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Episode 199: Keith Law's 'Inside Game'
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Keith Law (@keithlaw) is a writer for The Athletic and the author of Inside Game (William Morrow).
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Transcript
Empowerment Through Bread Making
00:00:00
Speaker
You showed me the basic recipe for making bread. Now I can make all the breads. That was kind of what it felt like.
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:00:11
Speaker
Hey, CNF-ers and non-fictionists alike. It's CNF, the creative non-fiction podcast where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories, who they are, how they came to be, who they are, and what they're working on. And I'm your host, Brendan Amara. Hey, welcome. Hey, how's the dishwashing going?
00:00:34
Speaker
Are you scrubbing that casserole dish right now? How about the dog? Is the dog pulling on your walks? I know what that's about, man. Trying to train that out of Mr. Hank over here. Producer Hank. Hey.
CNF Pod Productions' First Audio Magazine
00:00:47
Speaker
before we get really rockin' and rollin' here. You've got one week, man, to submit your work to the first ever audio magazine by CNF Pod Productions. The theme, of course, is social distancing, essays on isolation, 2,000 words max, a 15 minute read, pro tip.
00:01:08
Speaker
This is audio. Uh-huh. Right? News flash. So read for the ear. Short sentences, shorter words are far easier to pronounce. You don't get tripped up. And they're typically better on the ear anyway. So May 1st, 2020 is the deadline. Email your submission to the show Creative Nonfiction Podcast at gmail.com.
00:01:33
Speaker
I might extended but don't bet on it. It's got to be true. It's got to be good and I can't wait to hear what you're going to send me. I mean it's going to be a print submission which will eventually turn into audio if they're selected. Anyway I can't wait to hear from you.
Connecting with CNF on Social Media
00:01:56
Speaker
Okay, are you subscribed to the show wherever you can get your podcasts? Spotify, Apple, Google, Stitcher, it's all over man. Follow the show at CNFpod across the big three networks. Remember those big three is ABC, CBS, and NBC? Now the big three is Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. I'd love to hear what's clicking with you. Don't be shy. Don't do it. Don't be shy.
Interview with Keith Law: Baseball and Beyond
00:02:21
Speaker
In any case, I should mention that Keith Law is on the program today. This is a lot of fun. He's a baseball writer for the athletic, and he spent over 15, about 15 years, not over, about 15 years at ESPN. He's the author of the latest book, The Inside Game, Bad Calls, Strange Moves.
00:02:43
Speaker
and what baseball behavior teaches us about ourselves. Hint, we kind of suck at critical thinking. It's published by William Morrow, but we'll get to him in a moment. This week, it's one of those weird weeks, I got hit hard by the old jealousy bug, and I really frickin' hate it when that happens. In a nutshell, it went like this, you know what?
00:03:09
Speaker
don't even want to say you know i'm just not even gonna give it give it air in any case i i got bit by it and it just got me thinking like where where do you put where do you put the jealousy you know if you're feeling it if you're feeling these toxic feelings what do you do with it how do you redirect it
00:03:32
Speaker
and that's what I'm thinking about. It's just like, I got these nasty feelings. It's like, all right, well, you can either stew on it or you can do something about it. So I guess it's just make something undeniably good, connect in an undeniable way, you know, something that's impossible, you know, not to share, you know, make a better connection, make a better show, you know, that's kind of,
00:03:59
Speaker
Kind of where I'm thinking about that, you know, and then I start thinking, I'm thinking out loud, I'm like, are these long-winded intros or are these any good or maybe they are. I'm just, I'm just thinking out loud, things that are on my mind. I have to think it serves you on some level. I have to believe that. Otherwise, I just dive right into the interview.
00:04:20
Speaker
Well speaking of that, Keith Law is wicked smart and his new book was a trip. This podcast of course is ostensibly a writing podcast so if you're a baseball nerd you're not going to get a whole lot of baseball junk on this episode.
00:04:37
Speaker
he did tell me why RBIs are misleading stat and why you should bet that your number your best hitter number two in the order things I didn't know and as some of you know I used to play a little ball myself so like I said if you're a baseball nerd not a whole lot of baseball junk on this episode
00:05:00
Speaker
There's a little, but we're not going to be digging into wins above replacement and all that shit. We talk a lot about the formative books Keith read and his reading habits, his writing, connecting with an audience and the underlying principles that make Inside Game such a gripping read with the backdrop of baseball, of course.
Board Games: Law's Personal Escape
00:05:23
Speaker
So it's all fun stuff and I hope you dig it. Here's episode 199.
00:05:30
Speaker
that the
00:05:49
Speaker
I loved board games as a kid, but of course the selection, at least the United States board game selection was pretty limited. They played all the ones everyone's heard of. Monopoly, Billy don't like it. Scrabble, that's like work. That's not actually a game. You know, enjoyed risk. I still love a choir and it gets a great game. That's one of the old school ones, but games weren't just that widely available, weren't as popular. I didn't, you know, to really have much of an outlet to play them and kind of lost it for a long time.
00:06:19
Speaker
until I'd say about the mid 2000s or so, working pretty close to the time my daughter was born. Between a trip I had taken to Europe and found an actual game store in Vienna and saw it's wait, what are all these games? Now Granite and Rose were in German. My German's not great, but sort of the existence of these games was kind of an eye opener and was starting to hear a bit more online about the game.
00:06:45
Speaker
then known as the Settlers of Catan. Now it's
Law's Reading Habits and Influences
00:06:48
Speaker
usually just sold as Catan. And got that and was like, oh, this is amazing. Wait, there are more games out there like this? And did the thing I often do when I find a new interest or hobby, which is just go completely all in to a ridiculous degree on it. And was sort of acquiring all the games.
00:07:04
Speaker
asking for recommendations and started writing about them on my personal blog and then people would come back and say either say they appreciated the reviews or that they bought a game I'd recommend and really liked it and asked me to review more or they would come back with other recommendations. Well have you played this? Have you played that? That still happens by the way. My game collection's over 200 now and I'm still getting frequent recommendations or questions from readers often involving games I haven't tried yet and so it became
00:07:32
Speaker
more of a thing for me to also connect with readers on, in addition to the fact that I just really love playing them. Now my daughter is 13. She plays lots of the games with me. My partner's older daughter is 7 and old enough to play any game that really doesn't have very heavy strategy or a ton of text and loves games.
00:07:52
Speaker
The first time she saw my game collection, she thought she'd died and gone to heaven. So that's really become a fun thing that's across all parts of my life. I do freelance writing on it for multiple sites now in addition to my own blog, but it's not the job. It's not baseball where the hobby became the job and then there's no longer a hobby. Board gaming is still a hobby. It's still something I can do for fun because I'm not relying on it, say, to put food on the table. I'm not depending on it the way that I do depend on baseball and baseball writing to provide my livelihood.
00:08:22
Speaker
I love that going completely all in nature. You can apply that to any number of things. Since we were talking about David Grant earlier and lots of interviews that I read or listened to with respect to that book, what cracked the code for him on that book structurally was Faulkner's Absalom Absalom, which is a book you highly rate on your top 102 novels.
00:08:48
Speaker
which we can get to in a little bit too. But to that point, it's like, okay, Grant says Absalom, Absalom. So then you might go read that book, and then you start reading maybe Faulkner's peers, and then you start seeing the relationships among generational peers, and then you go back to see who inspired them. So it's kind of, it's great that you can probably dig into like the family tree of an author.
