This resignation letter from former Philadephia 76ers GM Sam Hinkie is full of gems. Here are a couple.
On contrarianism in a short-sighted league when you’re always under the microscope:
To develop truly contrarian views will require a never-ending thirst for better, more diverse inputs. What player do you think is most undervalued? Get him for your team. What basketball axiom is most likely to be untrue? Take it on and do the opposite. What is the biggest, least valuable time sink for the organization? Stop doing it. Otherwise, it’s a big game of pitty pat, and you’re stuck just hoping for good things to happen, rather than developing a strategy for how to make them happen.
On traditions, conventional wisdom, and the limits of advanced statistics in basketball:
Maybe someday the information teams have at their disposal won’t require scouring the globe watching talented players and teams. That day has not arrived, and my Marriott Rewards points prove it from all the Courtyards I sleep in from November to March. There is so much about projecting players that we still capture best by seeing it in person and sharing (and debating) those observations with our colleagues. What kind of teammate is he? How does he play under pressure? How broken is his shot? Can he fight over a screen? Does he respond to coaching? How hard will he work to improve? And maybe the key one: will he sacrifice—his minutes, his touches, his shots, his energy, his body—for the ultimate team game that rewards sacrifice? That information, as imperfect and subjective as it may be, comes to light most readily in gyms and by watching an absolute torrent of video.
The Guardian’s extensive profile and Q&A with Arsène Wenger, legendary Arsenal manager.
“Arsenal had a style of play that was criticised, but there was a style of play,” he says. “I can understand that people want only to win, but you need to have the desire to transform the team expression into art. When the supporter wakes up in the morning, he has to think: ‘Oh, maybe I’ll have a fantastic experience today!’ He wants to win the game but as well to see something beautiful.”
A good piece giving an inside look of what life is like for a journalist inside the bubble.
I’ve missed most of the playoffs this year during this strange time for sports. It’s been impressive that the NBA could pull this off and still put together a compelling end to the season when everyone assumed that it’d be an asterisk-ridden result with players and teams lost to COVID. It’s turned out to be incredibly well executed. The finals have nearly the same energy that I remember from recent seasons. As of writing, the Heat have pulled back to 2 games to 3 against the Lakers.
Status is clearly scarce, and in a gift culture like the free software community – or on Finance Twitter – the way you earn status is by putting in real effort, and then giving away the fruits of that effort.
Of course, the effort you put in has to actually be valuable, and recognized as such by your peer group. So the optimal thing for you to do, whether you’re an open source software developer or a Twitter armchair analyst, is to figure out your specialty zone that’s simultaneously useful, but unique – and then homestead it. Establish and cultivate it, like a garden or a plot of land, that you’re tending for the communal benefit of everyone. People come to associate that little plot of land with you specifically, and think of you whenever they go near it.
Amateurs think they are good at everything. Professionals understand their circles of competence.
Amateurs see feedback and coaching as someone criticizing them as a person. Professionals know they have weak spots and seek out thoughtful criticism.
Amateurs focus on being right. Professionals focus on getting the best outcome.
Amateurs make decisions in committees so there is no one person responsible if things go wrong. Professionals make decisions as individuals and accept responsibility.
You don’t have to be an avid cycling fan to be impressed with Tadej Pogačar’s incredible time trial on stage 20 of this year’s Tour de France. He bested the 2nd and 3rd place riders by a full minute, 1:21 better than 150 other riders. Absolutely unbelievable.
His countryman Primož Roglič (a heavy favorite for the overall weeks before the Tour) had nearly a minute on him in the yellow jersey, going into a long TT ending with a climbing finish on La Planche de Belles Filles.
I just wonder how much different the Tour results would look if this TT was stage 3 instead of 20.
The Tour is on its second rest day, 15 stages into a brutal 3 weeks of hills, mountains, and even challenging “easy days.”
