The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking

by Russell A. Carleton

marrying numbers and psychology, the baseball world’s version of a blind date gone wrong.

The scouts who survived understand the value of analysts. The analysts who care for layers of depth to complement their reports turn to scouts. Their relationship is symbiotic, and the most capable master both languages and serve as conduits when the inevitable disagreement arrives.

Information is everything, and while baseball has defined information as numbers, statistics, and the branches of those family trees, information also encompasses behavior, history, processes, systems, biases, communication, and, perhaps most important, decision-making.

“maybe” is the most seductive word in baseball.

Oh baseball, why must you do this to me? I had an odd feeling about what would happen next. It wasn’t exactly déjà vu. It was a premonition. Or maybe it was just a thought so crazy that it could only happen in a dream or a baseball game.

Games are defined by their rules, and rules create spaces outside the normal bounds of reality. Baseball is an odd activity when you look at it out of context.

There are two ways to win at any game. One is to read the rulebook and become good at the skills that are listed there. In baseball, that means being the person who can throw the fastest fastball or hit the ball the farthest.

There’s a second way to win a game, one that always brings about a few raised eyebrows. In between the rules, there are always spaces.

There are two sets of rules in any game: the ones that are written down and the social norms that fill the vacuum when the rules fall silent.

It was technically legal, but social norms do not take kindly to the word “technically.” It’s easier to change the written rules than the unwritten ones.

What happens when someone tries to break the rules that aren’t written down or even spoken of? That’s where baseball becomes a thinking game.

Baseball at once walks the fine line of being a game that “never changes” despite being a game ever in flux. It’s not rapid change; that illusion ...

Baseball is a thinking game. Maybe it’s even an obsessing game. It is most certainly a shifting game.

Even though my dream never really came true, baseball has a way of staying in the blood.

I look at baseball and I see a mind game. If you want to understand the game, it’s important to understand the very human dynamics of those people wearing funny pajamas and running around that odd box we call a baseball field.

Finding the places where the individual ends and the team begins in baseball is trickier than it is in other sports. On a baseball team, 25 grown men must learn to play a game together, even though most of the time they are only minimally interacting with one another.

Those interpersonal connections on a baseball team might be one of the most powerful forces in the game, but since much of that happens behind the scenes, we don’t have a good way of studying it.

Baseball is filled with ways to bleed away tiny bits of value around the edges, mostly in ways that the untrained eye would never perceive.

To understand baseball, we have to think about issues like motivation and leadership, not in the “Rah! Rah! Coach is never wrong!” sort of way, but in a real, measured—dare I say scientific—way. We lose the plot if we think of the manager as just a button pusher. He’s also a leader of men. That matters.

The arguments for and against umpires are well-worn, and they all boil down to an argument for baseball as a game that should be adjudicated with mechanical precision versus a game where the inevitable human error is a necessary thread in the fabric of the game.

Often, we can learn more by looking at how people talk about something, rather than what they say. In this case, relegating the walk to afterthought status shows a profound discomfort with ball four. Why does baseball get so freaked out about walks?

In the United States’ culture, there is a reflex to judge situations not on functional grounds, but on moral grounds. There is also a preference for Smith’s industrious work over Jones’s dumb luck.

The numbers that we use to describe our world have their own cultural etymologies, and sometimes they have assumptions baked into them that we don’t even realize. Sometimes those assumptions don’t make sense. A walk and a single both end with the runner at first base, but our brains are too busy answering the question of whether the batter deserves first base or not.

The problem is that batting average isn’t actually answering the question that we really want answered.

The most dangerous thing in the world is the correct answer to the wrong question.

If the sabermetric movement in baseball can be boiled down to one moment, it would be the moment when someone asked “Why are we pretending that walks never happened?” Perhaps the best-known piece of the book Moneyball was that the Oakland A’s picked up on this very issue and began evaluating batters by virtue of their on-base percentage, rather than their batting average.

it’s not enough to just proclaim yourself an expert if you want real engagement with people. You have to be willing to both understand and address the other person’s natural skepticism and to do so honestly and without resorting to “because I have more letters after my name than you do.”

I may not have walked the same path that you have, but I have my own experience and an open mind and I care about learning what you’re trying to communicate. If I can understand how a person sees the world around them, I can usually work from there.

I’ve come to realize that “You never played” often serves a different purpose. It’s a way of saying there are things that players, managers, and baseball lifers know to look for implicitly, things that sometimes they themselves don’t even realize they’re picking up on.

Storytelling is a quintessentially human endeavor. All societies have ways of passing down knowledge and traditions through generations. The fact that baseball has been measured using many of the same basic stats across time provides a language to tell these stories.

one of the first major findings to emerge from the sabermetric movement was that pitchers actually have less control over what happens in the game than we usually give them credit for.

If we’re to understand baseball—or anything—better, then the way to do that is with better questions. Before you answer any question, question the question first.

If a question itself doesn’t make sense, then the answer to that question isn’t worth much.

Baseball—being a game played by humans—is tied up in many of those cultural values and cognitive biases that can lead to decisions that don’t follow the rules of expected value. Sometimes, the mathematically correct decision is the one that feels the worst emotionally, but runs are runs and the scoreboard doesn’t care about how you feel.

The creepily obsessive nature with which data about baseball games are collected only becomes apparent when you imagine the same level of detail being applied to other areas of life.

Baseball is a game of inches played at insane speeds.

There’s a pleasant myth that people tend to believe about themselves that they “look at all the facts and decide from there.” We are fond of thinking of ourselves as logical. This is, without question, not true.

one particular situation in which the closer routinely enters the game, with his team up by three in the ninth, is not nearly as important as another ninth-inning situation in which he does not often enter, the tied game. In fact, “up three” in the ninth isn’t even on the chart of the Top 10 most important innings.

Casinos are monuments to mathematical and psychological illiteracy.

Uncertainty feels icky and people will go to great lengths and do irrational things to get rid of uncertainty.

“Doing the numbers” might make for better decisions, but it doesn’t make for perfect decisions or emotionally easier ones. There’s no certainty in that spreadsheet, and that’s what people are really craving. That’s the emotional shift you have to realize to make better decisions in baseball (and the rest of life). That’s why it feels icky.

The problem with emergence is that it isn’t always good. It can take a group of people and make them an angry mob. Worse, it can make them do The Wave.

“If the opposite of your core strategy choices looks stupid, then every competitor is going to have more or less the exact same strategy as you.”

A real strategy forces you to make choices between options when it’s not obvious what the answer is. In other words, a strategic choice is one where you might be wrong.

Politicians love slogans. The engineer, on the other hand, answers questions like these often with complicated discussions about the details. Details are boring, but they run the world.

The tough part about being a parent isn’t the actual act of parenting; it’s that you rarely get to leave “parent mode.”

Becoming a parent means living for someone else on someone else’s schedule, every day for a couple of decades.

Parenthood is a draining business. There’s no one event that gets you. Like a car that runs out of gas, there wasn’t a specific mile that was to blame. It’s the fact that you weren’t able to stop to refuel.

That’s the beauty of baseball minutiae. It’s a game full of nooks and crannies and the occasional rabbit hole. There are thousands of little pieces of information about the game.

Baseball is a game where most of the time nothing happens, but you have to pay close attention anyway because when something does happen, you have to react quickly.