00:09:11
Speaker
I don't know is that something you do too when you like you know you pick up a certain writer and you're like alright I want to see who inspired this guy and then so forth and so on. Now it's less so for me that more that if I see a writer I like I will read many many of their works books or novels or short stories I just actually this winter.
00:09:31
Speaker
finished, so to speak, the published works of both Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, two of my favorite writers of the 20th century, and just had a little bit left, like one or two novels left for each. Waugh's short stories were all published in a single volume that I got for like three dollars for the Kindle that included a few of his shorter novels. The original short story that eventually became the ending of A Handful of Dust.
00:09:56
Speaker
and then just some other short stories. And just because I just enjoy his writing so much, I get like that. When I find an author whose prose I really enjoy especially, I just want to read all the things. And so that often dictates what I read. And then I do browse in the bookstores a lot and I will often just take a book that looks appealing. And then, but the other thing is, when I find, I've tried to stop doing this a little bit because
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00:10:21
Speaker
it becomes sort of an obligation for me, but when I find
00:10:25
Speaker
Time Magazine at one point did its top 100 novels from the time when Time Magazine itself started publishing until whatever year they did the list. It was like, you know what? I'm gonna read all these books. And I read them all. I didn't like them all. There were a few on there I'd probably look at. You know, Gravity's Rainbow is, I don't know, what, 15 hours? I'll just never get back. But I read them. And along the way, discovered some authors I didn't know I liked. I read Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amos is one of my favorite comic novels.
00:10:54
Speaker
I hadn't heard of it before. I really wasn't familiar with him. I knew of him as a writer about cocktails, not a writer about not a novelist at all or a humorist. And it turns out he was quite brilliant at that. Lucky Jim is an amazing sort of classic comedy of manners and drinking, of course, that became one of my favorites. And I found it because of that list. And I found any time I've tried to read and especially complete any of those lists, there are always some duds. I read all the Pulitzer winners. There's some awful books. There's some really racist books.
00:11:24
Speaker
early in the history of the Pulitzer Prize for, when it was still Pulitzer Prize for the novel, now Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But there's also some amazing books, The Keepers of the House, Shirley Ann Groff in the 60s, but just a brilliant, angry, like a good, angry novel that is extremely powerful. And it's pushed me, reading the Pulitzer winners is also pushing me now each winter. I try to find out what are the books that could win the Pulitzer this year. Maybe I'll check a few of them out. And I read a bunch this winter
00:11:53
Speaker
I really liked The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. I thought Feaster Eyes by Myler Goldberg was tremendous. Bollywood by Elizabeth McCracken, probably not going to win, but the best novel published in 2019 that I've read so far. Sort of things like that pushed me, reading those lists just sort of pushed me in different directions, read more contemporary literature, read the complete works of an author that I really like because they discovered something by him.
00:12:17
Speaker
How do you build this compulsive reading habit into your days? It takes time to read this kind of stuff. You also have a lot of writing you do. So how do you carve out that time so you're able to consume such great art on the page? There are multiple answers because in the regular life before the COVID-19 quarantine, I was traveling a lot. So I always have time. When you travel,
00:12:43
Speaker
for work, there's always time to read. As long as you're willing, you have to make the time to read. You make the commitment, but time on planes, time waiting. There's just so much waiting involved in traveling at this point that I would have at least an hour a day, maybe broken up into smaller chunks, but I could read for an hour each day quite easily and often quite a bit more, especially if I have long flights.
00:13:05
Speaker
I could find myself easily knocking out 100 or more pages a day, just among other things. It's the time between the things you're actually doing. Turns out you have a lot of lost moments. What do most of us do now? Pull out our phones. Well, I carry a book or I carry my Kindle and I do that instead and resist the impulse to go look at my phone. I have not even logged in on Twitter on my phone anymore to just stop that entirely because it became such a time waster.
00:13:35
Speaker
that in because, frankly, it was just too much needed to take a step back from it. So in the previous hours, that was how I did it. I found so much time to read. Now, in this period, it's a little harder because obviously we're all home constantly and work hours and homeschooling hours are all kind of amorphous.
00:13:57
Speaker
And in some ways it's good because we're playing more games as a family or watching more shows and movies together. The flip side is I'm having to try to carve out some time during the day and say I'm going to go spend 20 minutes and just read because it's very meditative for me. Also, it's very calming. It is one of the activities I'm most able to completely focus my mind on for a period. It does limit me also, though. I'm not reading a gravity's rainbow type book where it's an effort. It's not so much enjoyable, but I'm reading for the sake of
00:14:27
Speaker
for the sake of reading that particular book as opposed to for the pleasure of reading. And so I've changed some of my choices now and stuck more to genres I know I will like, authors I know I'll like. I'm more willing to set a book aside too. If I start reading something to this is too slow, this is
00:14:44
Speaker
This is not enjoyable. No, I need stuff that's gonna keep me going mentally and really suck me and get lost in that world where 20 minutes goes by like it's nothing. And I feel reenergized to go back to whatever other thing I'm really supposed to be doing.
00:14:57
Speaker
Would you consider yourself a very active reader in terms of you know writing you know scribbling in the margins or underlining passages and making sure that there are ways that you can go back and you know look at these things that inspired you and maybe it
Family Influence and Early Education
00:15:12
Speaker
kind of like not steal it but like oh I love how so-and-so like turn the phrase like maybe I can sort of use that in my work somehow. Never. Never. I actually think
00:15:24
Speaker
What you're describing is defacing a book, and it feels heretical. I don't dog-ear books. I use bookmarks. Actually, my bookmarks tend to be New York City metro cards. They make excellent bookmarks. They're indestructible, and they're super thin, so they don't actually work the book. I treat books that way, even if I know I've gotten a used book that will end up in the trash because it's falling apart and I'm going to be its last reader. I don't care. I don't write on pages of books.
00:15:52
Speaker
books I read for pleasure. Now if it's a textbook or something like that, obviously it's different. That would always be a different process for me. And in terms of borrowing, in terms of phrase, that's never been me. I think my writing style probably reflects all the things that I've read. I know I owe various debts to other writers, but it is a subconscious process. It's almost acquisition via osmosis. And I'm sure that my writing style reflects the authors I've read most.
00:16:21
Speaker
just as my humor style reflects the people in my life who kind of taught me to be funny, that stuff shows up in my ring, but it's never conscious. And I, I'm always amazed when I can read, especially older authors, authors from previous eras who would constantly be quoting Shakespeare or constantly be quoting the Bible. And, you know, I wonder, did they, did they just keep notes or was it that they read these books so many times that they could quote the third line of a particular Psalm?
00:16:49
Speaker
and just do it by heart. I don't know, but I can't do it that way. I would feel very inorganic to write it down and reuse something and then not, I don't read anything
00:17:00
Speaker
more than once where I would actively memorize passages. I loved your little micro blurb on 1984. The best paper I wrote as a student was a comparison of the way colors and light are described in 1984 in Brave New World, where Orwell saw yellow, Huxley saw gold, and so both
Career Path: Harvard to Baseball Analytics
00:17:22
Speaker
authors created vastly differing pictures of their dystopian futures.