I’ve followed the sport pretty closely over the past 6 years, but not too far into the business behind it. This article goes deep into the economics of the race. The organizer, ASO, doesn’t disclose financial numbers, so this was an interesting look at some estimates of the money generated by the race. Also some good insight into how team budgets and sponsorships work.
With this year’s Tour de France delayed (as of now, til late August), the guys from The Move have been going over some of the best stages from the US Postal years. It’s a cool format, sort of like a commentary track over the exciting parts of the climbs and pursuits.
I especially enjoy the commentary from Johan Bruyneel, who was the team director at the time. The insider commentary on strategy is neat — hard to appreciate as a TV viewer of cycling.
Combining baseball and maps? Sign me up. The MLB has a plan to “improve” the MiLB system costs, standards, compensation, and other things through shuttering 42 ball clubs around the country. In this piece for FanGraphs, the authors use some GIS tactics to analyze how this shakes out for baseball fans falling within those markets:
So how many Americans would see their ability to watch affiliated baseball in person disappear under MLB’s proposal? And how many would see their primary point of access shift from the relatively affordable games of the minor leagues to major league ones? To work out how the closure of these minor league teams will affect access to baseball, we went to the map. More specifically, we took the geographical center of each ZCTA (a close relative of ZIP Codes used by the Census Bureau). We calculated the distance as the crow flies from each ZCTA to each ballpark in America, both in 2019 and in MLB’s proposed new landscape.
Seems like a strange move for transit agencies to sell the naming rights to entire stations to private entities. Would it really raise revenues enough to make a dent in paying for operations or improving systems? Seems like the downsides outweigh the upsides here. I’m all for experimentation in improving public services, but this seems like a lazy method for raising a few million bucks.
I did learn a new handy phrase here:
There’s a phrase that urban geographers use for this private rebranding of public space: “toponymic commodification.”
Strasburg tipping his pitches almost ended the Nats’ run:
He remembered the game Strasburg pitched in Arizona on August 3. The Diamondbacks pounded Strasburg for nine runs in less than five innings. The D-Backs knew what was coming. The Nationals broke down the tape and discovered Strasburg was tipping his pitches by the way he reached into his glove to grip the baseball near his waist, just before he raised his hands to the set position.
An annotated version of Mike Migurski’s workshop on RapiD and Disaster Maps from the NetHope Summit. Facebook’s work on this stuff looks primed to change the way everyone is doing OpenStreetMap contribution.
I’ve never used TikTok, but it’s been a fascination tech story to follow its insane growth over the last 8-12 months. With the current geopolitical climate and the fact that it’s owned by Chinese owner ByteDance, it seemed like this CFIUS investigation was inevitable.
Some top-notch baseball geekery, with Jason Snell comparing the graphics overlays from Fox, MLB Network, and ESPN’s telecasts. I’ve thought about this, too, but have to give it to the ESPN one, with Fox right up there.
Scott Alexander’s review is an excellent in-depth look at this book on meditation. I’m still making my way through it, but it’s definitely a fantastic soup-to-nuts guide so far.
From an objective observer in the 16th century, what site would have been the best bet to predict the flowering of the Industrial Revolution, based on contemporaneous evidence?
In fact, England in 1550 was not even close to being Europe’s preeminent naval power. It was Hispania, not Britannia, who ruled the waves. Even on maps made in England and for the use of the English government, the ocean off the west coast of England and to the south of Ireland was labelled The Spanish Sea. The foreign maps agreed. The North Sea, too, was the Oceanus Germanicus, or German Sea. It gives an idea of who controlled what. And England of course came close to catastrophe in 1588, when the Spanish decided to launch an invasion – it was largely only stopped by the weather. Despite having always been on an island, English policymakers only seriously began to appreciate Britain’s geographical potential for both defence and commerce in the late sixteenth century.
It took until the mid-17th century for promise to start taking hold in England. By then it’s growth and expansion had begun overtaking its neighbors.
