The Moneyball Concept

I stumbled across Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, while driving around town and listening to talk radio. One of the hosts, whom I've listened to for several years, mentioned that this book changed the way he thought about baseball (before you stop reading, baseball is just the setting here). I thought it was a little interesting, just because I knew this was probably the first book this guy had read in years (he later admitted this), so I thought it would be interesting to check out.

I couldn't put it down.

Here's the premise: A man named Bill James, who was a night watchman at a factory and an avid baseball fan, decided that the statistics that are most often associated with baseball players are a very flawed means of judging performance. He writes and self-publishes (60 copies or so) an amateur analysis back in '77 or so. He does legwork and determines that there are some obscure statistics that are much better predictors of success in the major leagues, and a small, underground craze begins--This question generates discussion among top minds in statistics and economics across the nation--adding academic theory to the raw concepts.

The funny thing is that no major league team picked up on the relevance of this statistcal analysis...until 20 years later, when Billy Beane, General Manager for the Oakland A's, hires a Harvard economist (it's really funny in the book, because there is not one scene where this guy isn't typing into his computer, which they personify: "His computer told them to take such-and-such a player". Using this data, Billy Beane finds players who are undervalued in the market and scoops them up at bargain prices, where they proceed to completely kick the ass of the Texas Rangers (my team), winning the division and going to the playoffs with a substantially lower total player salary.

The moral of this story could be: Nerds rule.

This story struck home with me, because it was completely analagous to the situation in which Gar and I found ourselves at the trucking company ten years ago...before the Moneyball concept was implemented in the major leagues.

We went to a small, family-owned trucking business, and, by applying concepts in productivity and logical business processes, without an MBA among us, I must add, we increased the production of a ragtag company which had never made a profit.

We also encountered some of the same obstacles--old-timers in a good ol' boy industry who were resistant to change--our ideas were flatly rejected quite often, which left us shaking our heads. We would have to prove our ideas with very little error, our assumptions would be questioned, and, in the end, if some old man with forty years of experience decided he wasn't going to do it, it wouldn't get done.

It was an exciting time for us--it felt like riding the crest of a wave on a surfboard, feeling the momentum of the company moving forward as we made huge changes. Gar had been my roommate in college and was my most trusted friend, but at the company he sort of went underground. He dressed in workclothes sometimes and went down on the loading docks to help the guys drive forklifts and load trucks, taking on that responsibility for months in order to get a real picture of what was happening behind the scenes. Sometimes, he would have to leave his dock responsiblities to build a new server, network our office, or help me crunch numbers for a new contract.

I wonder if the authors and implementers of the Moneyball concept realize how stubborn and entrenched businesses can get. The feeling that I get from the book is that the managers in baseball often feel confined to almost superstitious beliefs in trusting meaningless statistics and disproven rules of thumb because they fear ridicule and public scrutiny. The tone that is conveyed is that baseball is composed of "insiders" and "outsiders", and that never the twain shall agree--having a computer pretty much automatically makes you an outsider.

But this is the way that Gar and I felt when we pointed to a printout as evidence that a change needed to be made, only to be met with solemn head-shaking. Reading Moneyball gave me an analogy to point to--we knew we were right but because we didn't have a Harvard pedigree there was more of a burden on us to prove ourselves. Even after 4 years of increasing profits and proving our track record, our voice was given weight, but not enough to overrule the insistence of insiders and their voodoo supersititions of business, which they chanted like a mantra at times while Gar and I incredulously tried to explain.

About a year ago, I wrote a story called The Potato Factor, about the owner of our company who saw our statistical projections and tried to get in on the act by implementing his own, nonsensical, timewasting, and inefficient record-keeping procedure--it was laughable--we felt like we were in our own world, and that nobody would believe it if we told them the story.

Maybe that's why Moneyball made me feel so excited--I connected with the struggle to apply statistical analysis in a subjective world. Suddenly, I felt like there were people in the world who felt my pain, and who also used the same techniques as I did to generate success. In fact, I was applying these concepts before Billy Beane used them to generate a winning team--It fed my ego and made me feel a lot smarter. But why should it? Nothing changed about our success or methods except for the fact that they were given Ivy League credentials and more sophisticated language and several zeros were added to the number of dollars.

