technically buzzed in first, they got the chance to answer.
Hang on a second ...
As soon as Weatherman Guy said "correct," I could again hear the sound of buzzer buttons being speed-pounded from the other two podiums, again all before Weatherman Guy even said anything. It took me until the fourth or fifth of these cycles until I realized what the other two teams were doing. To each side of the stage, there was a screen on which they showed the name of the landmark that Weatherman Guy was about to read, in text form. (It was also on the screen for the viewers at home.) As soon as the question appeared on the screen, the buzzer system went live. At that point, it was open season on those big red buttons. It still took a couple of seconds for Weatherman Guy to breathe in, read out the name of the landmark for the viewers at home, then look up to see which team's light was lit. That gave them enough time to formulate a response and have it ready when Weatherman Guy asked for it. The rest was a race to hit the button first.
We got wiped off the stage. I had practiced for a game in which there was a certain cadence of politeness. In the social norms that I grew up with, you didn't interrupt someone before they were done (or before they even started) talking. A quiz show was supposed to be about recalling pointless, but poignant, facts. Buzzing in was supposed to be the indicator that the buzzee had found the answer in their cerebral rolodex. Recall came first, then buzzing. For most of the half hour that we were on that stage, I couldn't move past those unwritten rules even when I realized that the other teams were gaming the system and racking up points because of it. It felt like I'd be breaking an honor code to copy their plan. Unfortunately, the scoreboard didn't care how I felt.
There was never actually a rule that said that we were required to wait for Weatherman Guy to finish — or even start — his sentence or that we had to know the answer before buzzing in. In fact, as part of his opening monologue, Weatherman Guy said that "the team that buzzes in first and gives the correct answer will get the points." The other teams had realized that buzzing in quickly was more important than figuring out the answer quickly. As long as someone on the team was able to pull up the answer within the three seconds that it took for the host to demand it, being a 10 of a second faster on recall than the other team didn't actually matter. In some sense, the other teams won the game before it even started. They didn't ask how the game had traditionally been played. They found a place where the rules were silent and an unenforceable social norm had filled in the gap. Then they found a way to exploit it to their advantage. I had spent my time solving one question — How can I remember and quickly access more trivia answers? — but it turns out my answer didn't matter, because I wasn't asking the right question.
* * *
"Smith was 1-for-3, with a walk."
Most baseball fans wouldn't blink at that sentence. We have a quick summary of Smith's day at the park. He came to the plate four times. In two of those times, he made an out. In one of them, he got some sort of hit. There was also that one time when he walked, but it doesn't really count. It happened, but we don't want to talk about it. We'll just append it to the back of the summary. Language is a powerful thing. Often, we can learn more by looking at how people talk about something, rather than what they say. In this case, relegating the walk to afterthought status shows a profound discomfort with ball four. Why does baseball get so freaked out about walks?
To understand why, we have to go back to the year 1887, still within the formative years of professional baseball. For the '87 season, the two major leagues at the time, the National League (which survives to this day) and the American Association (which eventually folded), came to a common agreement that the number of balls needed for a walk would be five, reducing the number from six (American Association) and seven balls (National League). By this time, batting average was already well-known as a statistic within the sport, and had been since the mid-1860s. In an era well before the modern power game (Billy O'Brien's 19 home runs led all of baseball in 1887), batting average was considered the main indicator of one's batting prowess.
In the years before 1887, as now, a walk didn't count toward a player's batting average. It was a non-event. In 1887, that changed. Both leagues agreed that for the purposes of calculating batting average, a walk would count the same as a hit. Apparently, things did not go well. There were reports that players started actively trying to walk to boost their batting average, and that led to slower, more passive games. Surely, baseball was dying! The data tell a somewhat different story. In 1886, the average game featured 2.64 walks per team. In 1887, there was a modest increase to 2.86 walks per team per game. We can't know how much of that increase was because players were trying to walk more often to boost their batting averages or because the new five-ball rule made it easier to walk than the old six- or seven-ball rules, but it's mostly pointless speculation. There was no epidemic of walks. The actual difference between 1886 and 1887 was about one extra walk for one of the teams every other game. As a point of comparison, between 2015 (2.90 walks per team per game) and 2016 (3.11 walks per team per game) there was a nearly identical jump in the raw rate of walks. While no one reading this book was around to witness the 1886 and 1887 seasons, I doubt that many people noticed the 2015 to 2016 jump in real time. Anyone who did probably only noticed it because they looked it up on the Internet. The Internet was much more primitive in 1887.
In 1888, the five-ball rule remained in effect, but walks were returned to their previous status as a non-event and removed from batting averages and have remained that way since then. The walk rate dropped that year to 2.18 per team per game. This likely had something to do with another rule change. In 1888, the strikeout rule changed from four strikes to its present "one-two-three strikes you're out" form. In 1889, both leagues changed the rules again and adopted the modern "four balls you walk" rule. That year, walk rates really did jump up, this time to 3.36 per team per game. If there was an outcry over having to write "BB" on the scorecard more often, it didn't result in a rule change back to five balls and never has. It doesn't seem like the walks themselves were the problem.
