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Friday, July 30, 2010
Start thinking outside the NEW box
Geoff Baker:
And I think it’s time for everyone to take a page out of the book of Bill James, founder of sabermetrics, and start to think “outside the box” again.
Because the thinking I’m seeing offered up, even from people who followed James in their youth and are now numbers wizards themselves, seems to be creating an entirely new box to confine ourselves within.
That new box states that anything that can’t be quantified with numbers, or a stats formula written in “The Book” by Tom Tango, or measured with a high degree of certainty, has to be discarded.
These same people will keep repeating that team chemistry doesn’t really matter, citing a stock quote from Jim Leyland—now apparently recognized as the greatest thinking mind in baseball by some of those same folks who had written him off as “yesterday’s man” five years ago.
OK, you have Leyland saying it doesn’t matter. Who else in the game? I can give you a dozen managers off the top of head who say it does, Don Wakamatsu among them. Jack Zduriencik has been around the game forever and says it matters.
Know who else does? Bill James. A guy who invented stats wizardry and has actually worked for a major league team.
When we sat down to interview James back in spring training, he said the Red Sox—you know, Terry Francona, Theo Epstein, two World Series since 2004—paid a huge amount of attention to it.
Baseball would be a quite remarkable activity if it was the one place in the world where your co-workers didn’t have any impact on how productive you were. But in fact, baseball is a high-stress occupation and those sort of stress-inducing activities have a sort of, just have a huge impact on how the team functions, I think.
Can James quantify it? Nope.
Nor can he quantify the intangibles that a catcher brings to the table. I asked him then, how we could possibly go about considering things we can’t quantify. His answer? Start thinking outside the box.
You don’t learn by studying the stuff you know. You learn by studying the stuff that you don’t know. So, if you divide the world into (crap) that you know and (crap) that you don’t know, and you study the stuff that you know, then you’re not going to learn very much. All of the progress comes from studying the stuff that you don’t know. So, that’s really what’s interesting. And that’s where most of your focus should be. Studying stuff that you can’t agree about.
And maybe trying some of it, too.
I never said that, nor do I believe it.
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