On a misty Saturday morning in Vienna, on a course specially chosen for speed, in an athletic spectacle of historic proportions, Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya ran 26.2 miles in a once-inconceivable time of 1 hour 59 minutes 40 seconds.
An architect’s manifesto on how teams can rethink the design of baseball stadiums:
Fans want to feel that the club has bought into them, and a bolder model of fan engagement could give them a real stake in the club’s success. One of the most promising recent trends in North American sports is the way soccer clubs are emulating their European counterparts by developing dedicated supporters’ groups. These independent organizations drive enthusiasm and energy in the ballpark, and make sure seats stay filled.
Instead of just acknowledging and tolerating the supporter group model, we’re going to encourage and codify it in the park’s architecture by giving over control of entire sections of the ballpark to fans. Rather than design the seating sections and concourse as a finished product, we’ll offer it up as a framework for fan-driven organizations to introduce their own visions.
Endurance cyclist Mark Beaumont is best known for his “around the world in 80 days” ride starting in Paris and crossing 3 continents in 78 days, putting him in the Guinness Book for the accomplishment.
A few years back he did this ride from Cairo to Cape Town across Africa — 41 days, 6,762 miles, 190K feet of climbing, 160 miles per day. To me it’s as stunning in itself as the around the world ride. Some of the shots in this video of him traversing the Sahara through Sudan and the mountains of Ethiopia are incredible.
Lance Armstrong’s been doing THEMOVE podcast on the Tour for 3 years now, the first being the 2017 Tour when I spent so much time watching both the Tour itself and the podcast (then known as STAGES). On the show they do a stage-by-stage breakdown each day, with segments on the best rider of the stage, recap the days major changes, analyze the sprint finishes and mountain attacks, and make predictions on future team tactics. It’s a fun show, but also gives insight from two guys who rode in the Tour many times (Lance and his former teammate and 17-time Tour rider George Hincapie) on how the team dynamics work and a lot of the off-the-road experiences go for a group of guys competing in such a brutal endurance event.
This year Lance’s former team director from the US Postal days, Johan Bruyneel, has been doing a separate set of episodes from a team manager’s perspective. It’s cool to hear the differences in point of view between rider and director and what they look for.
The Tour de France is on right now, reaching the first rest day after a wild first 10 stages of racing. Julian Alaphilippe (a Frenchman) is in the yellow jersey, who’s one of the great opportunists in the field, with a win at Milan-San Remo earlier this year.
The Tour is one of my favorite sporting events of the year. I’ve gotten familiar enough with the UCI Tour over the last 5 or 6 years that I enjoy all of the flavors of races — the big grand tours, the classics, and the world championship events.
But one of the main reasons it’s a special event for me is the sentimental nature of what’s gone on in my life in past years during the Tour: Elyse was born during the 2015 race, and I had my diagnosis and surgery during the 2017 event. One was a very positive experience, sitting home each day on leave holding the baby and watching the stages, and the second of course not so positive, but watching each day gave me something to hold my attention and follow to keep my mind occupied during that rough patch on the road to recovery.
In the past two years the Tour brings those times back to me. It is “just” a sporting event, but it’s a sentimental one, for me.
Yesterday’s stage 10 into Albi was suspected to be a relaxed flat day leading into the rest day, but it was anything but. Crosswinds, some complacent GC riders in the back of the peloton, and some well-timed attacks in the last 25km created a split in the field and a chaotic blitz for the line. The climb of La Planche des Belles Filles on stage 6 and De Gendt’s breakaway win on stage 8 were also incredible to watch. A great way to kickoff week 1 with a competitive race in the GC standings.
The mountain stages of the Tour de France are some of my favorite events in sports. This edition of Places features a tribute to this year’s 18th stage, and one of my favorite climbs of the Alps: the Col du Galibier, a 2,600m HC beast with an epic descent on the other side.