00:17:26
Speaker
I love that so much. Where does that critical eye come from when you're reading these books? It's funny because that was the most praised thing I ever wrote as a grade school student. It's a great school. It's amazing. I just remembered not wanting to write the paper, which is very typical. I never wanted to do any work as a kid.
00:17:51
Speaker
and flipping through the two books and just noticing the adjectives, noticing that the way they talked about light and dark and different colors just sort of was there and then started thinking about it and said, Oh, maybe there's something here. I didn't think it was very good when I wrote it. I had no idea what I was doing. Like that, that I was writing something that the teachers would like that turned out to be one of those,
00:18:17
Speaker
papers, I found out from a friend in another class, oh, I saw your paper on my teacher's desk. This wasn't my actually to my teachers was their teacher, because the teachers have been passing it around. So my god, this paper is so great. Like, really? I just kind of threw something together because I was lazy and didn't want to write very much. And, you know, just pick two books I liked, because I hated reading all the stuff we were supposed to read in high school, right? I'm freaking 14 year old boy, I want to read Jane Austen. I like Jane Austen today. I like
00:18:44
Speaker
I went back and read tests of the Derbervilles of 33 and thought it was amazing. Well, when I was 17, I was like, it sucks. I don't want to read this and watch it in a damn movie. And they did. And I've got a good grade, actually. But I didn't read the book for 15 more years. So in that case, like 1984, Brave New World, dystopian stuff, yeah, all that. Sci-fi, love that stuff when I was a kid. So I wrote what I thought was kind of a throwaway paper on that, not realizing I'd done something that my teachers would like. I just wanted to finish the assignment and go back and play some video games. And not a Hemingway fan, are you?
00:19:14
Speaker
Never. Oh, I have tried many, many times. If it's Hemingway, to me, it's like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. They're the three lights of that era, generally contemporaries. And to me, Hemingway is a clear third. Fitzgerald is the great, brilliant prose stylist, and probably the best for story. Faulkner's a bit of an acquired taste, and I don't love all of his work. But when he's on, he's a superstar.
00:19:38
Speaker
Yeah, I read Gatsby every year and I did love Tender as the Night as well, which is number two on your power list and stuff. One more thing. The Master and Margarita is your number one book. What about that resonates with you so much? It's the Imagination. It is just such an incredibly clever, creative book and also quite subversive. If you read about the history, it is a somewhat thinly veiled criticism of the Soviet era.
00:20:07
Speaker
written by a state playwright. The book was banned in the Soviet Union for 30 years or so after its initial publication had to be smuggled out of the country. Yet at no point is it overt. It is a satire and it is extremely cutting, but it is also mystical. An early example of magical realism before that term even existed.
00:20:34
Speaker
blew me away when I first read it in college and went back and reread it about 20 years later, so I almost never reread books. And I was very pleased to see how well it held up, that it actually was still that wonderful and that immersive, just the entire scene of the ballroom, of the grand ball that Dr. Wolland holds in an apartment is still one of the greatest passages I have ever read in the history of literature.
00:21:01
Speaker
And as a kid growing up on Long Island, were you always a bookish kid and always into stories in particular, were you into writing as a kid growing up? Yes, I was always a reader. My parents learned early on they could put a book in front of me and I would be occupied for maybe a few hours. There were these Moby books that were abridged versions for kids of classic novels and I
00:21:30
Speaker
probably read 40 or 50 of them and remembered quite a bit of the stories too for a very long time. Now I've gone back and read the full unabridged versions of most of those books, probably not all. And it still amazes me how much of a plot I can remember, how many specific details I could remember of something
Cognitive Biases in Baseball Decision-Making
00:21:51
Speaker
I'd read 30 or 40 years previously. It was probably six, seven, eight when I was reading those books. I remember we used to go to the Toys R Us
00:21:57
Speaker
that was on Route 347 for folks who were from Suffolk County. They probably remember where that was. There was a service merchandise in the same strip mall right outside the Smith Haven Mall. I can still picture it.
00:22:10
Speaker
That was like a reward for me. If I'd done something good or whatever, behaved well, that I would get another one of those books. And I mean, I think my parents had a pretty good, right? I wasn't, obviously I wanted some toys. Of course, I needed the Star Wars Death Star play set. You know, like it was the last toy on earth, but also like they could just buy me books and I was incredibly happy with it. I would devour them and sit quietly and read basically anything they put in front of me. Nice. What did your folks do for work? My father was an electrical engineer.
00:22:41
Speaker
I worked in the aerospace defense industries for his entire career. My mother had multiple jobs before she had kids. She also worked for an aerospace company. Took time off to raise me and my sister. Of course, it was an era also where more more
00:22:59
Speaker
she had fewer two-income households. But then once we were both kind of well off in school, she went back to work and eventually settled in as a mortgage counselor for a nonprofit for the last 15, 20 years of her career and really enjoyed it. She actually would say she found that the most rewarding of all the different jobs or careers she had. She really liked that ability to help people. And of course she acquired quite a bit of knowledge that turned out to be useful for myself and my sister as we've gone through multiple houses, multiple
00:23:28
Speaker
mortgages and refinancing, just understanding what that market is, why you should never pay points, what PMI actually is. So a lot of things that people don't, we're not taught that stuff in school, but personal finance class should include all of these things. And yet we're not, you're just basically expected to acquire this knowledge from parents or friends. And I was fortunate to have my mother have all that knowledge really just at the point when I was starting to enter the real estate market myself as a purchaser.
00:23:56
Speaker
So as you're progressing through high school, and of course you're always comfortable with your nose in a book, and as I'm sure you start to do a bit of writing as one does in high school mostly, did you have a particular teacher or a mentor who saw something in you and gave you that little extra juice that said, yeah, Keith, you should keep doing this. This is something you have a knack for.
00:24:22
Speaker
Not really. Nobody ever encouraged me to be a writer as a career. I was probably encouraged more often to go into the sciences, by science and math teachers, and even by teachers in the humanities. I did have teachers who were, like I was generally praised as a kid for my writing. My papers would be passed around via other teachers who liked what I'd done, or just have a look at what this particular student did. I had one teacher, my ninth grade English teacher, Linda Sonik Solvi,
00:24:53
Speaker
was her name. I've been in touch with her since I became a writer too, just to thank her because she was the first teacher to really, and probably still the only actual teacher I had, even including the writing class I was required to take in college, which is a complete waste of time.
00:25:10
Speaker
approach to teaching writing was the most methodical. The idea that you would think of a written paper with a specific structure and just the idea of having a thesis statement up top and then your thesis statement even leading each paragraph and that has to be backed up by multiple additional statements that provide evidence. That really spoke to me as somebody who's kind of more analytically minded just that's the way I think and I'm always
00:25:34
Speaker
looking for evidence or asking for evidence. And when I make arguments myself, I want to be able to back them with evidence. And she really boiled it down in a way that I'm sure my writing at that time came across as excessively structured, but it grew out of that. It was first, the idea you start with this, what you're trying to make an argument, you're trying to convince the reader of your paper of something, state it up front, back it up with three points. You had a three by three structure because we were writing one page, two page essays at that point.
