Battling Expertise with the Power of Ignorance | Articles | Bill James Online

There's a lot to like in this article, not the least of which is this:

But everything depends upon recognizing what you do not know, and this gets back to the Power of Ignorance.   The great mistake that analysts make is that we always want to focus on what we DO know; we want to make inferences based on what we have studied in the past.   We like to do that because, like everyone else, we are trying to purchase credibility based on the work we have done.

Enjoy the rest.

from billjamesonline.com
https://www.billjamesonline.com/article1373/

Battling Expertise with the Power of Ignorance

            Since I am speaking to the statistics department, I will make every effort to make this a statistically-oriented speech discussing specific issues of statistical research.    However, in order not to be misunderstood, there are several other things that I will have to say first to establish parameters, and then I'll get to what you might recognize as relevant issues in five or ten minutes.

            The first thing that I should say is that I have no credentials whatsoever as a mathematician or a statistician.   I have been identified countless times as a statistician, for reasons that I understand, but I have never, ever been self-identified as a statistician, for reasons that I will explain.   I don't really know anything much about the workings or applications of statistical methods.   I could not describe myself as a statistician because I could not meet the standards that the people in this room would expect a professional statistician to meet.  I don't call myself a statistician for the same reason that I don't call myself a plastic surgeon or an auto mechanic:  I am afraid that somebody might ask me to tighten their jawline or to fix their Honda, and I wouldn't have a clue how to do it.   I have always chosen to call myself a writer because, well, hell, anybody can call himself a writer.

            There is more to it than that, actually.   Self-definition is dangerous for a public figure, because it indirectly places limits on what one can attempt within the definition.   Although I often write about baseball history I don't call myself a historian, either, in part because saying that I am this or that or the other adds limits, but not abilities.   If I call myself a historian that doesn't make me any better historian, but am I still allowed to write about the future of the game, or if I call myself a statistical analyst am I still allowed to propose theories that have nothing to do with statistics?    I have always thought that it was best not to define oneself, but to let the world say about you whatever it is that the world chooses to say.   This is my first reference point for the Power of Ignorance.   By not claiming to know exactly what it is that I am doing, I remain able to attempt whatever it is that I feel like attempting.   It's a great advantage.

            I should say, unless there be misunderstanding about this, that I am in no way in favor of ignorance or against the advance of knowledge.   I have worked my entire life for the advancement of knowledge, trying to increase respect for reason and respect for research in the world of sports.    I am embracing ignorance here in this sense and for this reason:   that we are all, in my view, condemned to float endlessly in a vast sea of un-answered questions and unknown reference points—a Sea of Ignorance, if you will.   The example that I like to use is a chess board.   How many moves ahead can you see on a chess board?   I can see about one move ahead of myself in a chess game.    If you can see 3 or 4 moves ahead on a chess board, you can beat 99% of chess players, and if you could see 7 or 8 moves ahead in a chess game, you would be a world-class chess champion.

            Well, suppose that a chess board was not eight squares wide and eight squares long, but a hundred squares wide and a hundred squares long, with a thousand moving pieces, rather than 32.   How far ahead could you see on a chess board then?     The world is like a chess board that is a million squares wide and a million squares long with hundreds of thousands of moving pieces and hundreds of thousands of different players moving them.    In my view, anyone who imagines that he can anticipate what will happen next, in any area of life, is delusional, and people who think that experts should be able to do this are children and fools.

            If the world was 10% more complicated than the human mind, or even if it was 40% more complicated or ten times as complicated, then the difference between an intelligent person's ability to understand the world and a less intelligent person's ability to understand the world would be very meaningful.   But since the world is billions and billions of times more complicated than the human mind, individual intelligence is almost entirely irrelevant to the understanding of the world.   What is critical to understanding is humility and co-operation.   What is critical to gaining more understanding of the world is to learn to accept and appreciate the vastness of our ignorance, and to understand that one can only survive in a sea of ignorance by working with others to make our small lifeboat a little bit stronger.   Only by embracing the fact of our limitless ignorance can one position oneself to increase the store of knowledge.

            Now, getting finally to statistics.   The way that baseball was understood 35 years ago, and the way that is understood today, is largely by the interpretations of experts.   I don't in any way want to speak disrespectfully of experts, but experts are people who claim to know things, and who claim to understand how something works.   There are a vast number of things that the experts all know, based on their experience in the game and based on their education by others, older than themselves.   The experts all knew, for example, that the prime of a player's career was ages 28 to 32.   The experts all knew that when there was a runner on first and no one out, the percentage move was to bunt.   The experts all knew that speed was tremendously important, and that the difference between good teams and bad teams was mostly in how they performed in clutch situations.   The experts all knew that a good starting pitcher would draw a few thousand extra fans to the game every time he took the mound.

