Numbers game.
Major-league baseball may seem an unlikely setting for the study of ideology in action, but the sport's recent history offers an object lesson in just how powerful prevailing dogma can be--especially when it presents itself merely as common sense. Over the past twenty-five years, professional baseball has witnessed a genuine intellectual revolution. A loose collection of writers, statisticians, and mathematicians--collectively referred to as sabermetricians (after the Society for American Baseball Research)--has gone back to first principles, interrogating the assumptions that like behind the decisions of owners, general managers, and coaches alike. In doing so, the sabermetricians have demonstrated that many of baseball's most widely accepted truths--about everything from player talent to game strategy to the relative value of performance statistics such as batting average and runs batted in--are based on little more than superstition and anecdote. Yet even as this critique of the existing order has gained credibility--Bill James, the most famous sabermetrician, was a best-selling author as far back as the late 1980s, while Michael Lewis's book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, which profiled one of the few general managers to take sabermetric ideas seriously, was a huge hit in 2003--sabermetricians and their ideas have made little headway with most of baseball's decision makers, who dismiss them as stat geeks and Rotisserie nerds (which, to be fair, more than a few of them are).The information that sabermetrics offers is too valuable to be ignored completely, however, and in the past few years it has had a powerful impact, both on and off the field. Four or five teams are now run by individuals whose devotion to the sabermetric mindset is explicit--including Theo Epstein, general manager of the Boston Red Sox, whose analytical approach earned the Sox their first World Series championship in nearly eighty years--and another three or four are meaningfully influenced by it. Yet even the recent success of "sabermetric" teams like the Red Sox, the Oakland Athletics, and the Los Angeles Dodgers has not eroded the convictions of the sport's traditionalists, who insist that the way things have always been done is the way they're supposed to be done. In textbook fashion, the traditionalists naturalize the existing order and portray the statheads as fanatical ideologues, Jacobins of numbers, outsiders to the game and therefore ignorant of its reality. The more influential and effective sabermetricians have become, the more vehement the counterreaction has been.
Even as this struggle continues, though, the terms on which it's waged have changed. In particular, there is a greater sense of security and assurance on the part of the sabermetricians. If for a long time they felt (justifiably) that they were yelling into the abyss, now there's a sense that the work they do may have a concrete impact, that it will help shape the decisions of at least a few key people, and that this in turn will eventually alter for the better the way baseball is played. That has led to a slight mellowing of tone, and to fewer jeremiads against the powers that be. The best evidence of this--and a fine example of rigorous analytical work--is the newest volume of the annual Baseball Prospectus. This year's edition is a massive collection of team and player analysis, coauthored by sixteen writers (many of whom, incidentally, have other jobs as well). Spiritual heir to the remarkable Bill James Baseball Abstract, the Prospectus includes incisive essays on each major-league team, a number of pieces on new ways of thinking about such topics as the assessment of defense and player performance, as well as short, well-informed takes on more than a thousand players, including just about everyone with even a prayer of wearing a big-league uniform in 2005. And, this year, it is clearly the work of people who can see the established order starting to tremble.
The real substance of the book is in the team essays, which do a masterful job of conveying sophisticated ideas and serious statistical insights in surprisingly accessible prose. These essays are also wide-ranging, in line with an early manifesto from the Prospectus writers that called for baseball analysis to "expand to explicitly consider the economic, social, technological, competitive and governmental contexts in which the game operates." While analysis of player performance will always be at the core of sabermetrics, many of the pieces here do an excellent job of examining off-the-field issues also. Perhaps the most striking thing about the book, in fact, is the centrality of economic issues--player salaries, team budgets, revenues--in nearly every team essay, in recognition of their importance to every real-life decision. It's no longer enough to figure out which players are really good and which are overrated; now it's important to figure out how much they're worth, too, and how their value changes over time.
All of this makes the Prospectus sound like a heavy slog, but in fact it's more like a sprightly gallop. Notwithstanding the fact that sixteen authors are involved, the book is written in a distinctive voice, one that sounds somehow like ESPN circa 1993, crossed with an amateur (but highly skilled) quantitative social scientist: witty, sharp, and enamored of its own knowledge yet still endearing. This is most effective in the short analyses of individual players, which are the most entertaining pieces in the book. Laced as they are with the occasional sophomoric joke or bad pun (of Cleveland outfielder Grady Sizemore: "It's not your Sizemore but how you use him"), more often they bless the reader with pithy descriptions and juicy tidbits of information (who knew that Pirates' minor-leaguer Adam Boeve's name rhymes with groovy?). The player descriptions alone provide a crash course on how to think about baseball intelligently.
That, ultimately, is the most valuable thing the Prospectus has to offer: an example of how to think seriously about complex problems, and how to use statistical analysis to find interesting answers. The goofy reference to the "information age" on the book's cover may seem already out of date, but the truth is, it's appropriate. One consequence of the sabermetric revolution has been an explosion in the amount of data available to fans. But many of the numbers bandied about by teams and the media are irrelevant at best and dangerously deceptive at worst. The point, then, is to accumulate not more and more data, but rather more and more information, in the Claude Shannon sense of the word, separating signal from noise. Baseball traditionalists have always assumed that, for the statheads, numbers are an end in and of themselves. But like Baseball Abstract, the Prospectus makes it clear that numbers are only a means to an end, namely, a deeper understanding and appreciation of the game itself.
Of course the obvious question is, Why should we care? To be sure, if you don't care much about baseball, you probably won't care much about the Prospectus. Yet the topic is important because it demonstrates clearly that it isn't possible to overthrow a regime of knowledge just by showing that it doesn't correspond very well to reality. It's simply the case that most of what has passed for wisdom in the baseball establishment over the years is nothing but bushwa--folk intelligence shaped by preexisting prejudices. It's also the case that major-league baseball's decision makers would seem to have every incentive to embrace new ideas that would improve their decisions and give them a competitive edge. But, for at least two decades, most general managers and owners in the game have willfully ignored precisely those kinds of ideas. Of all the mysteries of baseball that remain to be investigated, that may be the most perplexing.
James Surowiecki is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies, and Nations (Doubleday, 2004).
A Fan's Notes examines the genre of sportswriting.
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| Author: | Surowiecki, James |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Artforum International |
| Date: | Apr 1, 2005 |
| Words: | 1317 |
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