00:26:04
Speaker
You have a thesis statement in your intro paragraph, you have three paragraphs that provide supporting our evidence, and in each of those three paragraphs, you should have at least three additional points that maybe support the thesis of the individual paragraph, and then a concluding paragraph that gets you out. Of course, I don't write like that anymore, but at the time, it was, oh, you just gave me the template, I can write all the things now. Once you showed me how to do this, you showed me the basic recipe for making bread, now I can make all the breads. That was kind of what it felt like, and of course, there was experimentation and things that didn't work,
00:26:33
Speaker
papers over the years that probably weren't as well written or well structured as they could have been. But eventually I got there to the point where I think my writing today even still reflects the lessons of that class. And so you went to Harvard, correct? That is correct. Yeah. So what was the draw as you go through the process of applying to schools? What are you thinking you want to apply your unique skill set to as you progress through undergrad?
00:26:59
Speaker
I had no real idea. I kept changing what I thought I wanted to do. One boy thought I might want to be a lawyer or to go into the political world and eventually settled on going to the business world and did do that for a few years after college, went to business school at Carnegie Mellon, tried that, never really clicked with me. It was just not a good skill set. Sorry, not a fit for my skill set or for my personality, I think.
00:27:25
Speaker
undergrad though, one of the things, I mean, let's be honest, the main reason I went to the college I went to is because it's the college. It's that college, right? It's the name. Everyone knows that name. And it was seen as prestigious. And it was, well, of course, you're the, you're, you know, you're going to go to that college. It seemed like a badge of honor. It was an achievement simply to get into that school. And it seemed like it would be an achievement to have gone to that school. And by the way, that's true. It's a bit absurd, but people look at you differently when they find out you went to that school, which is also why I don't always tell people,
00:27:54
Speaker
That's where I went to college. I have to pick and choose based on the audience like a form of code switching. Sometimes I'm fine telling people that that's where I went to school and sometimes I just say I went to school up in Boston because it's not worth it. It's not worth that reaction. It's not worth maybe the stereotypes that might go along with that or the way people look at you differently when they find out you went to a college of that particular caliber or stripe.
00:28:18
Speaker
But also, I will say, and I remember this being particularly true for Harvard and that other school down in New Haven. I can't remember the name of it. It's not very important. But their course catalogs at the time, which were printed, because I'm old, were two inches thick and just had all the classes. It's like, what do you want to learn when we teach it? And seeing that at those schools and knowing, of course, at those schools, you're going to be taught by some pretty impressive people. They said, yeah, I want that.
00:28:46
Speaker
Then I went to the college, went to college and probably didn't take enough advantage of it. But that's on me. Right. They offered it. And I saw that. I recognize that as somebody who's kind of a curious person going to a place that offers a billion different classes and all these majors and subjects and things you've never heard of before. That's pretty awesome. If I'd been a little older, a little more mature, a little less anxious, probably would have made better use of it.
00:29:10
Speaker
And I would also say that the curriculum at the time at Harvard or the requirements were such that, yeah, we offer all these classes, but you're not going to get to take a whole lot of them outside of your major and the core requirements. It's my what kind of my biggest criticism of the school of the academic experience I had at the school was that there were so many requirements. I didn't get to experiment enough and might have found other areas of study that I enjoyed. I might have majored in something completely different if I'd had more time to just kind of mess around, take classes that were interesting.
00:29:40
Speaker
And so how does baseball sink its teeth into you? And then how do you start to then take your various skill sets and sort of apply it onto that canvas, if you will?
Baseball Evolution: Analytics and Innovations
00:29:53
Speaker
It was a series of accidents more than anything else. I was avidly playing fantasy baseball with some friends from high school. I ran the league. I wrote the code to actually compile the stats and email everything out.
00:30:05
Speaker
uh, was not very good at it. So of course, uh, actually like the, I was, I was good as a commissioner, I think, of course, but I was not very good at actually playing the fantasy baseball part. And so I decided, I decided to go out onto the internet. This is pre web mostly and ended up on Usenet and found discussion groups dedicated both to baseball and both, and specifically fantasy baseball and realized I was thinking about a lot of things the wrong way. And
00:30:31
Speaker
stats that I thought were predictive had really no predictive value and got involved in some discussion groups that one just educated me a lot. I didn't know a lot going in. I really actually probably knew very little going in. I was not exposed to say Bill James writing when I was a kid which is true of a lot of people my age did see his baseball abstracts and started to learn sooner. I kind of
00:30:54
Speaker
learned some of this stuff and then went backwards and read all the stuff I had missed to get more, make sure I just had the proper foundation for learning about sabermetrics and just analytical thinking and sports. And through there got involved with a group of people who were founding a new site and writing a book called baseball prospectus, which was a bit of a spiritual heir to the baseball abstracts and ended up doing some writing for them.
00:31:20
Speaker
discovered I liked the writing, probably was much better at the writing than I was at the baseball part at the time, but worked at it, got better, made a few contacts, sort of without even planning to necessarily, ended up with the job that I took with the Toronto Blue Jays and stayed there for four and a half years. And that set me up to be able to do this as a full-time job. That Blue Jays job was my first full-time baseball job. And the start of the career change, 2002,
00:31:47
Speaker
I switched to the media side for a lot of reasons, but one of the big ones is I just liked writing. Even when I was with the Blue Jays, I would be writing things constantly for just for coworkers, writing things about players, compiling information that was buried in scouting reports in a way that might be easier for us to, for everyone to see. Rather than having to go through scouting reports, they'd maybe have a single resource they could look at. It was a small, tiny bit of value that I added, but I particularly enjoyed it. I liked writing and I missed it.
00:32:14
Speaker
And so when I got the chance to, when I realized I did not want to stay with the Blue Jays any longer and was speaking to Dave Schoenfeld at ESPN, he mentioned they were looking for somebody to fill the job that would ultimately become mine. And I was thrilled. I was thrilled at the opportunity to go out and maybe make writing. My full-time job was kind of amazing to me because I'd never actively considered being a writer as a full-time profession. I thought if I did any writing in my life, it would always be as a freelancer, just some kind of side hustle. But instead it's been,
00:32:44
Speaker
the full-time job for now 14 years. So what was the piece or pieces that JP Riccardi saw that impressed him so much that it was like, all right, well, this is the fact of resume. I got to pluck this guy and try to pick his brain and get him into my front office. No, it wasn't like that. I know he had read some of my stuff, but it was more that we had many people in common, many people we knew in common.
00:33:13
Speaker
who knew me, who'd spoken to me, who were willing to recommend me. And then I know he looked at a few of things that I read. There was nothing that specific. And it's not like Mike Fast ended up working for the Astros. He's obviously now with Atlanta. I think a large part of why Mike got that job was specifically the work he did on pitch framing.
00:33:31
Speaker
For me, it was nothing like that. It was just more he was looking for somebody who was kind of like-minded and who had some of the technical skills he needed. He was going to a Blue Jays front office that had no analytics department beforehand. They had a lot of great people there, many of whom still work for the organization, but he
Cultural References in Writing
00:33:46
Speaker
needed somebody who had a bit of a different skill set and knew through all of our mutual contacts I could potentially fill that spot for him. And it was good. It was an education for me too. I learned a ton while I was there.
