One difference between a boardroom and the internet - in the boardroom, you get instant reaction or no reaction. On the internet it can take a day or two...
League would've made a great situational reliever, but I don't think he was a particularly good closer. When the Mariners got him from Toronto, we were all excited about his splitter - "the best pitch in baseball". If only we'd known at the time that he was never going to throw the darn thing... His pitch selection was never particularly intelligent, in my view. He'd never use the split early in counts, despite it being his only good pitch vs. LHP, and as a result he had annoying platoon splits despite the great splitter. Watching him against any lefty lineup was terrifying. 2011 was a great year for him, true, but I always had the impression that he was walking a thin line.
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Q. What is a "Think Tank"?
A. It is a policy institute with the following characteristics:
- Diverse experts are brought to bear
- Info exchange is synergistic (expression of "incorrect" ideas is genuinely encouraged)
- Research collides and is sharpened
- 30,000-foot-view strategies are consolidated
- Typically, the "Think Tank" then goes out and advocates a position
Gordon lights up the PowerPoint projector and displays his research, proposing that the Morrow-for-League trade be evaluated as neutral. This presentation could indeed occur at a Fortune 500 steering committee -- Lessons Learned are important parts of the "Think Tank" process.
One of the sharpest experts around the table, Thirteen, speaks up and delivers a sentence or two, "Um, I question the data that suggests Brandon League was very helpful to our company." Classic (terse) steering committee 'put.
Gordon presents more data. The second-level (Thirteen) does little but scowl mildly, which serves to get across the point "I don't accept that data, either." All very amusing to Dr. D, because it echoes so strongly the boardroom setting in which he cut his consultant teeth.
You might ask, "Doesn't Thirteen have to reply?" On this board he does. In steering committee he does not. It's on Gordon, running the PowerPoint projector, to get signoff. Lot of times, you walk out of the room without signoff. That's fine. You proceed based on the call of the guy in charge, whoever that is. In this case, me.
;- )
Okay, in this case, it would be Gordon, but the shot-caller can't run the projector.
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Gordon, running the projector, does say politely, "at what point do you question the data?" To which Thirteen doesn't reply. This exact scenario has occurred in real life for Dr. D. Some 3rd-level would shake her head, "I question the data." I'd say as mildly as possible, "Can you help me understand at which point you question the data?"
All the heads around the conference table would remain politely detached, but people would look out of the corners of their eyes at the 3rd-level. Maybe she would --- > Just shake her head again. "I question the data." End of discussion. You can guess where that leaves things. Translation: "I don't believe you know what you're doing at all." Most, not all, execs tilt to your side at that point. A few agree with the dissension, that you might not know what you're doing.
Not that Thirteen is analogous to a stubborn dissenter. Even in steering committee, those roles might morph from one meeting to another, as the subject changes. The idea exchange, that's the point.
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Said all that just to give an inkling as to why --- > SSI so frequently comes across to Dr. D as a "think tank." I'm guessing that super-posters like Bat571 will agree to some extent. For guys like him, who spent their careers in high-powered intellectual EXCHANGES, the SSI community is stimulating.
It's the very exchange that's stimulating. This is information download of a completely different nature than that in a Philosophy 102 class.
By the time Gordon's hour-long Think Tank session was over, we had jumped off the starting point and arrived at an (even more) interesting point of exchange: what went wrong with the high draft picks back then? For which Dr. D wishes to schedule CR #8 for another meet, after lunch ...
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Going back to the "Definition of Think Tank" bullet list for a moment -- Political, or Social, or Military, think tanks deploy the following characteristics:
- Diverse experts are brought to bear
- Info exchange is synergistic (expression of "incorrect" ideas is genuinely encouraged)
- Research collides and is sharpened
- 30,000-foot-view strategies are consolidated
- Typically, the "Think Tank" then goes out and advocates a position
It's funny, but those five things are what baseball sites aspire to, aren't they? Not to sound immodest (on all our behalfs), but are there any other baseball sites that aspire to execute this general paradigm?
I'm sure there are, to one extent or another. When Bill James writes a research article on BJOL, and Tango et al join in, it's pretty similar. There are sites on which a lot more information is conveyed, and there are sites that make more important discoveries (though not relative to the Seattle Mariners).
Am not aware of any baseball sites on which the information exchange is more frictionless. I really appreciate it, guys. In the cyber realm, you're my heroes.
Thanks Gordon,
Dr D
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Comments
That "best pitch in baseball" thing ... I hope that they oversimplified it for public consumption. The fact that a given SECONDARY pitch posts a -5.00 run value in one season, that is a nice red flag, but if you are basing a Brandon Morrow-level trade on that ... growf. There are 100 reasons that a given secondary pitch might rack up great stats in a single year.