            Through 1970, through 1975, there was essentially no one in the world who was in the habit of submitting these axioms of expertise to objective test.    When I began writing about baseball in 1975, the first thing I did was to say, "Well, I don't know anything.   I'm not an expert.   But perhaps I could contribute to the conversation by finding a way to take these things that the experts know, and look to see, as best I can, whether they are objectively true."

            If you want to know who I am and what I have done for a living for the last 35 years, I can explain it in one sentence.   My job is to find questions about baseball that have objective answers.    That is all that I do; that is basically all that I have done for the last 35 years.   I listen carefully to what is said to be true about baseball, and I try to find elements in those claims which are capable of objective answer.   For example, when it was suggested that baseball players peaked from ages 28 to 32, we asked, "OK, do players hit more home runs at ages 28 to 32 than at other ages?    How many home runs are hit by players at age 27?  At age 22?  At every other age?  How many doubles are hit, how many games do pitchers win at each age, how many strikeouts do they record, etc.?

            It turned out in this case that what the experts all knew to be true—that baseball players are in their prime from ages 28 to 32—is just totally, wildly and complete untrue.   It doesn't match the data in any way, shape or form.   27-year-old players hit 68% more home runs in the major leagues than do 32 year-old players—thus, saying that 32-year-old players are in their prime and 27-year-old players are not is preposterous.

            When you formulate a question which has an objective answer and you go and find that answer, you almost always wind up with a set of numbers.   "Numbers", in baseball, are usually referred to as "statistics", even if they are not the kind of numbers that would ordinarily be described as "statistics" in any other area of life.   Because the questions that I asked led to the formation of new statistics, I became known as a statistician.

            It is quite astonishing to me, in retrospect, that no one before me had tried to make a living by doing this.  There was a large community of baseball experts who worked for baseball teams and wrote about baseball, based on this large, shared body of "expertise".    A very, very large percentage of the things that the experts all knew to be true turned out, on examination, to be not true at all.   It is not true that bunting increases either the number of runs that are scored or the expectation of scoring a single run.   It is not true that speed is a key element of successful baseball teams, clutch hitting is either 99 or 100% a chimera, and the identity of the starting pitcher has, except in a very few cases, no detectable impact on the attendance at the game.  I'll deal with a couple of these claims in more detail later on, but when I began to publish articles and later books reporting on research which demonstrated that some of the claims of experts were demonstrably false, this put me at loggerheads with the baseball establishment.   There was, in the first fifteen years of my career, a great deal of misunderstanding about what I was doing.   People thought—and, indeed, some people still think—that I was trying to supplant the experts, and become an expert myself.   Some people thought that I was anti-expert, or anti-scout.   This was never true.  In fact, I have always had great respect and great admiration for the scouts.  There are a large number of things about baseball that I have no way of studying, no way of knowing based on the records.    I admire the ability of scouts to look at a young hitter, and note things about his swing that may predict whether he will be able to adjust to higher levels of competition.   Having set next to scouts at hundreds of major league baseball games, I am always astonished by the things that they can see that I would never have seen in a million years had someone not pointed them out to me.   I also admire, and lust after, those really cool radar guns.  The only thing is, everything the scouts say is not the gospel truth.

            In my early career, people would attack me by pointing out that I had no credentials to be considered an expert.   I fell into the habit of saying, "that's right; I don't."

            I want to point out to you in passing that "getting the answers right" had almost nothing to do with the success of my career.   My reputation is based entirely on finding the right questions to ask—that is, in finding questions that have objective answers, but to which no one happens to know what the objective answer is.   That's what I did 35 years ago; that's what I do now.   When I do that, it makes almost no difference whether I get the answer right, or whether I get it a little bit wrong.   Of course I do my very best to get the answers right, out of pride and caution, but it doesn't actually matter.

             Why?