00:33:58
Speaker
It was not the job for me. It was really not the career path for me. I don't really think I would say I've had opportunities to go back to work for front offices and I've always turned them down. I don't think that's really the right environment for me. I'm happier on the writing side, I think, than I would ever be on the front office side. I guess you never know for sure. I've only worked for one team. But the sense I've gotten in all the years since is that there is a freedom to writing that I would miss terribly, the actual act of writing I would really miss terribly.
00:34:27
Speaker
And to some extent, the communication with readers, the people who actually value my work and want to hear from me, those are the people I love talking to. And the more ways I can have to communicate with them, the better. Unfortunately, our social media environment now doesn't always make that easy. But I've tried to make myself available, especially through avenues outside of Twitter.
00:34:50
Speaker
where we can have more constructive and amicable conversations, even when we disagree over something. I'm happy to talk to people who disagree. Twitter is not really the best format for that, but whether it's through Facebook, through my personal site, through chats, or as you were saying earlier, those live events where I get to meet readers and take people's questions and have real conversations. If I had to go back to the team side for whatever reason, I would miss that terribly.
00:35:16
Speaker
It seems like these days, people are more dug in on what they believe in more than ever and are not easily swayed, even in the face of convincing data, which of course is such a big principle behind your book.
00:35:33
Speaker
Have you always been someone who could be really really clinical in that sense be like I had this one Stance but jeez the numbers are telling me otherwise. It's time for me to change the way I view things Is that something you've always been kind of fluid and open to? Yes, and no, I think I have a bit of a natural reluctance to first of all I'm a bit of a sort of skeptical person to begin with right I want things to be proved to me we let everyone loves to make claims and
00:36:01
Speaker
Lots of bold assertions out there that are really light on evidence. And when there's money at stake or there's lives at stake that's kind of more relevant to our current moment, we need evidence. We should demand evidence. That said, I think like just about everybody, particularly everybody when we're talking about our own spheres of knowledge or experience, I can get a little caught up in, well, this is the thing I already know to be true.
00:36:28
Speaker
So, you know, should the bar be higher for you to show me that it's not true? Well, no, no, it shouldn't. But don't we all resist new ideas to some extent like that? There were some pieces going around this week on multiple sites talking about public defensive metrics and for outfielders in particular. And the conclusion, unsurprisingly, is that Major League Baseball's own outs above average is the best of the publicly available measures.
00:36:56
Speaker
And it said that some of the other measures, many of which I have looked at and relied on for years, arguing that things like UZR, for example, ultimate zone reading is directionally correct rather than precise, which I think many people may disagree with, but I thought that was a good compromise between, hey, this is the best publicly available metric we have, which was true for a long time, versus I know there's data that teams have that we don't that would make
00:37:23
Speaker
their defensive metrics a heck of a lot better. You know, when I saw those articles go by, there was a moment where I said, well, wait a minute, you're saying the stats I've used, even just for directional purposes, aren't that good? Aren't that accurate? That can't be true. But I mean, of course, it's true. They provided evidence, the multiple articles I saw across multiple sites, provided actual evidence to show no outs above average is clearly superior. It is not questionable. And it's based on better data. So it's unsurprising, too. But I caught myself
00:37:53
Speaker
doing that, you're falling into that bit of a bias towards what I already thought to be true, rather than saying, nope, got to enter this in an open mind, got to make sure I, you know, if the knowledge in the industry is changing, I have to keep up with it. And obviously I got there, I'm able to talk to you about this, but I also caught myself doing that thing.
00:38:13
Speaker
And I don't ever want to become that writer. You know, hopefully about 20 years left as a professional writer. I don't want to be that guy. And don't ever want to turn into one of these grumpy dinosaurs. I see ranting about how players used to be better. And these new fangled stats are all wrong. And I don't know what these, you know, these kids in suits are talking about kids and khakis, really. I don't want to be that guy. If that happens, I need to go find something else to do. And it is a process of catching myself doing that falling into some of these
00:38:42
Speaker
mental traps so that i don't get set my ways and in this book it's uh... so many of the sort of topics in it are sort of uh... economics terms economics driven and thankfully like baseball's the backdrop to really make it um... more digestible especially for someone like me who does it just like okay that the fact that you're able to tease out tease all the stuff out so expertly by using baseball like made things like
00:39:11
Speaker
base rate neglect, recency bias, gambler's fallacy, survivor bias, moral hazards. It made it all much more easy to digest. So how were you able to take those terms, which in and of themselves are kind of esoteric, and make it digestible for someone like me on the other end reading this book? The fit between examples and bias had to be really strong in my mind. So for each chapter, I try to give two
00:39:41
Speaker
specific and distinct examples that illuminate the cognitive bias or illusion that I'm talking about. And again, I had to make sure it was never forced. Most of these were, you know, I had many, I've read lots of books about these, about the cognitive biases and illusions, and just generally from behavioral economics. So I kind of knew where I was coming from in the first place. And I knew which ones I absolutely wanted to make sure I covered in the book.
00:40:07
Speaker
I think there were others I ended up leaving on the cottage room floor just because I couldn't find baseball examples that I felt really strongly about. But these were the ones where I didn't, I generally didn't have a lot of trouble coming up with good examples. I will tell you there were sort of random times while I was in the process of writing the book where I would be, I still remember one pulling out of my neighborhood onto the sort of main road nearby and just got hit with one. It just, boom, there it was, the bias and the particular example.
00:40:36
Speaker
Oh, wait a minute. I know exactly what I want to talk about. And of course, then I was heading away from the house, which was like the worst thing possible. I'm like, what do I write this down? I need to go like write 2000 words. Let's stop stop the car. There's not an option at that moment. But that mean that if you think the book works, and it sounds like you are really appreciate that. Yeah, I would say that the credit really goes to, you know, it's
00:40:58
Speaker
It's that the fit was there, right? It's that if you want to give me credit, it's just that I made the connection, right? I didn't make the fit. It's that, hey, there's lots of people. I'm standing on the shoulders of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and Richard Thaler and many, many others who wrote about these biases. I'm just making these connections, but I think they feel really strong because they're probably right. We can't get into Grady Little's brain from that moment in 2003 when he decided to leave Pedro Martinez in that ALCS game. But we have a pretty good idea.
00:41:27
Speaker
of what the thought process was, particularly from some quotes he and Pedro gave afterwards, but also because we kind of know, we see it, the writers who've come before me who identified things like status quo bias or moral hazard, moral hazard goes back centuries, they've done such a good job of defining it, explaining what that looks like in the real world, that it is much easier for folks like me to say, that's it. I know that that's a real world example of this theoretical construct. And therefore I can use the example
00:41:56
Speaker
to explain that concept, that particular cognitive bias, to readers in a way that I hope is accessible to everyone, even if you haven't taken an economics class since high school.
00:42:07
Speaker
And I think we should talk about sunk costs too. It's such a universal principle that applies to so many different genres in life. You've been a writer for 20 years and it just doesn't feel right, but you keep writing or you keep pursuing this career because you sunk 20 years of your life into it.
00:42:27
Speaker
There are countless examples of it that that and you cite some that are brilliant I wonder if maybe you can expand on that and how the sunk cost fallacy is It's it's really debilitating that really to hang your behavior on it It was actually one of the first pieces I ever wrote for ESPN. Maybe the third piece I wrote for them in 2006 was an unplanned piece but at that point the Diamondbacks released Russell Ortiz who they had signed to an enormous and
00:42:55
Speaker
absolutely bonkers contract based on bad data. They really looked at the wrong stats to determine what kind of picture he was, how valuable he would be, and gave him a huge contract that was not justified by previous performance, not by the actual underlying performance. By a year and a half into it, he was unusable at that point. And I was in part praising them for cutting him, but also sort of going after this idea that they were eating the money on his contract.
