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Friday, March 12, 2010

The Wisdom (or is it Madness??) of Crowds and Baseball



In their recent edition, Baseball America, did a "prospect draft" of this years crop of MLB rookies. On the surface, the premise of the article brought to my mind the book "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations" by James Surowiecki.

Baseball America started the process by culling the prospect list of their staff of reporters-- Will Lingo, John Manuel, Jim Callis and Conor Glassey.

These guys are chatting with MLB GM's, scouting directors, farm directors, scouts and coaches year round. It's safe to say that if they don't know it, it's not worth knowing as far as the future pipeline of major league stars goes. Anyway, they combined each guys list and came up with a consensus of opinion that seems to match the methodology described in the book.

Is this the most effective method? Who knows? That's why they play the games.

Every year brings a surprise or two in terms of an early bloomer or a well-hyped bust, but most years the BA list is as good as it gets.

See if you see a similar connection between BA and the book:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.

The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton's surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox's true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members, and also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts).[1]

The book relates to diverse collections of independently-deciding individuals, rather than crowd psychology as traditionally understood. Its central thesis, that a diverse collection of independently-deciding individuals is likely to make certain types of decisions and predictions better than individuals or even experts, draws many parallels with statistical sampling, but there is little overt discussion of statistics in the book.

Its title is an allusion to Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, published in 1841.

We feel more comfortable with the opinion of an expert or guru when many times the collective wisdom will do as good or better a job. It's easy to assume that if we find the "right" person that they will lead us to the "right" answer. Many times, the greater wisdom is in the consensus or collective opinion. And it plays right into the baseball culture of going by "The Book" as well as the corporate culture of CYA.

On the home front, the Giants managed to put the Big Two, Buster Posey (ranked 7th overall) and Madison Bumgarner ranked 14th on the list. Further down, I found Zach Wheeler (49th) and Thomas Neal (96th). Not bad placing four out of 100.

The Rays placed seven in the top 100 including:
#6 OF Desmond Jennings
#18 RHP Jeremy Hellickson
#34 RHP Wade Davis
#35 LHP Matt Moore
#54 SS Reid Brignac
#67 SS Tim Beckham
and # 68 RHP Alex Colome.

The future is bright for the Rays.

The Cubs and Indians placed five players apiece.

The Giants and nine other organizations were up next with four players.

This tells me that the Giants are roughly middle of the pack in terms of absolute number of prospects, although they are top-heavy on the list with Posy and Bumgarner posting where they did. Sadly, the Giants appear ready to block Posey this year and maybe save a year in control unless he wows them like Longoria did the Rays a couple of years back.

The other top players on BA's list included:

The Braves 20-year old OF Jason Heyward, who topped the list. He already looks like a star.

The Nats RHP Stephen Strasburg looks ready to pay dividends on his big bonus paid last year.

Marlins OF Mike Stanton was third and Yankees C Jesus Montera ranked #4.

Rounding out the Top Five was Orioles LHP Brian Matusz.

The law of small numbers and the usual caveats about injuries can quickly turn a bumper crop of four or five players, who could contribute to a team's fortunes, into a low yielding field of one or two contributors.

Which is why this stuff is so interesting, it's very fleeting and no matter how smart you may be, you can look like a colossal screw-up due to issues entirely out of your control. It's partly what draws us to fantasy leagues and March Madness bracket-ology.

You didn't need to look too far into the spring training notes to find Hank Blalock signing a minor league deal with the Rays and Khalil Greene getting released by the Rangers last week to see how quickly the fickle fortunes of baseball can turn. A couple of years ago, you might not have sounded crazy picking Blalock over former teammate Mark Texeira as a prospect. And now one is on Broadway and the other is trying to light up Central Avenue.

The Khalil Greene case is even more crazy. A year or two ago he looked like he was going to be the type of hitter who could contend for the batting title or pound out 20-25 HR's for you and now he can't even stay on the field. It's like the hitter's version of Steve Blass--where he has just lost the ability to compete effectively at this level--albeit for a slightly different reason.

Both cases are confounding and hopefully Khalil pulls out of it--because he seems like a great kid--but it goes to show how powerful intangibles like mental and emotional skills really are in generating and maintaining optimal, elite performance.

Anyway, back to BA. After that, they went further and had eleven different staff members draft a full team from each of the thirty organizations top thirty list of prospects. They added Cuban signees Aroldis Chapman and Noel Arguelles. Sounds like a fun exercise.

Among the Gigantes:

Posey went first in the #7 slot and Bumgarner next at #11 to close the first round.

Zach Wheeler went in the 6th round.
Thomas Neal in the 10th round.
Dan Runzler in the 14th round.
Tommy Joseph in the 14th round.
Roger Kieschnick in the 15th round.
Nick Noonan in the 19th round.
Ehire Adrainza in the 23rd round.
Waldis Joaquin in the 27th round.
Brandon Crawford in the 30th round.

Not a bad haul, but again a surprisingly low eleven Giants out of 330 players overall drafted. A pedestrian, to-be-expected 1/30th of the players picked, or a C grade for the organization. Not quite the basis for the bright future I have been envisioning, but lets hope the BA people are wrong here.

The Red Sox graded out the highest in this exercise with 16 prospects drafted, the Indians second with 15, and then the Rays and Twins with 14. When is somebody going to write a book or gush romantically about the Twins organization or maybe the Rays Andrew Friedman if they manage to secure another W/S berth with the budget they have to work with. There's not much room for error there in either organization.

The top four teams in the grading turn out to be A.L. teams. Not a good sign if you're looking for the N.L. to return to dominance in the All-Star game or World Series competition.

It was good to see Casey Crosby make the list at #34 and Toms River NJ's own Todd Frazier #50.

I would not have minded seeing the Giants draft Frazier a few years back.

I can't wait to get back to baseball. It's 50+ degrees here in Chicago and feeling like mid-spring already. We'll probably pay for this big-time down the road, perhaps by having the Cubs home opener snowed out, but let's get back to the diamonds and PLAY BALL!!!!!

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