Same Old Same Old Same Old: Threading the 2013 World Series

[Guest d'Kong76]

Dow Jones Reprints: This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers, use the Order Reprints tool at the bottom of any article or visit http://www.djreprints.com Mind and Matter World Series Recap: May Baseball's Irrational Heart Keep On Beating Columnist Alison Gopnik on what moneyball thinking has failed to conquer in the sport. By Alison Gopnik Nov. 1, 2013 8:27 p.m. ET The last 15 years have been baseball's Age Of Enlightenment. The quants and nerds brought reason and science to the dark fortress of superstition and mythology that was Major League Baseball. The new movement was pioneered by the brilliant Bill James (adviser to this week's World Champion Red Sox), implemented by Billy Beane (the fabled general manager of my own Oakland Athletics) and immortalized in the book and movie "Moneyball." Over this same period, psychologists have discovered many kinds of human irrationality. Just those biases and foibles that are exploited, in fact, by the moneyball approach. So if human reason has changed how we think about baseball, it might be baseball's turn to remind us of the limits of human reason. We overestimate the causal power of human actions. So, in the old days, managers assumed that gutsy, active base stealers caused more runs than they actually do, and they discounted the more passive players who waited for walks. Statistical analysis, uninfluenced by the human bias toward action, led moneyballers to value base-stealing less and walking more. We overgeneralize from small samples, inferring causal regularities where there is only noise. So we act as if the outcome of a best-of-7 playoff series genuinely indicates the relative strength of two teams that were practically evenly matched over a 162-game regular season. The moneyballer doesn't change his strategy in the playoffs, and he refuses to think that playoff defeats are as significant as regular season success. We confuse moral and causal judgments. Jurors think a drunken driver who is in a fatal accident is more responsible for the crash than an equally drunken driver whose victim recovers. The same goes for fielders; we fans assign far more significance to a dramatically fumbled ball than to routine catches. The moneyball approach replaces the morally loaded statistic of "errors" with more meaningful numbers that include positive as well as negative outcomes. By avoiding these mistakes, baseball quants have come much closer to understanding the true causal structure of baseball, and so their decisions are more effective. But does the fact that even experts make so many mistakes about baseball prove that human beings are thoroughly irrational? Baseball, after all, is a human invention. It's a great game exactly because it's so hard to understand, and it produces such strange and compelling interactions between regularity and randomness, causality and chaos. Most of the time in the natural environment, our evolved learning procedures get the right answers, just as most of the time our visual system lets us see the objects around us accurately. In fact, we really only notice our visual system on the rare occasions when it gives us the wrong answers, in perceptual illusions, for instance. A carnival funhouse delights us just because we can't make sense of it. Baseball is a causal funhouse, a game designed precisely to confound our everyday causal reasoning. We can never tell just how much any event on the field is the result of skill, luck, intention or just grace. Baseball is a machine for generating stories, and stories are about the unexpected, the mysterious, even the miraculous. Sheer random noise wouldn't keep us watching. But neither would the predictable, replicable causal regularities we rely on every day. Those are the regularities that evolution designed us to detect. But what can even the most rational mind do but wonder at the absurdist koan of the obstruction call, with its dizzying mix of rules, intentions and accidents, that ended World Series Game 3? The truly remarkable thing about human reasoning isn't that we were designed by evolution to get the right answers about the world most of the time. It's that we enjoy trying to get the right answers so profoundly that we intentionally make it hard for ourselves. We humans, uniquely, invent art-forms serving no purpose except to stretch the very boundaries of rationality itself. Copyright 2013 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit http://www.djreprints.com

[Edgy MD]

Theamtically, I like and agree with this very much. Outcomes are very humbling, but Bill James' team nonetheless has won three times this decade. But outcomes remain very humbling.

But the author doesn't really get to her thesis, leaving it implied until maybe paragraph 16. I'm still not sure what it is.

[Guest Mets � Willets Point]

Red Sox parade stops on Boylston Street to honor victims of Boston Marathon bombing: http://www.boston.com/video/viral_page/?bctid=2796810856001&pconnect_name=823527

[Edgy MD]

With all respect, that's sort of weird way to approach a somber moment.

Not to be old-guy (who am I kidding?), but the carefully stylized rebelliously affected look as he approaches just makes it all cheaper to me.

[Frayed Knot]

Most recent World Series without an American-born black player: 1950 ... 2013

[Guest Mets � Willets Point]

Edgy MD wrote: With all respect,

Words used inevitably by someone who is about to be disrespectful.

Edgy MD wrote: Not to be old-guy (who am I kidding?), but the carefully stylized rebelliously affected look as he approaches just makes it all cheaper to me.

Perhaps it's less to do with your age and more to do with your innate cynicism about anything that is meaningful to other peopel

[stevejrogers]

Frayed Knot wrote: Most recent World Series without an American-born black player: 1950 ... 2013

Expect that to be part of the ammunition for the "baseball is no longer the sport of choice to participate in or watch in that demographic."

I don't think that is something that should be dismissed as TV ratings are though.

[Edgy MD]

Mets � Willets Point wrote: Edgy MD wrote: With all respect, Words used inevitably by someone who is about to be disrespectful. Edgy MD wrote: Not to be old-guy (who am I kidding?), but the carefully stylized rebelliously affected look as he approaches just makes it all cheaper to me. Perhaps it's less to do with your age and more to do with your innate cynicism about anything that is meaningful to other peopel

You've really got to stop that nonsense and try talking to people online like they're human beings.