00:43:24
Speaker
No, that totally misunderstands and misstates the situation. The cost is sunk. In baseball, all contracts are guaranteed. So I think Ortiz had had a four-year deal, and all of the money, for all four years, was already committed. They were going to have to pay it to him no matter what, whether he was on the roster or not on the roster, whether he was playing or not playing. It didn't matter. That money was guaranteed. It was due to him.
00:43:50
Speaker
that money should not be a variable at all in determining whether you use him or whether you even keep him. I mentioned that example. I mentioned the example of Albert Pujols, who is still on a 10 year contract with, that he signed with the angels, that he hasn't been good for probably the last five years, maybe longer, certainly has long past the point where he should have been benched.
00:44:17
Speaker
Whether he should be released or not is probably a more sensitive subject simply because of who Albert Pujols is in the history of baseball. But just talking about, should he play or should he not play? Well, they have continued to play him through multiple general managers, through multiple field managers, and the results have not gotten better. In fact, there's probably at least one year in his career where Pujols' non-performance has cost them a shot at the playoffs. They continue to play him, I think, primarily because they have committed so much to him.
00:44:47
Speaker
Financially and I think also just sort of emotionally that gave him this 10-year deal. No one wants to admit that the 10-year deal was a terrible idea and that you're gonna pay him money to not play. But it turns out you're paying him money, your choice isn't paying him money to be good versus paying him money to be not good. He's just not good. So your choice is paying him money to actually play and potentially destroy value for you versus paying him to not play, whether he's on the bench or not on the roster at all. That's the actual choice that people are facing. The sunk cost fallacy comes up
00:45:17
Speaker
everywhere, absolutely everywhere. Are you in a house that you're having a hard time selling? Well, if you spend $10,000 to fix up your bathroom, maybe it makes the house a little bit more valuable, but are you going to get your $10,000 back in return? Are you just simply throwing good money after bad rather than taking a loss on the house and moving somewhere else potentially? The example that I got in business school, I still remember Professor Rajan giving us the example of you bought an expensive
00:45:46
Speaker
exercise machine for Christmas. And a month later, you're kind of sick of it, but you keep using it like, well, I spent all that money on it. I might as well use it. Well, no, the money's gone. You already spent the money. That shouldn't be a factor. The factor should be, do you want to exercise? Do you value what you're getting out of the exercise? Otherwise, you're just basically dealing with some kind of economic guilt, which I guess if that helps you exercise more power to you, but it's not rational. And none of these things are rational. I should sort of
00:46:11
Speaker
close this particular comment with this as well. But one of the main pieces in the book is that we all do this. Humans are not actually that rational. We all fall for these biases and these illusions because we're human. It does not matter how smart you are and how educated you are. It happens to everybody. This is about learning what these things look like so you can catch them in your own thinking and then change your process so that you work your way around them as opposed to some magical idea where you can train your brain to never have these biases in the first place. That's not possible because it happens to everybody.
00:46:42
Speaker
Yeah, you're right. And I had underlined this. It was like critical analysis is not in humans nature or not in not the nature of humans, basically. And it's just and that's exactly what you're getting at. But knowing that you can arm yourself with better information that can, in fact, sort of, I don't know, reset or kind of reconfigure your mind a bit so you can sort of hack into our preexisting condition to not be very good at analyzing things critically.
00:47:12
Speaker
Right. One of the big takeaways throughout the book is get more data. Now what that data look like, what might look like, what they're, where you're getting it. Those are all sort of different questions and how much data is actually required to make a better decision that there's more complexity to it than this sort of flip statement I'm making here. But ultimately the answer is you need to change your process to get more information.
00:47:36
Speaker
And if you're armed with more information, that will help you determine whether the choice you were going to make anyway was a good choice, an actually rational choice, or whether you were falling prey to something. And that's the idea behind that chapter near the end on good decisions, was I wanted to talk to some executives who'd made decisions that appeared a bit counterintuitive at the time that really worked out. And I pulled a bunch of executives to say, and even some baseball writers I know,
00:48:02
Speaker
say, hey, what are some decisions you can think of that you hated at the time that maybe other people made, but that worked out. I also particularly remember the Jose Bautista contract extension tomorrow because I criticized it at the time. These guys have one good year. You're all buying into this as if he's a superstar. Well, obviously the contract did work out at least in terms of him, his performance. Blue Jays went to the playoffs with him. So I talked to Alex Anthopoulos who I worked with in Toronto as well.
00:48:28
Speaker
So what did you do to make yourself comfortable that you weren't just falling for a one-year fluke? Well, Alex, and I knew he would, had the answer to that already. He had the process. Here are the different kinds of information we gathered, subjective and objective data that we could use to help us believe that we weren't making this mistake. And oh, by the way, we were still worried we were making the mistake even after all of that. We just chose to do it anyway because we felt like we had gathered enough information that our process was sound.
00:48:55
Speaker
he still knew there was the chance they were falling for a sort of recency bias. And even though he had done everything you could ask a GM to do to try to overcome it. Yeah, that's so critical because it was recognizing that there is the recency bias going on. It's like, OK, that's one side of the scale. We need to overload the other side to overcome
00:49:22
Speaker
this the the bias that we're we might fall victim to and that's exactly what happened I guess it was something conversation but he said had with Vernon Wells about just kind of swing mechanics and then just the the headspace in the mindset of in the confidence of the player seemed enough and obviously beneficial enough for for the organization and for but he's the
00:49:43
Speaker
Yes, those are all, to me, if you were thinking about signing a player, think about drafting a player. It's a little less true in a trade because you don't have the same access to the player. But there are multiple types of information that I, if I were GM, for example, so here are the five types of information we need to gather as much as we possibly can on the player before making this decision, whether it's signing into a five year extension or making our first round pick.
00:50:07
Speaker
you can do that. You may go out and say, okay, we can't gather the information we wanted, or the information is ambiguous, and it's not clear which direction it's pointing us in. Okay, fine. It's about your process. Was your process good, so that these cognitive biases in particular don't end up overwhelming an otherwise good process and leading you to a wrong decision. It is all about making
00:50:29
Speaker
the decision making process itself better so that the decisions as a whole will be better. Individual decisions may still not be better, but as a whole, your group of the next 10 decisions you make should be better if you improve your process.
00:50:43
Speaker
Love the the quote you cite from Jonathan Swift that says falsehood flies and truth comes limping after it so that when men come to be Undecieved it is too late and I just I love that and I love that you go on in that chapter also to just be mindful of checking data sources because of you know if people just stating falsehoods over and over again it becomes true in people's minds and
00:51:07
Speaker
I think we've, the last few years, we've been badgered with that very principle. So with respect to, say, your research and your approach, how do you vet out the information you're digging up in the research and be discerning that it's coming from credible sources? So when you put your name on it, it holds up. So certainly in writing the book, I had the advantage of spending a lot of time looking at peer-reviewed journals and making sure that these were
00:51:36
Speaker
articles, textbook chapters, et cetera, that had stood the test of time and been held up by peers and by subsequent writers, subsequent experts who said, yep, this is valid. Yes, we've confirmed this, or yes, we also agree that this is true, that this, the conclusion is supported by the data that comes before it. In my day-to-day writing, typically I'm just relying on primary data sources as much as I can.
