The Essence of Stupidity: All I Know Is I Know Everything
More than the steroid scandals of 2005 or the strike of 1994, the 2003 publication of Michael Lewis’ bestseller Moneyball, changed the way we view baseball. By revealing how objective analysis and the scientific method influenced the outcome of baseball games, an entire generation of statistically literate fans were born.
Almost overnight, the general fanbase began demanding more accurate analysis for the outcome of sporting events than "this team has all the momentum right now".
Sports, in so far as they are popular, are often reflective of society at large. It comes as no surprise that this outbreak of statistical analysis in sports coincides with the general population's embracing of scientific progress, such as the acceptance of the theory of evolution.
More interestingly, Moneyball's publication and the completion of the human genome project occurred within a year of each other. People want to know more, they want to learn more, they want to understand more.
Whether in life or in sports, people want to informed, literate, and educated.
So what the hell is Joe Morgan's problem?
Employed by the worldwide leader in sports entertainment, Mr. Morgan, a Hall-of-Fame baseball player and not so Hall-of-Fame broadcaster, made a comment as profoundly stupid as one could ever possibly make: "It's typical if you write a book, you want to be the hero.
That is apparently what Beane has done. According to what I read in the Times, Beane is smarter than anyone else. I don't think it will make him popular with the other GMs or the other people in baseball."
Mr. Morgan went on to publicly announce that he would never read the book, because it's about computers and computers can say anything.
What makes the statement so amazingly, mind-boggingly stupid isn’t the fact that Joe Morgan got the author wrong. Billy Beane had nothing to do with the writing of Moneyball. The book was the sole creation of Michael Lewis, who is a damn good writer.
What makes Mr. Morgan stupid is that he thinks embracing ignorance is an admirable quality.
Morgan refused to believe that there were any ideas in baseball that he didn’t already know about. How Morgan could draw such a conclusion about a game where he clearly did not know everything there was to know, when scientific luminaries such as Einstein or Newton would happily admit the limitations to their knowledge, is beyond me.
Embracing ignorance is a downright repugnant quality in a human being.
Why Joe Morgan Isn't As Stupid As We Think He Is
But what makes Mr. Morgan's philosophy even more incredibly, blatantly, outrageously wrong is that like it or not, he is a statistician. Everyone is.
Now, not everyone knows what a chi-square test is, or can construct a linear regression model, or can conduct a two-tailed t-test. Not everyone is an expert on statistics.
But everyone does use them.
Mr. Morgan is employed by ESPN. That means he was offered a salary for his services. When he was offered this salary, he didn’t come out and say, 'Listen, I don’t know anything about numbers and I don’t intend to know anything about them.'
No, ESPN made him an offer and Morgan thought to himself one of three things: a. That’s a lot of money; b. that’s just the right amount of money; or c. that’s not enough money.
And how did Mr. Morgan know which of the three the offer was? He just simply compared it to the average salary of a broadcaster, or the average salary of a middle-aged American male.
What Morgan did in his salary negotiation was what is called "internalizing the mean".
In his head, he understood what the average salary is for broadcasters, then looked at ESPN’s salary offer, and compared that to the average.
And guess what? That's exactly what every single sports analyst does!
When Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs, fans and analysts weren’t like, wow, that number 73 is pretty cool. What they did was say, holy shit, 73 is like twice as much as the average. 73 is so much greater than the average that it’s almost impossible to reach that number.
When Joe Mauer was flirting with .400 everyone was saying, whether they knew it or not, wow, that’s awesome because that’s a lot more than average.
When Rey Ordonez was batting .210 for the Mets, everyone was saying, holy crap, that is way below average.
And when most of major league baseball hits between .260 and .280, you say, yup, just about average.
And all these new fangled sports statistics are just more advanced way of doing the same exact thing Morgan the great statistician accomplished when he signed his contract: comparing an individual data point to the population's average.
Baseball Prospectus is a little more sophisticated by creating its bread and butter tool, Value Over Replacement Player (VORP), but once you have VORP, you are just comparing one average VORP to another. An average player will produce 2 or 3 more wins above replacement level, while a truly awesome player will produce 7 to 10.
Barry Bonds once had a season so great he produced 15.
This is not only true of baseball, but all sports statistical analysis.
In basketball, John Hollinger’s player efficiency rating (PER) does takes all player performances, normalizes their contribution to a basketball game, and then we compare each individual to the average. We know that most players are around 15, so when Dirk Nowitski leads the league with 27, we know that’s way above the average, and so, we know that’s really, really good.
In football, Football Outsiders takes it one extra step. Their statistical tool is specifically called Value Over Average.
Rather explicitly, Football Outsiders makes it clear that all performance analysis revolves around comparing an individual performance to the average.
And the reason all sports fan, broadcasters, athletes, coaches internatlize the average and compare individual data points to it, is because everyone does it. We internalize the average then we compare.
Whether when buying a car or a house, or looking for jobs, or consuming calories, or lifting weights—everything.
Not only are we all statisticians, we are always statisticians.
So take that Joe Morgan. You’re a Moneyball fan whether you like it or not. And you're sort of smart, no matter how stupid you want to be.
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