The guy approached the line to make a solemn presentation like he was a goofy drunk. He was in the midst of a celebration, and that's hard to mix with solemnity but can make for a symbolically awkward image. That's actually how I feel because I care, not because of " innate cynicism about anything that is meaningful to other peopel." Fucking hell, what did I do to deserve THAT?

[Guest Mets � Willets Point]

It made me weep. I found it very moving.

[Edgy MD]

I'm glad for that.

[Guest themetfairy]

As a runner, and during the weekend of the New York City Marathon (which suffered its own problems last year, albeit not the same as the Boston Marathon's), I also found it to be a moving and appropriate gesture.

[Edgy MD]

Cherington had some big boots to fill and has done an amazing job. Seriously I look at that roster and go wow, they won the World Series. After last year's finish and the big trade-off of last summer, lots of folks were underwhelmed with their roster and picked them to finish at or near the bottom of the AL East. And while Cherrington et al have to get the credit for the results, anytime a team leads most of the season and winds up as the last one standing it means a helluva lot went right for them. You don't want to dismiss it as luck but good teams are usually good AND they're lucky. Every one of the starting eight--starting ten really since they platooned in LF and at 3B--missed little or no time. Including: - Napoli, whose 3-year deal was canceled when he failed his physical. They settled instead on a one-year deal for smaller bucks and he both played every day and adapted to 1B well. When injured deals like that don't work out (Moises Alou) the GM is derided as stupid. - Peroia never missed a game. - Drew at SS was another guy available because of past injuries. This year he got 500 PAs - For 2008-2010 Papi (at age 32-34) averaged .257/.356/.498 -- So the Sox signed the 35 y/o to an extension and he goes .311/.401/.571 for 2011-2013 at ages 35, 36 & 37 It's easy to say deals like that are no-brainers after they work but supposing those years were the beginning of the end rather than a temporary lull? - Ellsbury was on the field for twice as many ABs this season compared to last - Iglesies was an all-glove SS hitting .202 in the minors when he was called up, he then hit .330/.376/.409 in Boston while filling in at two positions before getting dealt for Jake Peavy - Four starters made 27 or more starts including Lackey who had missed all of 2012, Only Buchholz among the regulars missed significant time (he made 16 starts) - And the only place where they were really injured bit was in the pen where their 38 y/o fourth choice turned out to be the best closer in MLB once he got the job.

The mother of all "Do what the Sox do" articles from Kevin Kernan.

Kevin Kernan�s column at the New York Post today is a treat. It praises the Red Sox� approach and basically says �the Yankees and Mets need to do what the Red Sox just did if they want to win the World Series.� Which, yes, I will agree 100% that if the Yankees and Mets want to win the World Series they SHOULD do what the Sox just did: they should win four World Series games before their World Series opponents do. That�s really the only way to do it. http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/11/04/what-the-red-sox-just-did-yeah-do-that/

[Frayed Knot]

It's just that these columns are so predictable.
- Every year some team wins the World Series
- Most years it's a different team with its own, if not unique, approach then at least one with an individual variation on a particular strategy
- What most if not all of those winners had in common is that a shit-load of stuff went right for them; some of it planned, some of it out of the blue.

And then after the conclusion of the season multiple writers will lecture about how this is the model to copy.
In this case they're being written as if signing an oft-injured Napoli, an oft-injured Drew, an aging Victorino, re-signing a really aging Ortiz, relying on a catching tandem of Saltalamacchia & Ross, hoping for a bounce back from Lackey (the most hated man in New England a year ago at this time) or continued luck with Lester & Buchholz all couldn't have gone incredibly wrong and thus be held up as a model of what NOT to do with a team coming off a 90+ loss season.

[Lefty Specialist]

Sure, all that's true, but I watched them win that World Series and I said to myself, "Bobby Valentine will never manage again".

[Edgy MD]

Maybe not. He sure seemed spent by the end, and laid bare to the point where you wouldn't want to be the next GM looking foolish by getting caught up in his orbit, looking like you bought into his BS. But I wouldn't put it past him to do something crazy like manage Italy or Colombia or Sierra Leone or somebody into the finals of the World Baseball Classic.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

I thought the broadcasting gig at SNY could provide a tiny path toward redemption, but I don;t think the exposure gave him enough presence. He needs to step that up a little while also keeping one eye on the degree of outrageousness of his remarks. Slowly build it all up and before long look like the obvious choice to succeed Terry.

[Edgy MD]

Yabbut, at 63, and as restless as he always seems to be, I wonder if he has the patience for the long game.

[metirish]

Surely Bobby gets at least some credit for the great purge of asshole players the Sox got rid of?

[Guest Mets � Willets Point]

metirish wrote: Surely Bobby gets at least some credit for the great purge of asshole players the Sox got rid of?

It's kind of my belief that Francona's laissez faire management style contributed to the players playing with their heads up their ass and the dissolution of 2011. Valentine was the man who had to clean that up and received a lot of the ire of the players, media, and fans as a result. At the very least he was the lightning rod that drew everyone's hatred and thus served as a unifying factor.