Galibier was last climbed in the 2017 Tour, during an awesome Stage 17 when Primož Roglič won the day on a route that included famous climbs on Col de la Croix de Fer, Col du Télégraphe, and the Galibier.
This year’s stage route includes the Galibier and another HC fixture in Col d’Izoard, also last seen in the 2017 edition when Warren Barguil had a memorable mountaintop finish there.
I’ve been a subscriber to Ben Falk’s excellent Cleaning the Glass blog for well over a year now. He’s a former front office analyst for the Sixers and Blazers that started this site with deep analyses on all aspects of basketball, with an eye for statistics and detail.
This is a great piece on what he’s doing with the site, moving from a purely subscription-based blog with a stats site alongside it to flipping that around: a stats and analytics portal with a splash of analysis writing. His work is excellent and worth checking out if you’re interested in deeply understanding the tactics of basketball. I’ve voraciously consumed everything Ben (and his occasional contributors) have written while being a subscriber.
One way I’ve felt this clearly: the pull between working on the stats site and writing. The stats site has been embraced by everyone from fans to NBA front offices to writers from some of the biggest media outlets to coaches to podcasters to agents. And yet there’s still so much more I can do with it. While writing consistently, though, my time is just too limited to keep building it out at the pace it deserves. But splitting my time doesn’t work well either: I can’t be both the best writer I can be and the best web developer I can be simultaneously.
After a lot of careful thought, then, I’ve decided to change things around here a bit. I’m no longer going to write articles for subscribers. Instead, I’m going to spend the majority of my time making Cleaning the Glass Stats the best site for advanced basketball stats on the web, making it as understandable and easy to use as possible.
I hope his next push into building something unique for basketball stats data works out well and will continue to follow all of his work.
Love to see the Rays getting some deserved attention in the mainstream sports media. They’ve put together a great, diverse lineup of consistent hitters that have performed well all season:
The Rays emphasize power now, but in a different way: Through Monday, their hitters had the highest exit velocity in the majors, at 90.1 miles per hour, and their pitchers — who specialize in curveballs and high fastballs — allowed the lowest, at 86.3. Hard-contact rates enticed them to trade for Pham from St. Louis last July, and to land Yandy Diaz in an off-season deal with Cleveland. Pham was hitting .248 for the Cardinals, but the Rays assured him he had simply been unlucky; he hit .343 the rest of the season.
And I get to post this on the back of their 11th inning win over the Yankees this afternoon.
Great quick read from Horace Dediu on Apple’s Services business. As he points out in the piece, Apple’s business model is continually oversimplified and/or misunderstood by many:
This disconnect between what people think Apple sells and what Apple builds is as perplexing as the cognitive disconnect between what companies sell and what customers buy.
Companies sell objects or activities that they can make or engage in but customers buy solutions to problems. It’s easy to be fooled that these are interchangeable.
Conversely Apple offers solutions to problems that are viewed, classified, weighed and measured as objects or activities by external observers. Again, it’s easy to be fooled that these are the same.
This post goes into how the author put together a visualization of tornado trend data for Axios. Observable notebooks are so great. The interactivity lets you not only see the code and data to create it all, but can be forked and edited right there.
The conference finals are set — Golden State and Portland in the west, Milwaukee and Toronto in the east. A great couple of matchups both likely to go deep. At halftime right now in Oakland, Portland’s keeping it close.
The east series will be a fun one, with Giannis and Kawhi going at it, each with spectacular playoffs going so far.
In other basketball news, earlier this evening New Orleans came away with the number 1 overall draft pick. With the Anthony Davis drama of a few months ago, and rumors of some sort of trade deal in the summer possibly happening, it’s almost like this was staged to really ramp up that drama. With AD, Jrue Holiday, and (probably) Zion Williamson together, it’d be a hard decision not to make a run for it next season with that setup and see what happens.