There are some lessons to be learned there.

Our Love's in Jeopardy, Baby...

Has anyone heard of the Greg Kihn Band? Okay, that song really sucks. Best parody: "I have a Japanese Baby" and "I Lost on Jeopardy, Baby"

Fran records the game show Jeopardy every day. It's amazing how high a score you can envision for yourself if you calculate your score this way: Give yourself points for everything you know, or remember as soon as the contestant says the answer. Don't subtract for wrong answers. So she scores very well every day and she's ready to go on the show (seriously, and not just so I don't get killed in my sleep, she does know a lot about many things, including royalty, which I am terrible at: I don't know a James from a George, and if there were at least eight Henry's, why does Henry VIII seem to be, disproportionally, the answer to everything?)

So she told me some vague story about testing to be on the show, and how important it would be for me to be present. I promptly forgot.

I got held up at work one recent night, and then my late evening turned even later, and then turned into entertaining a colleage who was in town to help me on a project. I couldn't get out of it even though I tried--I was his ride back to the hotel and I got roped into going out for dinner. I came home to glares and was informed that Fran had to take the Jeopardy test online with an attention-seeking 2-year-old running around the house wrecking things to get a reaction from her mommy. Whoops.

Yes--there is a God!

Ding Dong Wedding Cake...

Reminds me of a very dumb joke:

Q: What does a dyslexic agnostic insomniac do?

A: Stays up all night wondering if there really is a dog...

What's the deal with THAT?

When I took Ryan camping a few weeks ago, I was pretty sheepish when I bought bear spray for protection. I even was a pretty good sport when the know-it-all dude at Sportsman's Warehouse wanted to give me a lecture on the n-dimensional decision tree which should be thoroughly analyzed before bustin' a cap of bear spray.

All I had to say was "Well, they're only black bears" (aka Ursus americanus), not known to be very aggressive toward humans--more likely to run away than the more aggressive grizzly bear (Ursus horibilis, as in they can make your day horrible).

While we were camping, the only other campers we ran into reported that they saw a black bear last year in the area. That made me feel a little less foolish about packing "heat". The campers reported that suddenly came into a clearing and saw the bear, which turned and ran away into the woods.

A couple of weeks ago, a black bear attacked a family in Tennessee and actually killed a child. Last week, a bear attacked and severely injured a man in Washington. It is so rare--there have only been about 50 deaths attributed to black bear attacks in the last 100 years.

Somehow, I preferred life when my fears were irrational.

Glory Days

Something about driving around in the neighborhood where you grew up makes you feel like a spy. You see the house of your old best friend and it may shock the current occupants that you know the floor plan and how it always mysteriously smelled like pickles.

You may even catch a glimpse of an aging ex-neighbor and realize that they couldn't possibly recognize you from thirty years ago--it would be so funny to stop and call them by name and watch the wheels spin. But not intriguing enough to actually do it.

The playground where you used to play basketball. The field where you meticulously played golf for a whole blazing Texas summer. There's an interstate running through the gap where the soccer field once was--I remember fishing icy cans of Shasta out of a cooler at the end of a game.

When I moved back to my old hometown, I ended up on the far north end--it didn't hit me until recently that down the street the site of the grocery superstore has a special significance--the entrance is erected directly on top of left field of the old baseball diamond where my crowning sports achievement took place. It accidentally happened while I was so frustrated that I gave up on playing well and tried with all my might to blast the head off one of the opposing players.

---

I'm not sure why I ever wanted to get into sports. I was always strong but very small and very slow. I must have set a record in soccer for playing eight complete seasons without ever scoring a goal. I was one of the best defensemen there ever was, and we even won division titles, but I didn't even get close to putting one in the net for our team. In football, I remember getting leveled, having the wind totally knocked out of me, and deciding that I didn't want anything to do with that kind of hitting ever again.

I had some raw tools for baseball, but never any finesse at all. I could throw the ball with almost destructive power--I could throw the ball so hard it would zip into the receiver's glove with a loud, attention-getting smack--definitely ahead of my time for my age. The coach rewarded this talent by parking me in the middle of the anthills of the dreaded and boring outfield because I was the only one who could heave the ball in to the other players if it was well-hit by our opponents.

