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Stuff is found below that relates to actual life. For some readers, that's their favorite part of SSI shtick. For others, this blog should be about baseball, light and breezy.
You been warned :- )
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HOT NEWS ITEM: M's had a 1/$8M deal with Cruz, and ownership backed away.
TOMORROW'S NEWS TODAY: You've gotten it all year. ;- )
We've insisted, long past even SSI's usual infuriating repetition level, that the M's had essentially decided against Cruz-at-a-big-bargain.
OH WELL: "We got Rodney instead of Cruz."
GIMME A BREAK: Was it truly either/or? If Clayton Kershaw will join your team for $5M, you find $5M. And, anyway, the M's paid Corey Hart.
OH WELL: If you're determined to believe that anything here is on the M's, be my guest. Maybe you're right. But I doubt it :- )
And, anyway, this is not about bashing the M's. It's about a life lesson.
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PREMISE: It's not possible for any baseball analyst to believe that Nelson Cruz wasn't worth 1 year, $7.5M. This one goes way, way beyond "no-brainer."
CONCLUSION: Something other than "stupidity" HAD to be the root cause of this fiasco.
OK, let's think for two minutes. Breathe. Let's process that, even if we dislike the implication. The M's didn't back away from Cruz --- > because their IQ's were low.
All righty then?
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There were amazingly smart men among the Founding Fathers. The genius of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and others were far beyond yours or mine. WHOEVER you are reading this. They invented things that you and I build on.
When the U.S. won the Revolutionary War, they needed one Founding Father to run the whole shebang. Madison and Hamilton didn't get together and ask,
*** WHICH IS THE VERY SMARTEST OF US? THAT GUY NEEDS TO RUN IT. ***
The scary-high IQ's, in the 1770's, did not do that, argue for the scariest-high IQ to run the country.
Huh! Now isn't that somethin'. Men with 190 IQ's had no interest in finding the 195 IQ among them? They in fact chose the 135 IQ? Why would that be?
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Nowadays, most college kids ;- ) take it for granted that the smartest of two candidates needs to be President. And why is that?
The kids reason that --- > the smart guy will be able to process the information and make the "correct" choice.
There is a fatal flaw in this reasoning -- in fact, in the entire life philosophy that says "the smartest guy is the most important guy." The fatal flaw is: real-life choices are far, far too complex for any human being to "calculate" the correct choice.
QUESTIONS: Should Obama have closed Gitmo? Or been tough with France rather than nice? Or appointed Sam Nunn rather than Hillary?
Those decisions are not similar to [X*2 +4 = 6x]. Real-life decisions are as similar to algebra, as an ocean liner is to a peanut butter sandwich. In other words, there are a lot more things different about them, than there are things the same.
Real life is far more complex than chess, which is why computers can't do real life. A computer can't tell you whether closing Gitmo will benefit the world. Right?
And so when you try to solve life with algebra, when you try to treat life like your college SAT's, you foul your life up. Royally. Life is way too big for our SAT-brains to get ahold of it. In real life, everybody here is a kindergartener tackling a differential equation.
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George Washington, Mother Theresa, Ghandi, Harriet Tubman, and Adolf Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung did not impact the planet because they were the smartest people. They did so because of choices they made, and persisted in. They changed the planet because of their personalities.
As a general rule, personality affects life much, MUCH more than smarts do.
Hey, do I have anything against smarts? Nah. If I had more of them, I'd play tourney chess more like Bobby Fischer did.
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Now We're Ready, dept.
People used to think that the Rangers were different from the Mariners because --- > one club is really smart, and the other club can't really process information correctly. (USED to think that! Even in Seattle, this snobbery has gotten miles better than it used to be.)
Most (internet) people now realize that all pro sports teams are awash in information, and that all sports teams can process information very effectively.
But, like an electrical wire with a short in it, most (internet) people continue to try to find ways to believe that the Mariners did X and Y wrong, because the Mariners could never really comprehend a very simple problem that they themselves, the (internet) people, can process in seconds.
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I'm not saying that rejecting Cruz -- on the basis that he might embarrass the ballclub -- is a sign of a bad company personality. That's not the point. The point is simply that personality is involved. More than brains are.
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Sure, some (easy) choices can be calculated. You know that Kyle Seager is worth 5.5 WAR. You can calculate that you don't want Willie Bloomquist instead of him. But which of the 30 MLB managers would do that? 0.
We're talking about marginal choices here: choices that literate men would make differently. Let's don't confuse the issue by bringing up the simplistic "6 WAR vs 2 WAR" type choices, as an example of why you need brains.
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Personally, I've only really liked the M's decision-making personality under two men. Lou Piniella, and Pat Gillick. Those two men couldn't be more dissimilar. But I could go with either one, equally cheerfully.
There's a third man I may need to add to the list: Lloyd McClendon.
He ain't perfect, by a long shot. But basically, I like the way he processes information. I think Lloyd McClendon may be very, very "smart" in the functional sense especially. That sense in which personality (bias, intuition, judgment) interacts with raw intelligence.