I didn’t get to watch the match live yesterday, but Liverpool’s 4-0 trouncing of Barcelona at Anfield in the second leg of the Champions League semi might be the biggest (most improbable) win I’ve seen. Goals from Origi at 7’ and 79’, Wijnaldum at 54’ and 56’, and a nerve-rattling final 10 minutes put the Reds over the top:
Coincidentally I ran across this piece from Ryan O’Hanlon earlier in the day that broke down Liverpool’s odds of a win thusly:
Liverpool, almost definitely, will not be playing in the Champions League final. Sure, they might beat Barcelona today. In fact, they probably will. FiveThirtyEight gives them a 49-percent chance of winning, while the implied betting odds on a win for the Reds are 41 percent. Liverpool are one of the best teams in the world, they’re playing at home, and so they’re favorites – even with Lionel Messi on the other side.
Messi’s, of course, the reason why a Liverpool win will get washed away by the aggregate scoreline. After Barcelona’s 3-0 win in Spain last week, Liverpool’s odds of advancing are five percent by the models and eight percent by the betting markets. The former is not even taking into account the fact Liverpool will be without Naby Keita, Roberto Firmino, and Mohamed Salah against Barca. They need to score at least three goals to have a chance of advancing … and they’ll be without two of their top three attackers and their most proficient midfielder on the attacking end. Oh, and they have to score all of those goals without conceding any. One Barcelona goal, and they’ll need five; two, and they’ll need six.
5% odds of advancing to the final, and they did it. All that would’ve had to happen was a single Messi or Suárez dagger in the final seconds to finish them, but they powered through.
This post is a bit late since the playoffs started last Sunday. This is the best time of year for sports where you’ve got the NBA in the postseason, MLB in full swing, Stanley Cup, PGA majors, and the final stretches of the Premier League and Champions League. So much to watch.
The NBA is especially dense for me, as a fan with no team allegiance. I try to watch as much as I can. But in these first couple rounds there are far too many games to catch all of. Must-watch series for me in round 1:
OKC / Blazers
Rockets / Jazz
Sixers / Nets
Bucks / Pistons
If it goes the way it looks like it will, there’ll be a 2018 Western Conference Final rematch in round 2.
Round 2 is shaping up to have some great matchups. As I type this I’m watching Portland and OKC in game three in Oklahoma. Competitive in the third quarter with Damian Lillard (possibly my favorite NBA player) heating up.
We had the chance on Monday night to go to the Padres game with a small group. Whenever the home team of a baseball city is in town, it’s a must-do for me to try and catch a game and check out the scene and the stadium.
Petco Park is an amazing facility. We had seats halfway up on the third base side. The stadium is an entire entertainment complex with a ton of activities, shops, food options, and of course beer (a San Diego specialty). Right outside we did a pregame stop at the Stone Brewing tap room, as well.
The weather was fantastic, even though the game result wasn’t so much for the home team. The Rockies took the win, but we had a good time anyway.
A fantastic one-on-one conversation between NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and Bill Simmons from the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference:
Adam Silver is one of the most thoughtful, enthusiastic, and interesting guys in sports leadership. He clearly cares immensely about promoting the health of the league and players. This conversation ranges through mental health, NBA trade deadlines, G League, tampering, and more.
At least 3 or 4 times he references European soccer features as having potential in the NBA — relegation (a long shot), player academies, and my favorite idea, a mid-season tournament. The FA and League Cups in England are great models you could use. But it’d take time to build enough tradition to give weight to the tournament trophy itself.
Interesting data here in Okta’s annual report. It’s clear that the way customer’s buy SaaS is very different than the “single-vendor” purchasing preferences from years past. SaaS allows businesses to buy and integrate the best-fit tools for any jobs:
We also looked at whether companies who invest in the Office 365 suite — the top app in our network — end up committing to a Microsoft-only environment, and the answer was clearly “no.” We found that 76% of Okta’s Office 365 customers have one or more apps that are duplicative of apps offered by Microsoft. Over 28% are chatting on Slack. Nearly 24% are connecting with their colleagues on Zoom. And over 28% of Okta’s Office 365 customers are “double bundling” themselves, subscribing to G Suite as well.