In 1980, I was 10 years old, and Texas was experiencing the worst heatwave in recorded history--50 days over 100 degrees, and there I was standing as the dirt around me baked quietly, ripping open in wide, prehistoric cracks. Even though our games were regulation competitions, the fields were in tremendous disrepair--the outfield was composed of a conglomerate of dirt mounds held together by the scorched brown carcasses of dead weeds, which were woven together to make the ball careen across the lumpy ground unpredictably whenever it was hit over the heads (or through the legs) of the infielders.

In my baseball career, I was always on the same team. The coach's son, Chris, always pitched, and he always sucked. And we always lost. Chris would get unnerved any time he started to get into trouble, and our team would get shelled like we were under attack by anti-aircraft mortars. It made things interesting from the standpoint of an outfielder, but it wasn't very fun to lose every game in the hottest summer ever. Occastionally, Chris would have a meltdown, pitch a whiney baby fit, march off the field and even quit the team. But the next week he'd be back on the mound, serving up meatballs for the other team to shove down our throats. When you're the coach's kid, you don't get sent out to the weedpatch.

It was during one of these complete drummings that I completely lost interest in baseball. We were playing the Pirates and they were extremely well-coached. They also were cocky and kept spitting nasty comments at me and my teammates and were smirking as they beat us 12-2. The sun was beating down on my head and I just started thinking about other cool things I could do, like taping baseball cards to my bike tires and making it sound like a motorcycle. I was marooned out in left field and was studying a fire ant mound when I heard the crack of a bat--I looked up and saw Chris' pitch getting rocketed back at our team--specifically right at me with quite a bit of speed as it bounced over the third baseman's head and headed down the line into the outfield territory that I was supposed to protect.

Time just seemed to tick off slowly like the hands of a stopwatch suddenly submerged in gelatin. I could see that the runner on second base fully intended to round third base and head for home. He was a short little guy and I remember seeing the old, beat-up batting helmet wobbling on top of his head as though it were 10 sizes too large for him. Sometimes, especially when your team is good and you're shelling the other team's outfield, lots of runners get on base and when you're up to bat you just have to put on the batting helmet that's sitting there in the dugout whether it fits or not.

This is not what was going through my mind at the time. At the time I was reconciling the fact that I was really mad that our coach's son was ruining all my fun by getting us killed every game, that the same coach kept pointing me out to the ridiculous outback also known as our outfield, and that it was so damn hot outside. That smug bobble-headed midget rounding third was just the topper. I took it personally that he didn't have sufficient respect for my throwing arm, and I couldn't wait to teach him a lesson. I had made a perfect play on the ball--it must have bounced off one of the larger, flatter weeds--and I had a second to think before throwing the ball in. I was supposed to throw it to the cutoff man at second base. The runner would score.

Hitting the cutoff man was for the other players who cared. The ones who didn't have a cannon for an arm. We were losing by ten points and the game was all but technically over.

I clearly remember thinking, even though I was at least forty yards away, that there was no doubt that I was going to peg this guy in the back of the head with every ounce of my strength. I took two quick steps, cocking my arm back and burning it straight at him with very little arc and putting everything I had into it, swinging my arm across my whole body with a huge follow-through.

I couldn't wait for that ball to clank off his head and leave his brains sloshing and ringing inside like the clapper on the Liberty Bell--that goofy-looking bobblety-headed freak.

But instead, a miracle happened. The ball sailed about 6 inches high, sailing over bobble-head's left shoulder and straight into the glove of J.P. Magginola, our catcher and the best player on our entire team. Even though there is no way J.P. could see it coming, he somehow caught the ball and stood in the base path in front of the completely astonished runner--it was a second before the runner got to the plate, and there was no where for him to turn.

He had no where to go.

His coach had no idea of what to say to him. Or time to say anything.

J.P. even looked a little surprised.

The kid gingerly ran right into J.P., who tagged him out. He stood there in a cloud of dust, shocked. The helmet went spinning off behind home plate somewhere.

The parents in the bleachers behind our bench, perhaps for the first time all season, erupted in a jumping, screaming celebration honoring the best play our team had ever made. J.P. was the hero. He turned and waved to his parents, who beamed with pride. The cheering lasted over a full minute, then died down.

