THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Beane is a very intelligent guy with an chiseled athletic body whose intelligence got in the way of his performance. You look at him, and you think he was born to be a star athlete. But he never became one.

Because he peaked at, I dunno, the 177th best baseball player on the entire planet?

His intelligence might have hampered him, I guess, but it seems far more likely that it didn’t.  The only thing that Beane’s body type tells us (and it’s echoed as well in the body types of Gretzky and Ruth and The Rock) is that the ideal body type for a sport is plenty influenced by things we cannot immediately see with our eyes and our preconceptions.

Try telling that to all the ivy-league baseball players (e.g., Lou Gehrig).
If you take the proportion of MLBers that went to good or great colleges, I imagine it’d be higher than the proportion of the US population that did the same.
There are obviously lots of problems with that calc (unavailability of Ivys to LatAm players, higher chance of beign drafted if you went to college, etc.) but I think it generally blows a hole in his anecdotal theory.
He takes such a narrow, curious view of intelligence - it just harkens back to the you’re a jock or nerd stereotypes that just aren’t true.

This is quite a stretch:

So Beane became a scout, then a GM, and tried to come up with a reliable way to weed out players like himself who can’t handle the mental part of the game, and discover the players who can.

And so is this, as Mike above points out:

Beane is a very intelligent guy with an chiseled athletic body whose intelligence got in the way of his performance.

Where is the evidence for that?  Because Beane himself said it was true (and I don’t know that he did)?

There are some nice ideas in this article about the physiology of brain functions and how that might relate to performance in athletics, but there are also a lot of B.S. assumptions and assertions as well.

Tough crowd!

I quite enjoyed Ken’s piece, even if a couple of parts were stretched to fit his thesis.

Ha, I’m obviously quite rusty in my blogging.  It’s been months since I wrote anything, and a couple of years since I did it regularly, and I’d pretty much forgotten how you’re not allowed to make a mistake on the web.  Consider me reminded.

I was surprised at first that the Beane part is getting nitpicked so much, because I didn’t really think it was that significant.  I was just reiterating what I thought was common knowledge from Moneyball.  But in hindsight, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, because that’s the one section I rushed through the writing process and where I skipped over providing supporting evidence.

My copy of Moneyball is sitting somewhere in about 25 boxes of stuff in my garage, and I didn’t really feel like spending the hours and hours it would take for me to dig it out and find it.  Unless I lent it to someone, which is possible, and then those hours and hours looking for it would have really been wasted, because I wouldn’t have found it.

Anyway, it’s flawed, but if I had taken the time to make it un-nitpickable I wouldn’t have had the time to write anything, and it would have gone unwritten.  C’est la vie.

Wow, thin skin Ken.  It was a very well-written piece, but if you come here for a pat on the back, you’ve come to the wrong place!  We’ll tear apart anything we can, and then some! 

After two years away from blogging, all my callouses had vanished.  But now my skin is rethickening by the second!