28% of customers have both Office 365 and G Suite. That’s a high number for an area that many consider zero-sum competition.
The Rays picked up Colin Poche in the Steven Souza, Jr. trade with the Diamondbacks last season. Sounds like he’s making some waves in the farm system:
The most unhittable arm in the minors is Colin Poche. Last year, he led the minor leagues in strikeout rate. This year, he again leads the minor leagues in strikeout rate, having increased his own strikeout rate by a dozen points despite going up against much stiffer competition. When Poche pitched in High-A last year, he struck out 37% of the hitters. In Double-A this year, he struck out 60% of the hitters. In Triple-A this year, he’s struck out 50% of the hitters. All year long, over 41.1 innings, he’s allowed just three runs. He’s allowed an OBP of .185, and he’s allowed a slugging percentage of .184. Colin Poche is turning in one of the most unbelievable performances you might ever see.
The St. Joseph’s Peninsula is special to our family, having gone camping, sailing, and fishing their growing up. The hurricane storm surge cut right through the island north of the boat launch area. I remember walking from the campground down to the marina to go fishing. Now you’d have to swim to get between them.
The UCI World Tour season kicks off this week with the Tour Down Under.
I started following pro cycling closely about 5 years ago, but since it’s fairly hard to get access to on broadcasts, I only get to watch a handful of events each year. With the NBC Cycling Pass you get some big events, like the Tour de France and Vuelta a España, plus some other fun ones in the spring like Paris-Roubaix, Paris-Nice, and Liège-Bastogne-Liège.
Last season while watching the Criterium du Dauphiné, it dawned on me one of the reasons I got into watching televised cycling tours so easily: it’s a great sport for a geographer. The sweeping views over the Massif Central, Pyrenees, or the rivers of the Alps are incredible. While I’m watching a stage and the peloton is passing through villages or past medieval landmarks, I’ll be on Wikipedia checking out the history of the places they’re racing.
With some top cyclist team moves in the off season, there are a few big things to watch. I’ll try and catch what I can of the Tour Down Under and get a preview. Never was able to watch that one before.
We’re right at the middle of the season, and this one’s been an exciting one so far. A couple teams at the top expected, a few others blew up out of nowhere. The Bucks in the east, Nuggets in the west, PG carrying OKC, Harden’s crazy streak the past month, Giannis’s nightly consistency, Embiid’s dominance. So many fun threads to follow.
I’m thoroughly enjoying League Pass again this year. I probably watch an average of 5-6 games a week, and sometimes more if there are good matchups and I have time. Between YouTube TV for the national broadcasts and League Pass for the others, I can watch anything. Unless there are specific noteworthy matchups, I’ll usually favor watching the Pelicans (Anthony Davis!), Bucks, Blazers, Raptors, or Sixers. I’d love to see the Bucks go deep into the playoffs. And of course the Lakers defying gravity and having LeBron carry them late into the post-season would be electric.
I’m not a huge follower of hockey anymore, but it’s one of the most exciting sports you can watch live. I got a chance last week through work to sit in the “Ice Box” at Amalie Arena for the Lightning vs. Sabres game. People always say sitting on the glass is a whole different experience, which it certainly is, but sitting between the benches adds another layer of intensity perhaps only equaled by courtside NBA seats.
Kucherov and Johnson, from my seat
Sitting on the Lightning bench side, there was less than a foot between me and Nikita Kucherov during the first period, separated only by glass.
There are only 8 seats in the arena like this, so it was a treat to get to do it.
A few months back we joined a bowling league here in St. Pete. Our four-person crew consists of me, Colette, Zac, and Cookie. We’re now in our second season playing with the same set of teams. It’s fun and as far as other organized recreational sports we’ve played, it’s more relaxing and consistent. Soccer certainly was a lot more intense and sometimes less fun.