00:52:00
Speaker
And when I am speaking to people in front offices, speaking to scouts, for example, it's also a primary data source. If I'm speaking to folks on the R&D side, I'm a little bit at their mercy, right? If they tell me that my bar are such and such a prospect of ours as a seven foot extension, the 3100 spin rate on his curve ball. I'm assuming he's telling me the truth, right? That is,
00:52:20
Speaker
ultimately a risk that I take because there isn't public access to the same kind of data. That is about building relationships, knowing I trust people, taking data from people I trust. If it turns out someone did mislead me, I'd make a note of that and maybe don't rely on that person going forward. There are people I have actually stopped talking to because they wouldn't stop lying to
00:52:41
Speaker
And you think of a player agent in particular it's you know what I'm just done with you not taking your calls and answering your text just not Because if all you're gonna do is lie to me if you're gonna lie to me with any frequency at all I can't believe the stuff you tell me that's actually true and I have no way to parse out one from the other So I'm just not gonna talk to you Yeah
00:52:59
Speaker
That brings up a point that when talking to people like yourself who are deeply enmeshed in a particular sphere, a particular beat, when you're in relationship building there, because there are some phone calls you take or you make just to check the pulse of something, not because you want to write about it, but maybe you want to write about something a year from now or six months from now.
00:53:27
Speaker
And then there are other calls where it's like, okay, yes, I do definitely want to write about this, that and the other. So how do you navigate both of those calls? One is just kind of like, I just want to make sure that I'm kind of being an upstanding person. This person might trust me a year from now versus those harder calls where you're like, I'm writing a column this week. The relationship building is sort of organic. It happens over time. I meet people, get to know people, get connected to people through trusted sources.
00:53:57
Speaker
And I just build those relationships just by being myself and being honest and making it clear to people too. You're talking to me, we're off the record. If I need something on the record, I will tell you explicitly. Otherwise everything is on background. I may use that information myself. I may repurpose it so that it appears to be coming from my voice rather than a scouts or an executives, but it will never appear under your name unless you tell me explicitly that you're comfortable being quoted as such.
00:54:23
Speaker
When I do need something specific on a player, for any kind of article though, I'm upfront immediately. I need a quote on this or can I ask you on the record about this and then make it fairly clear and confined and often even go back and say, are you comfortable with me quoting you on this? That's something I always need to remind myself to do too, is to say, hey, this thing that you said to me, this is on the record, right? You're okay with being quoted on this?
00:54:52
Speaker
I want to make sure it's two things. One is obviously my own relationship in that case is, is something I value greatly and don't want to potentially torch. I also don't want to burn anybody. I don't want to be the one who causes someone else to get an angry phone call from their boss. Hey, why did you tell Keith law so and so? No, that's not my job. I don't want that. I don't want to be responsible for anyone getting in that kind of trouble. I mean that kind of stress.
00:55:16
Speaker
I'm trying to do my job, and hopefully I can do my job in a way that doesn't hurt you from doing your job. You can help me without causing any anxiety or trouble for yourself. And to me, if I'm, as long as I'm able to do that, to sort of bridge those two things, then I'm doing well. I'm doing a job in a way that I can live with. I can be comfortable in fulfilling my responsibility to my employer, but also that I'm fulfilling my moral obligations to my sources, and many of them are just my friends.
00:55:42
Speaker
And I haven't read your first book, but it is an analytics-driven book from what I have, from what I gather. And this Inside Game is also analytics-driven, but with all these other principles that we've been teasing out. What was the challenge for you in writing Inside Game and not repeating yourself? So this one feels fresh and new and separate from the other one.
00:56:09
Speaker
I'm not covering any of the same material. If you read the first book at some point, you don't have to. But I'm saying if you do so. Okay, well, thank you. I appreciate that. But I just that had a very specific aim, which is, which came from readers asking for something, Hey, what do you have that I can read to help me understand all of these newer stats that you're quoting? Why I understand why RBI is a bad measure of a hitter. Okay, can you explain why a little bit more about maybe give me some more examples? And can you tell me what I should look at? Instead, people just want to know.
00:56:39
Speaker
Most people just want to know, what do I look at? I want an answer. Is this guy good or not good? Should I trade for this guy in my fantasy team or not? Do I like this player that my team just drafted? They just want simple answers and they'd like to be able to look for themselves and form their own opinions. And so in the first book, I tried to arm people and say, look, these stats, these old stats that have been around forever, not actually very good. These somewhat newer stats, better.
00:57:02
Speaker
Maybe you don't understand all of them intuitively. Let me try to walk you through some of them because they can be a bit more complicated to understand. But hopefully you come out of the second section of that book feeling like, OK, I know how some of these new stats work and I understand why it's better to look at them. And then the third section of the book, I have some different essays, but a lot of it is about applying what I had already talked about in the second section of the book.
00:57:24
Speaker
to some more pertinent questions, such as who deserves to go to the Hall of Fame, and then concluding with a look forward to where do we think this industry is going, where do we think some of these data streams are going in the near future. With this book, although I referred back to a couple of the same stories I might have mentioned in smart baseball, the inside game covers a completely different ground. There was really very little discussion of
00:57:49
Speaker
cognitive biases or economic inefficiencies in the first book that's all pretty new, I think, in the inside game.
00:57:57
Speaker
And to that point of maybe some things you tease out in smart baseball, I came up playing in an era where RBIs and putting your best hitter in the three hole was canon. So maybe you can just explain for my own edification why it's best to put your best hitter second and why RBIs are not as conclusive or a great metric to measure a player's performance.
00:58:26
Speaker
So RBIs are a huge problem because about half of what goes into an RBI is what the hitters ahead of you in the lineup are doing. And you have no control over that. If you're trying to evaluate the contributions of an individual player, you have to strip out all of the noise that comes from other players around him. So the number of runs you hit in over the course of a season is very much a function of whether anyone's on base for you. So the on base percentages of the two guys in front of you in the lineup
00:58:52
Speaker
make up about half of the sort of, if you're trying to predict your RBI total, about half of it comes from how often those guys are getting on base. The same would be true in the other directions. How many runs will you score over the course of a season? Well, how much you get on base is kind of within your control, but how much the guys behind you hit and hit for power is totally out of your control. And there are also managerial decisions in there too that can affect that, that would not necessarily be true if we're looking at very individual stats that are more signal and
00:59:21
Speaker
and less noise. As for why you bat your best hitter second and not third, that's one of a couple of concepts that does come up in both of the books, as does the myth of the hot hand. The basic idea between batting your best hitter second, though, is that you want your best hitter to come up as often as possible over the course of each game, over the course of a season. The second spot will come up
00:59:43
Speaker
12 to 20 more times over the course of the season than the third spot. Well, now the first spot lead off spot would come up even more often, but the lead off spot often comes up with the bases empty. The first step out of the game, obviously he always comes up with the bases empty because he gets behind the nine hitter. To some extent, the eight hitter, those guys typically aren't very good. And so they're not getting on base as much. So the lead off hitter is pretty likely to come up with the bases empty.