I suspect that McClendon's overall decisions -- his functional IQ, his IQ on the more complex SAT tests of real life -- were the biggest reason that the 2014 Mariners were a good team.
You can't get a great manager if you insist on your IQ paradigm in choosing him. Why? Because in real life and in baseball, nobody can calculate the correct choices, the way they can on a simplistic SAT test.
If we think a little bit less in terms of IQ and education, and a little bit more in terms of functional intelligence, personality and virtue, our lives will be better.
Cheers,
Jeff
So when you choose Hart over Cruz and get the result we did, somebody loses their job. Jack? He got an extension. Mac? A likely extension. Hoard? Nevermind. He'll have a monument beyond the CF fence at the Safe. Yeah, Hart is the guy that lost his job. Go figure. The other losers? That would be the fans. Sure we had a pennant race, but we lost out on the playoffs by this choice.
Plenty of other teams that could certainly have used 40 dingers in 2014, passed on Cruz too. This whole thing feels like Monday morning QB'ing to me, now that the absolute best case projection for Cruz 2014 has turned out to have happened. I for one am happy to have a team that steers away from cheaters as a corporate philosophy. Absolutely nothing wrong with that and if it costs some wins at times, I am fine with that. Of course it is much more complex than that, but all else equal I want to support a team that does the right thing on this issue.
Doc, I agree with the general thrust of you commentary so this is not to be3 taken as me trying to show you up or disagree to score points or whatever..
When I was working for the Yankees as an intern, there were two stat guys in house and the rest of the intern pool was doing mission critical tasks like prepping the scouting notebooks, tracking games in the minors to improve our data on players etc. But both stat guys in the room reached the same conclusion, and I've had it personally confirmed to me by three different heads of baseball operations departments in my search for other MLB employment:
Baseball is *NOT* awash in a sea of data on players. Some teams use lots of data to aid the decision process (Yankees, Astros, Rays, Mariners (yes...Mariners), As, Red Sox, Cub, Pirates...and some teams do not (Braves, Cardinals, Dodgers, Mets, Twins, Rangers, Marlins, Giants) and some teams are in between. ALL teams aren't leveraging their data analysis capabilities as much as they could to improve efficiency in certain areas except possibly the Yankees, Rays, As, and Pirates. But the general feel from most baseball ops managers is that the slow pace of advancement in baseball research is caused by the persistence of belief by executives in the game that spending a lot on analysis does not have a high marginal rate of return in profit. That most of your money comes from having marketable assets and advertising well and having a strong TV deal.
And they're probably right.
I think it is incorrect to claim that all 30 teams (or even most teams) have big data. They don't. The Yankees are one of only 4 clubs that has an internal database system that includes analysis, biographical info, video scouting records, etc. Even some other analysts on high-data clubs are working with PUBLIC DATA! rather than internal proprietary information.
ANd there sure aren't many open positions for skilled analysts in the game today...there was a brief period...maybe 6 years, where lots of net analysts got hired. They filled jobs, held onto them, and there are no other jobs left. That is a fact. Most teams have either 0 or 1 full time professional statisticians and between 0 and 3 consultants.
Are you familiar with this LL article and the series following?
It names 6 dedicated analysts as members of a larger analytics department inside the Mariners infrastructure:
Jesse Smith
Wesley Battle
Anthony Aliosi
Jordan Bley
Kenny Wade
Caleb Peiffer
I know that if I walk into an F-500 company and there are 6-12 first level analysts in a department, that the company has built a VERY robust organization dedicated to that one area. The rest of the LL series confirms this. The Mariners' stats DEPARTMENT is more robust than many entire COMPANIES are.
For example, I've seen temp agencies, serving Weyerhaeuser/Boeing/whoever, doing very well, in business for years, that were less-developed than the Mariners' sabermetrics dept.
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It certainly doesn't sound like the Yankees' stats department was first-class in comparison to the Mariners'.
But I'd be very interested to hear your feedback, after you carefully processed the entire LL series and compared it to your own understanding.
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As to the question of whether there are some MLB teams with analytics departments that are much less robust, that's another subject. The Mariners have always been out front sabermetrically, though I doubt in an apples-and-oranges sense. I appreciate your remarks on that point; my response would sidetrack us.
Best,
Jeff
One of the most insightful things I've ever read here.
I try to tell my kids to differentiate between three things: 'well educated', 'intelligent', and 'smart'. Which I think is the distinction you're making here.
'Well-educated' is just a measure of attainment, codified by a piece of paper. It means the paper-holder had access to intellectual stimulation, which that person may or may not have taken advantage of.
'Intelligent', in fundamental terms, is measured by IQ. An imperfect measure, to be sure, but in broad strokes should indicate one person's ability to learn things versus another.
But 'smart' is a different animal entirely. It can be developed within an educational environment--but mostly not. It's the experience talking.
It's great if you can have all three. Very few do. And I think that's what you're talking about with LMC. He is extremely baseball smart...and also masterful at direct communication. As great as Lou is, I think he was sometimes misunderstood. LMC doesn't seem to have that issue.