We’re now nearing the end of a second season. I’ve been tracking my scores on each game, each week. There are three games per session. I feel like I’m getting a bit more comfortable and consisent, but let’s investigate the trends:
At first glance I can see my week by week aggregate increasing, though slightly. This feels accurate because when bowling, I’m very inconsistent frame to frame. Also I seem to roll my best in the second games. I start low, go high, then tail off a bit in the third game (the beer pitchers may contribute to this performance hit). My lifetime average is now at 135, which is honestly better than I thought I’d do as a novice.
Averages
Last 5 Weeks
Rank
Overall
135.7
140.7
Game 1s
122
127
Low
Game 2s
149
150
High
Game 3s
136
145
Mid
We’re still rolling with all house equipment, but there are plans to get our own balls before the next season starts. Even with better equipment I need to work on my form and consistency.
A few weeks back I had an opportunity to catch a game at Fenway Park for the first time. That’s definitely a bucket list item checked off.
Tim got tickets last minute, some great seats down past the bend on the third base side, beneath the Monster. It was a beautiful night, with Chris Sale on the mound against the Blue Jays.
Gary Neville’s thoughts on the rumors of a Jose Mourinho firing:
The Premier League’s fickleness with management is astonishing. It would be unbelievable to see the same level of volatility and shortsightedness in other professional sports that you have in European football clubs. A United legend calling out the leadership of the club directly is incredible, but unfortunately it probably won’t change anything. I’m not a United fan, but I would love to see the club stick it out with Mourinho and to stop perpetuating the impatient lack of logic that exists in the League.
The Premier League season is now a couple of months in, and the usual suspects are top of the table — City, Liverpool, Chelsea.
What I didn’t expect was Arsenal in the top four, especially after losing the first two weeks. Turns out new guy Unai Emery’s found his footing.
Arsenal have put up 9 wins in a row (all competitions: league, Carabao, Europa League, FA Cup). There have been some skeptics with the new squad and management, but Emery is well on his way to silencing them. The next few weeks look winnable on the schedule. Leicester, Sporting, Palace, and Blackpool, then Liverpool to the Emirates. Emery’s done some experimenting with the starting XIs, but honestly everyone on the roster has been solid.
I’m a baseball fan from way back, and grew up as a Braves fan during the early years of their 1990s NL East dominance. As much as I always enjoyed following the sport as a casual fan, I’d never studied the game much, nor its history beyond the bits that are conventional knowledge to anyone with an interest in the sport (the seminal records, player achievements, and legends of the game). I’ve been on a kick lately of reading about sports I enjoy—baseball and soccer—and have picked up a few books on the subjects to find out what I’ve been missing.
I just finished reading George Will’s Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, his 1989 book that dives deep on the strategy of the game. He sits down with 4 separate professional baseball men to analyze the sport and its component parts: managing with Tony La Russa, hitting with Tony Gwynn, fielding with Cal Ripken, Jr., and pitching with Orel Hershiser. One of the first things that attracted me to this as a re-primer to a newfound interest in baseball is that it’s not new. This book is over 20 years old, so most of the players mentioned in the text are ones I grew up watching.
The book offers a deep analysis of the tactics of baseball games. Rather than write about the specifics as an armchair expert, the author leaves most of the opinion about the elements of the game to the actual practitioners. He poses the question and lets La Russa’s 2,700 wins or Gwynn’s 3,000 hits do the talking. Will does pepper in some of his own opinions on things like the practicality of the designated hitter rule (he thinks pitchers hitting in the NL is a waste of time), and that Walter Johnson is hands-down the best pitcher to have played the game (a bold position, but not a surprising one). But it’s by no means a book of opinion on the game.