I think that the Great Walk Panic of 1887 was related to something else. I invite you, reader, to think of two people, Smith and Jones. Smith spends hours each day tinkering in the garage on a marvelous contraption that will solve a major social problem: reheating leftover pizza to the perfect temperature the next day. Upon learning of Smith's invention, a company licenses Smith's work for mass production. Smith signs a contract that pays $1 million per year over the next 30 years. Jones, on the other hand, plays the lottery one day and happens to pick the correct six numbers. Jones will now be paid $1 million per year over the next 30 years. Which of the two is better off?
It's likely that the question "Which of the two is better off?" took you by surprise. Financially, they are equally well-off, but that's not the question that your brain started to answer. It started to answer the question "Which of them deserves it more?" with Smith being the obvious choice because Smith worked for it. In the United States' culture, there is a reflex to judge situations not on functional grounds, but on moral grounds. There is also a preference for Smith's industrious work over Jones's dumb luck. The inventor and the lottery winner, even if they end up with the same outcome, are viewed very differently. According to the cultural norms of the late 1800s, the walk was considered to be a lucky, lottery-winning event. The batter didn't do anything, at least in the sense that "doing something" involves physical action. He just stood there while the pitcher had a systems failure.
As things were put back to their rightful order after 1887, batting average once again completely ignored that walks ever happened. As baseball continued to develop and grow in popularity, batting average became the metric by which the "batting champion" was crowned. Lore developed around the ".300 hitter" and the nearly-mythical ".400 hitter." The numbers that we use to describe our world have their own cultural etymologies, and sometimes they have assumptions baked into them that we don't even realize. Sometimes those assumptions don't make sense. A walk and a single both end with the runner at first base, but our brains are too busy answering the question of whether the batter deserves first base or not.
If batting average had never existed, someone would have eventually invented something like it. The question, "How often has this guy done something positive with his at-bat in the past?" is a good one. The problem is that batting average isn't actually answering the question that we really want answered. It's answering the question, "How often has this guy done something positive and socially acceptable according to the cultural norms of the late 1800s with his at-bat?" The most dangerous thing in the world is the correct answer to the wrong question.
To state that Smith and Jones both had a batting average of .300 last year might be a true statement. To state that they were equally valuable to their teams based on those data alone is dubious. If Smith hits .300 and draws a lot of walks, but Jones does not, then Smith is clearly doing more to help his team win. Why not ask a better question if you have better data sitting there? Once you ask the right question, the rest is just long division to get a stat that already exists, on-base percentage (OBP).
If the sabermetric movement in baseball can be boiled down to one moment, it would be the moment when someone asked "Why are we pretending that walks never happened?" Perhaps the best-known piece of the book Moneyball was that the Oakland A's picked up on this very issue and began evaluating batters by virtue of their on-base percentage, rather than their batting average. To put it another way, the Oakland A's — more than a century after the Great Walk Panic of 1887 — started asking, and then answering, the right question.
* * *
There are plenty of people who are skeptical of the sabermetric movement. Perhaps, reader, you are one of them. I've heard plenty of those objections. Some of them are just name-calling (Why thank you, I'm proud to be a nerd), but there's one that I think deserves some honest consideration. It's usually summarized in three words: You didn't play.
In my case, that's a true statement. I went to baseball camp when I was nine. I loved the game, but even the hubris and big league dreams that came with being in fourth grade eventually gave way to the realization that I couldn't hit a curveball. Or a fastball. Or a slow ball. I wasn't going to make it to the big leagues if I couldn't even make it in Little League. Years later, when I revived my major league dreams (and eventually achieved them — I've worked as a consultant to a couple of teams in MLB) by doing statistical research on baseball, I heard that a lot. How can someone who never played or managed professionally have something to say about Major League Baseball?
As someone who has been trained in psychotherapy, I'm painfully aware that it's not enough to just proclaim yourself an expert if you want real engagement with people. You have to be willing to both understand and address the other person's natural skepticism and to do so honestly and without resorting to "because I have more letters after my name than you do." At the same time, part of the job of being a therapist is helping people whose life stories I did not share. It's possible if you approach the work with an open mind, and sometimes, having an outsider's perspective gives a person the ability to see something in a way that they can't from the inside.
I've heard "You didn't play" in the therapy room, too. There, it's commonly said as "You haven't lived my life. You don't understand." That's a powerful statement that usually has the problem of being true. It can be a frustrating sentence. As a therapist, the correct response is generally, "Okay, help me to understand." I may not have walked the same path that you have, but I have my own experience and an open mind and I care about learning what you're trying to communicate. If I can understand how a person sees the world around them, I can usually work from there. There's another problem. "Help me understand" sounds great, but sometimes asking for an explanation doesn't work. There are times when people can't explain what exactly it is that they understand but you don't. That's not a fault; it's just hard to explain some things.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Shift"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Russell A. Carleton.
Excerpted by permission of Triumph Books LLC.
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Table of Contents
Foreword Jeff Passan vii
Introduction: Rule 1 xiii
1 The Most Dangerous Thing in the World 1
2 How to Score Half a Run 39
3 Why Does It Fell So Icky? 69
4 The-Perfect-Team 101
5 Why Didn't David Ortiz Just Bunt? 139
6 This Isn't a Babysitter's Club 171
7 Nitrogen and the Forgotten Fourth Starter 199
8 Putting Down the Calculator 225
9 Did You Day "Guessing"? 253
10 Except That It's Not Actually True… 279
11 Dénouement 301
Acknowledgments 319