THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

From #7, Shane Battier:

Off-court/intellectual interests: “Finance, sabermetrics, golf.”

Has anybody talked sabermetrics with Battier? Someone needs to interview him!

I can’t help but notice that some of those Ivy grads had shockingly low SAT scores (for the Ivies).  Being good at sports is helpful!

I presume, Jason, that you’re excluding Ryan Fitzpatrick from that “criticism.”

@Jason W - yeah the ivies are really good at not offering scholarships but somehow finding other merit-based financial aid packages for all their recruited athletes.  not that i mind. if you can give a full ride to a concert cellist you should be able to give a full ride to your starting quarterback.

Not sure how SAT scores are relevant to discussions about smartness.  Seriously, the SAT is the RBI of tests.

@sky - wouldn’t that imply that there is a far more accurate and readily available and equally as efficient test for intelligence that schools could be using?? i don’t at all disagree that the SAT has glaring shortcomings, just wondering if there is a better alternative, because that would be great.

I would think that there is a high correlation between SAT score and smartness, although I guess it depends upon how you define smartness.  The best sluggers tends to have the highest RBI totals too.

I don’t know how anyone could say “shockingly low” SAT scores.  There is only one shockingly low score out of the whole bunch - Manning’s (1030).  The rest are from decent (in the 12’s) too shockingly high (in the 15’s).  I had a 1430 (not too good on the English) and that was one of the highest in my high school, I think.

He was pretty clear that he thought it was shockingly low for the ivies.  And I’d agree with that… I’m somewhere in the mix of ages with these guys, and when I took the SATs I think the average at most Ivy League schools was 1400 to 1500.

I’m actually surprised at how few incredibly smart people are on this list. A 3.2 @ Princeton or 3.1@Stanford is probably as low as you can get with their crazy grade inflation, a 3.7 @ Utah doesn’t seem that spectacular and 1220 and 1300’s SAT scores are above average, for sure, but certainly not exceptional. Given that 15+ of these 20 fit into this above-average but not exceptional category, it leaves about 4 or 5 athletes out of the 1000s in professional sports that are really really smart.

Well, remember they’re well beyond exceptional at their sport in high school.

I mean, let’s say Chris Young.  SAT of 1300 puts him in let’s say the top 10% of high school seniors.  What’s his percentile for skill at sports?  He’s likely in the top 0.1%.  So if he’s got the choice between spending an hour studying for the SATs or doing long toss, which do you think he’ll choose?

If there was an SAT that measured athletic skill, he’d probably be a 1580 or so.

And this is purely based on how good he is at either.  If you factor in the common sentiment that (a) sports is more fun than studying, and (b) you can make a lot more as a pro baseball player than you can as a pro lawyer/doctor/middle manager…

For entertainment purposes, let’s see how the 1400-SAT non-athletes do at the combine or other athletic skills competition.

Isn’t the point that being smart and athletic is rare?

What’s always amazed me are 0-linemen. Some of them have majors that definitely do not fit their bodies. Big nerds.

I remember Kobe Bryant having a 1020 or maybe 1080 SAT score.  And the world on ESPN was that he could have gotten into Stanford even without basketball.  ha ha.

Becoming a professional athlete requires single-minded determination and untold hours of practice from say age 12 until age 20-25 (continuing once you make it, of course.) The odds of making it are infinitesimal - out of 125 guys in my graduating class in high school, we had one guy who made a career of it.  There’s probably one every two years. 

On the other hand, there have to be a not insignificant number of people from my class who are making good money in professional or business careers.  If you’re smart, you might have upwards of a 75% chance of hitting that target vs a 1% chance (or less) of having a real pro career.  No surprise that people with multiple skills drop off.

Also, does George Parros really get made fun of for doing crossword puzzles?  He could break anyone’s teeth.

--- “Becoming a professional athlete requires single-minded determination and untold hours of practice from say age 12 until age 20-25 (continuing once you make it, of course.) The odds of making it are infinitesimal - out of 125 guys in my graduating class in high school, we had one guy who made a career of it.” ---

The same thing could be said of making it to the elite level in any field, to be fair. However, if there was an elite geneticist, or elite level mathematician that was also physically gifted enough to play professional sports, it’d be a rare thing, and a big deal.

We had two guys on our HS baseball team year with ACTs over 31 (32 and 31). That’s pretty impressive just at the HS level (public).

Smart kids that are good at sports is impressive. Smart kids that make excellent grades and are really good at sports, work hard at both, and excel through self-discipline and outstanding time management and prioritization is even more impressive.

I will also state that it is likely that many athletes could spend LESS time on their sport and still make it professionally, especially in sports where athleticism is a greater requirement than skill. Athletes tend to spend more time on sports because [1] it’s what they’re good at, and [2] it’s what they like. Unfortunately, a lot of athletes just do the “book stuff” because it’s a requirement for the sports stuff.

@14 - sports are very winner-take-all in terms of future earnings.  Take baseball, for example.  MLB teams take on 100 new American players or so each season, all of whom were probably the best players in high schools with good baseball teams.  Two will probably have lengthy careers and another 3 or 4 average high five figures or low six figures over a 10-year career (including signing bonus).  The other 94 guys have to do something else with their lives.

But if we take 3000 kids with the highest SAT scores in good academic high schools, the future earning potential of 97% of them is probably higher than for the baseball player cohort.  There are simply way more jobs for them.  They don’t need anywhere near the same kind of focus on performance as a baseball player does.

Hawerchuk, that reminds me of when there was a proposal a while back to add an additional scholarship to Division 1 basketball and John Thompson (Sr.) promoted it as a way of getting some kid an education.  My proposal was that he should go ahead and recruit that extra player, but give the scholarship to the most academically gifted student at his high school who couldn’t otherwise afford college instead.  The idea that having an extra kid on the bench who will practice instead of study, but has zero chance of ever making a living at basketball being the most deserving to get a full ride to college is pretty laughable.

15/Hawerchuck

Point taken but your numbers seem off. You seem to be suggesting that each year, 6 kids make it, so over the course of 10 years, we’d only have 60 players on each team making any decent money off baseball. While this is true of the millionaires, you seem to forget the fact that if you even make the MLB roster for one year, you are all of the sudden rich, making about 5 years good salary in one year (400k league minimum). Furthermore, AAAers make a decent living, by most accounts (e.g., “organizations often turn to the minor league free agent. The most coveted free agents can make as much as $12,000-$25,000 a month, depending on the organization. That works out to a cool $60,000-$125,000 for five months of work.") and if you make the 40-man roster, I think you get a bonus of 60k.
So yes, only 6 become *rich* (and far richer than any nuclear physicist, fwiw), but some decent number also live comfortably by most Americans’ standards.
A small number, to be sure, but not quite as dire as you make it out to be.

9/mettle: don’t lump Princeton in with the Harvards of the world when it comes to grade inflation.  They unilaterally instituted a pretty strict grade DEFLATION policy in 2004 to separate themselves from schools of similar ilk.  I believe the current standard is that no more than 33% of grades should be in the A range - actually quite a target, considering the kinds of grades their students would be given at most other schools.  A little bit different from Harvard, where a full 90% of students graduate with honors.

Of couse, that policy is fairly recent and doesn’t apply to any of the athletes mentioned in this article…

JD/#1: See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html for Michael “Moneyball” Lewis’ article on Battier for the New York Times Magazine. Very insightful regarding Battier and the basketball equivalent of sabermetrics.

Article on Ohlendorf http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=kurkjian_tim&id=4230662

He was an Operations Research major, and thus fairly predisposed to what we do.