He spends a lot of the book’s introduction emphasizing the differences between baseball and other sports. No one would deny that baseball is extremely different than the other Big Three US sports, all of which are “get object to the other side to score” games. All of those sports have depths of complexity in and of themselves, but the important differentiation isn’t about which sport is “harder” or innately “better”. He points out that baseball is the only sport where the defense initiates every play—pitcher throwing to batter. This shows that no matter how dominant or overpowering a particular hitter is, he only gets 1 of every 9 team at-bats. One offensive player simply can’t dominate the entire game on behalf of his team if the other eight are consistently striking out. In football or basketball, the ball can be dished to the same runningback or power forward each play, if he’s dominating. The only player on the baseball field that can dominate is the pitcher, a part of the defense. I love these dynamics of baseball games, with each pitch functioning as a set piece with strategies set up for each hitter, count, baserunner position, batter tendency, and stadium configuration. A typical baseball game consists of 300 pitches or more, so the intricate interlock of the game’s components is incredibly complex when trying to compete at the big league level, for 162 games a season.
The theme throughout the book, touched on by each of the professionals, is that baseball is, fundamentally, a game of attrition. There are more opportunities to fail and go into a slump than there are to succeed, even for the cream of the crop. Even the winningest managers in the modern era (La Russa, Bobby Cox, Joe Torre) racked up 2,000 losses in their careers. At the end of the day, baseball is a game of failure, and excelling at the game is an exercise in minimizing failure as much as it is about success. There’s an excellent anecdote at the start of the book from Warren Spahn, the Braves’ left-handed legend, speaking at a dinner at the US Capitol with a host of congressmen:
Spahn was one of a group of former All-Stars who were in Washington to play in an old-timers’ game. Spahn said: “Mr. Speaker, baseball is a game of failure. Even the best batters fail about 65 percent of the time. The two Hall of Fame pitchers here today (Spahn, 363 wins, 245 losses; Bob Gibson, 251 wins, 174 losses) lost more games than a team plays in a full season. I just hope you fellows in Congress have more success than baseball players have.
The pros that get on top are the ones that overcome the ridiculous rate of failure to edge out the competition.
Much is said in the game about “luck” as an immovable fixture of the sport. You can’t watch a broadcast or listen to a manager’s press conference without them talking about luck or misfortune. Analysts in the last 10 to 15 years have created an entire science out of developing statistics that removeluck from the equation when measuring a pitcher, fielder, or hitter’s effectiveness on the field. Part of the reason luck becomes an interesting “metric” when analyzing the sport is the sheer number of individual events in a baseball season—pitches, hits, strikeouts, runs, stolen bases, the list goes on and on. A season is 2430 games, not including the playoffs, so there’s an enormous amount of data streaming out continuously, ripe for analysis.
“Luck is the residue of design.” -Branch Rickey
Because of this, baseball is a game of numbers and averages (with a “steadily thickening sediment of statistics”, in Will’s words). Lots of current baseball writing and analysis is overrun by esoteric sabermetricians hyperanalyzing the game in such ridiculous detail that casual fans wouldn’t even understand the meaning of the numbers. Look at stats like wins above replacement (WAR), batting average on balls in play (BABIP), or ultimate zone rating (UZR) and try to understand their meanings without detailed study. With Men at Work, I liked that Will’s approach was closer to the surface in reflecting on the practical aspects of the game, rather than the in-the-weeds examination of player performance and team contribution that’s become commonplace in the post-Moneyball era. There’s certainly no shortage of statistics or an appreciation of their importance to the sport, but they take a backseat to the observable strategies and decision-making processes of a La Russa or Hershiser. My favorite part about baseball statistics has always been looking at historical trends in player output, and many of the old school numbers work just fine for seeing individual and team performance.
I highly recommend Men at Work to anyone interested in baseball, and particularly more avid fans of the sport. This book deepened my appreciation of the game, and now makes me think differently about strategies unfolding on the field.
He is the only player to have scored a hat-trick in the English Premier League, Championship, League One, League Two (or the divisions under their previous names), the League Cup, the FA Cup and for his country at International level.