01:00:07
Speaker
The second spot is the perfect balance of getting him as many at bats as he possibly can, while also optimizing his lineup spot for the number of base runners he'll see on base for him as he comes up over the course of his season.
01:00:22
Speaker
I'm glad you brought up The Hot Hand, because I just read Ben Cohen's Hot Hand, and he was on the podcast a few weeks ago. It was a Malcolm Gladwellian look at The Hot Hand. It was kind of cool to see, like you cited Ben and also The Hot Hand fallacy in this book. Having just read Ben's book, it was kind of cool to see the two play off each other in that sense.
01:00:46
Speaker
He also writes a lot about the gambler's fallacy, which is something you touch upon here, which I thought was really kind of a great connective tissue between these two books. Yeah, the hot hand, it's interesting. Every time some academic person comes up with a store paper that they think proves the hot hand is real, media can't wait to rush and say, oh, hot hand fallacy disproven. But they never actually look.
01:01:11
Speaker
very deeply at the papers behind it. And there was there was one that was just kind of a misunderstanding of baseball sample sizes entirely and played pretty fast and loose with some of the data. The second one was just literally like a mathematics trick that I thought did not work at all. I ended up speaking to a couple of other experts in the field who said, including one of the authors of the original Hot Hand paper from the 1980s, were like, yeah, that's not that doesn't say what they think it says.
01:01:38
Speaker
Yet it got breathless media coverage again because I don't know why I guess because it's good coffee. I guess if you would talk about the hot hand theory or fallacy in print or now online it just must generate a lot of discussion. So people love to talk about it. But does it change the fact that at least in baseball it's just not true. If you are hot as a hitter I'm doing air quotes around the hot there too.
01:02:02
Speaker
you don't have any greater chance of getting hit in your next at-bat or your next five at-bats than you otherwise did. It's not a thing. Streakiness is a thing in that it's a function of random or partially random data distributions. You will, if you flip a coin a hundred times, you're going to get a few heads in a row at some point. The coin isn't hot. That's just random. And people looking for that, particularly in team sports,
01:02:28
Speaker
are probably looking for something that either isn't there at all or it's so small, we can't really measure it and it's not worth thinking about. Now, I can't speak to individual sports where you don't have the noise of other players actively trying to stop you. If golf had a new feature where somebody tried to tackle you as we were trying to swing the club, wanted it to be a much more interesting sport, and two, okay,
01:02:49
Speaker
Maybe that would mitigate some of this idea of a golfer being on or off, being hot or cold. I don't know. I haven't looked at data for that sport, so I can't profess to any particular knowledge. But it seems to me it would be more likely to occur in a sport where there are no confounding factors of opposing players. In baseball, though, people have been looking for the hot hand for a long time, and still, nobody's actually found it. And I've just got a couple more questions for you, Keith. Are you OK on time?
01:03:19
Speaker
Yep, absolutely. Are there any things about pre-analytic baseball that you miss? The stolen base. I wish we had more running in the game but I understand why we don't. Baseball could always choose to tweak its rules in a way that would make us see more stolen bases.
01:03:43
Speaker
They should tweak the rules so that we see fewer strikeouts. I really think raising the bottom of the strikes on another half inch or so would go a long way to just getting more balls hit into play. There's some risk with that too. We don't want necessarily 12 to 10 scores every night for our games. But I do think that a sport that sees more balls hit into play.
01:04:01
Speaker
more balls fielded and more runners actually running would be a more aesthetically pleasing version of baseball. But I just personally particularly miss stolen bases. I miss the days of I remember Ricky Henderson. Oh yeah. Breaking Lou Brock's record. I remember the excitement of I remember seeing that player stats and thinking it was cool when someone stole 80 or more bases because it was unusual but not
01:04:24
Speaker
never, right? That those are the cool things when somebody, especially if you're kind of a numbers guy, you like the outliers when the guy, when someone steals, uh, yeah, I don't even know what the record is for this century. I don't know. Has anybody stolen 70 bases in the 2000s? I don't think so. So somebody stole 75 bases this year. Well, next season, next full season we play, it's a, yeah, that's cool. That's absolutely cool. And I couldn't even, wouldn't even necessarily care. Well, you know, he got caught this many times. He cost his team value. Like obviously I would say that.
01:04:54
Speaker
But as just a pure fan, a guy who was stealing that often, if Byron Buxton were healthy for a full season, he could do that. He's fast enough. That would be awesome. As a fan, I would really enjoy that.
01:05:05
Speaker
Oh yeah and just as I grew up a Red Sox fan so I just the what the most iconic stolen base of the last I don't know 50 years maybe more is Dave Roberts and it's just like that and then of course Miller just you know hits a single or something up the middle and that scores him and changes the course of the thing I think it was Miller could have been someone else but it's just like it was such a bang-bang exciting play and it's just yeah we just don't see that anymore.
01:05:32
Speaker
Right. It wasn't a home run. It wasn't driven by a home run. Home runs are fine, but would I like a game with 10% fewer home runs and 20% more stolen bases? Yeah. Yeah, I would like that. I don't know that that's coming anytime soon without a rule change because it's not necessarily rational to play that way, which is from a fan's perspective. Yeah. I like, I like seeing balls in into play and I particularly like seeing the excitement of the stolen base, the excitement of runners running.
01:05:57
Speaker
And do you have any gut prediction of what maybe the next watershed moment in scouting or analytics might be? I think there's still a lot to be done and being done on the health and wellness fronts, which I would include conditioning under that. There are a lot of teams doing interesting things with players diets. There are a lot of teams doing things with mental health and I mean real like evidence based mental health stuff. You know, I also know there are a lot of teams doing dealing with chiropractors, which is
01:06:27
Speaker
probably just pseudoscience. They're doing that stuff instead. And teams are trying a lot of things. They're not all gonna work. They're not even necessarily all evidence-based. But I bring all those up because I think they're also somewhat less visible to those of us on the outside. Whereas a lot of the statistical revolution of the last 20 years was televised and the next revolution won't be. It's going to be much more behind the scenes. And it will leak out from team to team as personnel change jobs.
01:06:54
Speaker
But it's not going to be as visible as this one. There's not going to be a movie made about the shift to feed and house players and make sure that they're healthier, especially from ages 17 to 21.
01:07:06
Speaker
Nice. And I gotta say, I deeply appreciate the references in Inside Game to, you know, when you say Joey Bag of Donuts. Yeah. And Don't Taunt, Happy Fun Ball. Like, lost my shit when I saw you quoted that, because that SNL parody is just so... One of the all-time greats. God, it's so good.
01:07:24
Speaker
Well, Keith, thank you so much for your time and the wonderful and amazing work you do. You're a new writer at The Athletic now after spending a decade and a half at ESPN. So in any case, thank you so much for hopping on the show and talking shop, and thank you so much for the work. My pleasure. Stay safe. Yeah, you too, Keith. Take care.
01:07:48
Speaker
We did it. We made it CNF-ers. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure you're subscribing to the show. Of course, this crazy show is produced by me, Brendan O'Mara. I make the show for you. I hope it made something worth sharing. And if you really dig the show, leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Show notes are at BrendanO'Mara.com.
01:08:08
Speaker
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