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You know and I know that the M's saw two things they are very good at seeing ... (1) a saber nicety, used in context no less, the C/100 value on the split, and (2) League's fearless makeup. That makeup thing is part of the reason we have Miller, Franklin, and Zunino right now, so I'm willing to take the good with the bad.
They missed the key point on League: his total lack of pitchability. (I wouldn't have seen that factor, pre-trade, either -- would you have?) I'd like to know why they missed that, just in a post-mortem chess type sense. Vargas and Iwakuma, they nailed because OF pitchability. (Did they nail it on Iwakuma?)
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Also: this may not be a fair question, but: are there any long-term closers with that sidearm, flat fastball and two pitches? The sidearm (flat) fastball seems like it could be a fatal flaw to me, especially vs LH as you say.
What I DID wonder, at the time of the trade was ... isn't this guy a Jeff Nelson, a guy who will have to face mostly righties? I wonder too how they missed that. If they did miss it.
Having left the high powered environment of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, first for working at a school district (to watch my kids grow a little closer up than from the Persian Gulf), and now rattling around on a farm, fixing irrigation and moving pipe in the horse pasture, yes, this IS my stimulation. Perhaps I clog the system now and again, but I do enjoy interacting with bright people on a subject I've enjoyed since I can remember (i.e. about 1954 in County Stadium). Thanks, Jemanji, Spec, Gordon, and everyone else for time well spent.
And that they weren't wrong to do it, as he's proven over half a decade that he can't stay healthy for even 180 innings. Toronto thought they could get Morrow to be a starter, and he's been one... but not a particularly meaningful one (although the K totals and some specific games, usually against us, are very impressive).
But Jack walked in to see a #5 draft pick whining about bullpenning, angry about being jerked around, and generally having a terri-bad attitude to go with his mid-90s arm (that threw a very hittable fastball). His bread and butter was his breaker, actually, but he was very inaccurate with it.
So should he invest in that, or get essentially the same guy (with a worse platoon split) who had the right attitude to be a back-end pitcher and had a terrific splitter that was unused and therefore provided upside?
He got the attitude guy, as Doc says, a reliever-for-reliever swap to Jack's thinking. Headcase, diabetic Morrow was not the kind of pitcher Jack was gonna rely on for either the pen or the rotation. Could he have gotten more for Morrow? Maybe. But he didn't get swindled, even if his return was a headstrong pitcher who refused to pitch completely to his strengths and had worse results than his stuff should have gained him.
Jack needed a bridge, and he got a bridge. I don't think that's anything to cry over, not when Morrow is still whacking away blindfolded at the starter pinata that stubbornly won't cough up any candy.
And to your point Doc, I'm glad we can deep-sea dive for conversations of a movable nature on this site. It's one of the reasons I write here. :) The conversation is the key, and the discussion a reward in itself.
Thanks for that.
~G
In 1979 I had the fortune to attend the Governor's School of NC. This was a 6-week summer program for "gifted and talented" whose sole purpose was to open minds and actually teach the concept of questioning assumptions. Time has taught me that what I learned during that 6 week period was more valuable than every hour of college I had in the decades since.
It has long been my belief that the single biggest failure of the American education system is that we actually TEACH blind acceptance of authority from earliest age - and even in our university settings, the tendency is to elevate the professor to almost godlike status in regards to being the ultimate authority on his expertise.
While we must have beliefs to function in the world and we must accept facts as facts, the basic concept of how one resolves challenges to ones beliefs is either ignored or actively discouraged. (I recently heard of legislation in Texas specifically banning the teaching of critical thinking in public schools). In a world where there were only three TV networks and mostly one local paper, there was little daily need for resolving conflicting inputs. But, in the modern world, when there a hundred different highly biased sources of mass media pumping their version of Truth into households each day - and seemingly infinite amount of data available on the internet - critical thinking is no longer a luxury for the few -- it is a necessity for all.
Instead, the forces that profit (literally) from people ill equipped to question anything, actively lobby to maintain the status quo.
SSI is one of the glowing beacons of reasonable discourse where true dialog happens and contrary positions are not just squashed out of hand, (so long as the debate remains fixed on topic and doesn't devolve into name calling as is too often the case on other blogs).
It is no easy thing challenging ones beliefs. The natural emotional response is no different than any other form of conflict - fight or flight. It's truly a pleasure to have a venue to come where I *CAN* have my beliefs challenged. That's where real learning begins.
Thanks for all you do, Doc.