Eye Cue DA COLI GAWD
<--- Cleveland Browns winning that many, boi!
A new day is here. Fukk Hard Knocks, this dude about turn the NFL into a thinking man's game. Impressive write up here. Dude literally sh*ts on average internet wanna-be scouts with no impressive track record to speak of:
Paul DePodesta
The Genesis, Implementation, and Management of New Systems Related Links
As an introduction to the second edition of his pamphlet, Common Sense, Thomas Paine wrote, “perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right and raises at first a formidable outcry in the defense of custom.” Well, welcome to the world of baseball.
When I joined the Cleveland Indians in 1996, the baseball world was really rich for reform. Fans were still holding a grudge from the strike, salaries were exploding and small market teams were disappearing from the competitive landscape. In short, crisis was emerging and the existing operating paradigm in baseball was totally incapable of solving these new problems.
All of this was very bad for baseball at the time, but as it turned out, very good for me. In retrospect, I had a distinct advantage over everybody else in the industry at the time in that I knew absolutely nothing. I'd played baseball in college but that was about it. Because I knew nothing I observed everything critically and took nothing for granted. I spent my first few years with the Indians analyzing all of their systems, from contracts to player development and scouting. Because I had no preconceived notions over how an organization ought to be run, this was an education for me.
I realized very quickly that subjectivity ruled the day in evaluating players. I sat in a major league staff meeting at the end of 1996 after we had traded for Jeff Kent and listened to one of our staff members say, “Jeff Kent has the weakest hack I have ever seen.” So we traded Jeff Kent and watched him become the most explosive second baseman in the entire game—and it was with the Giants, not the Indians. I sat in scout seats behind home plate and listened to scouts rave about the five tools of one of the players—how he could hit, hit for power, run, throw, field—and I'm watching him swing and miss at another slider in the dirt for strike three.
To the untrained ear, these scouts were unbelievably convincing. Some of their subjective opinions almost sounded like they were objective. If you had worn a major league uniform at some point in your life, you were somehow qualified to make these judgments despite a complete lack of empirical evidence to support your claims. Don't get me wrong, subjectivity by itself isn't really a sin, and complete objectivity isn't perfect either. In our industry we make a lot of educated guesses on the future performance of people under very stressful situations. Subjectivity will be an element in any decision we make.
The incredible thing is that in subjectivity there are a lot of biases that come into play—emotional opinions or focusing just on outcomes, or even worse, focusing on the most recent outcomes. In baseball it can even take into account the player's physical appearance or worrying about what the press is saying all the time.
Evaluation is really at the core of decision—making whether the field of endeavor is baseball or picking stocks. It was clear to me that using clearly subjective evaluation was shoddy at best. The psychological biases I mentioned, and more, were all in play. Imagine if you made a huge investment in a company after just meeting the management and never even glancing at a financial report. Your entire evaluation would be something like, “the CEO seems smart; he's got a good body on him; and I'm still really angry with that last company that lost all of our money so I'm going to do something and I'm going to do it now.”
Major league teams were basically using this model and if you did, you were eligible to be a GM. We were making multi—million dollar bets on the future performance of the players. Baseball is an industry that is run by old time baseball people. If you weren't a baseball guy, then you better consult with baseball people before you made any kind of decision. But these people weren't always right.
The problem itself wasn't the people. Our scouts were very loyal, passionate, industrious people. The problem was the operating system. The industrial inertia was leading them further and further away from the truth. The operating system at the time, which I'll refer to as Subjective 1.0, was incapable of providing solutions to all the new problems the game was facing. Former Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee may have summed up the baseball operating system when he said, “In baseball you're supposed to sit on your a$s, spit tobacco, and nod at stupid things.” That's America's pastime right there.
Despite this situation, I was grappling with a significant issue: the Indians were very successful at this time. We kept winning the division year after year, selling out every game in our stadium and the owner took the team public at one point and was making more money than any other owner. Thomas Kuhn wrote in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, “As in manufacture so in science—retooling is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it.” There was no crisis in Cleveland, at least not on the surface.
How was I supposed to innovate a supposedly smooth running machine? There was, however, a crisis underlying our success. Our lofty expectations had stifled our innovative spirit. Everything we had done to be successful, we stopped doing. We were hanging on instead of trying to move forward. We signed veteran, big name players who everybody knew. Our team got a lot more expensive and started growing older. Though I was seeing all this, I didn't have much of an audience in Cleveland.
Then the Oakland A's called and offered me the assistant GM job. At the time the Indians had one of the top payrolls in the game, about $71 million. The A's were near the bottom at $20 million. The A's were really in full crisis mode. In the past six seasons the A's had finished 161 games under 500. Attendance was in a freefall. To add insult to injury, about a year and a half earlier, the A's had traded Mark McGuire, the greatest power hitter of our generation. Then the next year they watched McGuire chase and break the single season home run record. They were at rock bottom.
What did I decide to do? I moved to the Bay area. This was the perfect opportunity because losing had become the expectation in Oakland. If we tried something really innovative and it didn't work, all we'd be doing is fulfilling expectations. To use a scout's term, there was a lot of upside. If somehow we figured out how to put a playoff caliber team on the field for pennies on the dollar, the baseball world would have to take notice.
It wouldn't be easy for us. First of all, no small market team had ever made the playoffs in the post—strike era. The A's like everybody else in baseball had ceased to do one very critical thing—to ask the naïve question: “If we weren't already doing it this way, is this the way we would start?”
Management guru Peter Drucker introduced this simple test decades ago and yet our public and private institutions are replete with things as they are because that's pretty much the way things have always been. Why is the workday 9—5? Why do we have the Electoral College? In baseball, why do people still believe that trying to bunt and steal bases helps in scoring runs?
Jim Pinkerton wrote a book called What Comes Next, and in it he wrote, “It's human nature to stick with traditional beliefs, even after they outlast any conceivable utility.” It was as if he were writing this specifically for baseball. So once I got to the A's I began a subtle, under-the-radar mission to ask the naïve question all over the A's organization. As you can imagine, some people didn't like it. Remember that the baseball industry is run by these old time guys with leathery skin who chew tobacco. Imagine Jack Palance in a baseball cap. And here's this young guy asking all of these questions like, why is our scouting system the way it is, what about our contractual strategies?
Pinkerton also wrote, “systems of any kind tend to degrade over time. Bugs accumulate, people figure out how to cut corners, and eventually they go through the motions and a lowest-common-denominator mentality prevails. And as the original purpose is forgotten, reflexive self-perpetuation becomes the only goal.” This is the world of player evaluation in three sentences.
At first it may have seemed charming that this young guy was asking all these questions—he seemed to really want to learn how things were done. But the questions became a little more detailed and that must have seemed threatening because that reflexive self-perpetuation goal definitely kicked in. Previously there had been no accountability at all in player evaluation. As you can imagine, the scouting community prized that tradition. How were they to feel free otherwise about giving their opinions and keep getting raises at the end of the year despite how often they were right or wrong? I was still waiting for the time I would be sitting in an organizational meeting and I would ask a scout, “well Bob, what do you think of this player,” and he would answer, “well Paul, he had a good beat, I could dance to it and I'd give it a nine!”