Although I was happy to have been part of it, it seemed a little unfair. I was just a kid, and maybe I wasn't a very good sport, but I wanted a little of the credit for that killer play. I had languished in right field the whole damn summer, and I had been running after fly balls from Chris' sorry pitching as they fell in the cracks and the ant piles and weed patches. I couldn't wait for the season to be over, but in the meantime I wanted someone to know that it was me who had thrown that ball.

I mean, J.P. Magginola didn't manufacture that ball himself behind home plate, did he? He didn't pluck it out of thin air--well, maybe he did, but I'm the one who planted it in thin air in just the right place while trying to kill that Darth Vader-looking punk who tried to take an extra base on me.

A couple of minutes later, before Chris served up another meatball, the coach, as an afterthought, hollered out into our weedpatch outfield "Who threw that?"

"I did" I said weakly.

"Good throw, Mike" someone said courteously. And that was it.

My moment in the sun.

Some Adjectives

Bummed
Tired
Uninspired
embarrassed
Buried
Suffocated
unimportant
ineffective
foolish
melancholy
unproductive
hodgepodge
short-sighted
dysfunctional
wrecked
undercaffeinated
allergic
neglectful
uneloquent
Petty

The Travelocity Gnome

Kaitlyn calls him "Little Santa"....

No Reason for Fear...Right?

This is Kaitlyn earlier today, fleeing for her life from the Easter bunny...I'm not so sure I wouldn't run from that, too...


Four Years ago...you couldn't make this up, could you?

 

Flight

Something about reading Hemingway makes me peevish.

I picked up A Farewell to Arms again--haven't read it in about five years, and it's been a year since I read For Whom the Bell Tolls. I have been so amazed at how fantastic the writing is. It makes me want to sit down and write for an entire day. The simplicity of the style just draws me in and makes me overconfident.

It also gives me the urge to binge drink and eat hunks of meat and cheese.

I read that in 1954 he won the Nobel prize for Literature and in 1961 he committed suicide, and I just can't get that straight in my head--I can't get it to make sense. I mean, this writing is so gifted and powerful that it is inspiring and motivating, even with its nihilist undertones. the dialog is sometimes wooden and the female characters are underdeveloped and flat.

On to my secret.

Have you ever heard of the term "personal myth"? It's often used in describing teenagers and how they feel magically protected from harm. Well, I wonder if I don't harbor a secret personal myth--that all this crap that I've lived through must pay off in the end in some extraordinary way. Like, if I find myself forty years from now sitting on a duct-taped barcalounger eating a tuna fish sandwich on a TV tray and bitching about how hot it is outside, that life won't have been worthwhile. Like I'm biding my time until my story matures and circumstances explode into some exciting story with huge significance to mankind.

Part of my personal myth is that I share a birthday with Ernest Hemingway, and I somehow feel that this is significant. There, it's out. Fran says that's just way too much pressure to put on myself--it actually probably demotivates me...

But I just can't sit and write all day like I wish I could. I've got my story sketched out and waiting for me to flesh out.

Last week I was driving through downtown Dallas. Clouds came overhead and everything was grey (I always spell this word with an "e" because I nearly got expelled from 8th grade over this alternative spelling--the teacher counted it wrong and I threw an increasingly violent hissy fit, calling one girl a "bitch" and then getting sent to the principal's office). I noticed a building with gothic architecture and threw open my notebook on the passenger's seat, scribbling the name of the building so I could look it up later.

Then I resolved to get my camera, clear off the flash card, and take half of a day to walk through the city, photographing interesting buildings, fountains, and structures. There is a beautiful sculpture of a cattle drive, adjacent to the oldest cemetery in town, with twenty or thrity cattle and several cowboys on horseback cascading down a hillside, representing the cattle drives of over 100 years ago so prominent in this region of the country. Courthouses, skyscrapers, quirky buildings---I got excited about the project and then got tired of the idea before I hit the next red light. I knew I would never do it.

Without wanting to raise alarm, I kind of see what happened to Hemingway--his personal myth was unatttainable. He had to put down the tuna sandwich, get off the barcalounger, and do something about it.

The secret seems to be contentment, being real, enjoying life, having good relationships. Either that or really kicking some ass in life and doing something significant--one or the other.