            Because if I don't get the answer right, somebody else will.   It is called "science."            Again, I am not qualified to lecture you or to lecture anyone about the scientific method.   In fact, my understanding of the scientific method is very rudimentary, very primitive.   Nonetheless, the scientific method has been the greatest ally of my career.   Basically, what I know about the scientific method would fit onto a bumper sticker, and, that being the case, I might as well read you the bumper sticker.   We design tests to see whether an assertion is compatible or incompatible with the evidence.   When you do that, someone else will always figure out some way to do another test, and a better test.    When that happens, it is my responsibility to acknowledge that the other person's research is better than mine or is an advancement from mine.   What is necessary to the advancement of knowledge, then, is humility—the capacity to recognize that other people have accomplished something that I have not been able to accomplish.   That, then, is the bumper sticker:   what is necessary to the advancement of knowledge is humility.

            When you go to an expert and you say that, "I don't think that what you are saying is true," that will be perceived as arrogance.   Who are you to challenge the experts?   But it is not arrogance, at all; it is grounded in the understanding that we are all floating in a vast sea of ignorance, and that much of what we all believe to be true will later be shown to be nonsense.   To recognize this is not arrogance; it is humility.

            When I was in Elementary School in the early 1960s, our principal was fond of telling us that, when he was a young man just after World War One, he took a college chemistry class, in which the professor told the students that they were studying science at the ideal time, because all of the important discoveries had been made now.   Everything that there was to be known about chemistry or biology or physics, he suggested, was pretty much known now.

            Well, I call the search for objective knowledge about baseball "sabermetrics", and you would be amazed how common it is for us to hear that everything worthwhile to be known about sabermetrics is known now, and everybody who cares about it knows it.   In reality, nothing has changed, at all; all we have done is to take a few buckets of water out of the ocean of ignorance and move them over into the small pond of real knowledge.   In reality, the ocean of ignorance is larger than it ever was, as it expands on its own.

            Baseball teams play 162 games a year.    I just realized last week that, sometime in the last 20 years, baseball experts have fallen into the habit of saying that a baseball team has about 50 games a year that you are just going to lose no matter what, 50 games a year that you're going to win, and it is the other 62 games that determine what kind of season you're going to have.   This is not ancient knowledge; this is a fairly new one.   A more inane analysis would be difficult to conceive of.   First of all, baseball teams do not play one hundred non-competitive games a year, or anything remotely like that.   Baseball teams play about forty non-competitive games in a season, more or less; I would be surprised if any team in the history of major league baseball ever had a hundred games in the season that were just wins or losses, and which the losing team never had a chance to win after the fourth or fifth inning.   The outcome of most baseball games could be reversed by changing a very small number of events within the game.

            But setting that aside, this relatively new cliché assumes that it is the outcome of the most competitive games that decides whether a team has a great season or a poor season.   In reality, the opposite is true.   The more competitive a game is, the more likely it is that the game will be won by the weaker team.   If the Royals play the Yankees and the score of the game is 12 to 1, it is extremely likely that the Yankees won.   If the score is 4 to 3, it's pretty much a tossup.   The reasons why this is true will be intuitively obvious to those of you who work with statistics for a living.   It is the non-competitive games—the blowouts—that play the largest role in determining what kind of season a team has.   Misinformation about baseball continues to propagate, and will continue to propagate forever more, without regard to the fact that there is now a community of researchers that studies these things.

            One of the most enduring debates about the applications of statistical analysis to baseball has to do with the role of speed on a successful team.   Speed in baseball is tied more closely to stolen bases than to any other statistical category.   By the late 1970s, we had studied the statistics of successful and unsuccessful baseball teams to such an extent that we could place values on each event.     The statistics of baseball teams predict runs scored so reliably that is extremely easy to see that teams that hit 150 home runs score more runs than teams that hit 140 home runs.   It is easy to see that teams that hit 240 doubles score more runs than teams that score 230 runs, and that teams that hit 230 doubles score more runs than teams that hit 220 doubles. 

            It is easy to see, in the records of baseball, that teams that draw 550 walks in a season score more runs than teams that draw 540 walks.   The end result of each isolated event is easy to see in the overall mix, so much so that it is very easy to place a value on one single, one double, one triple or one home run.

The only exception to this is that stolen bases appear to be nearly invisible.  Teams that steal bases not only don't score more runs that teams that don't steal bases, they actually score slightly fewer runs—or did, 35 years ago.

Obviously, stolen bases can correlate negatively with runs scored because stolen base attempts can lead either to stolen bases, which are positive, or to runners caught stealing, which are negative.   By contrasting the value of a stolen base with the cost of a runner caught stealing, one can calculate what success percentage is needed to break even.  It turns out that through much of baseball history, teams were attempting to steal bases at a success rate that was actually causing them to score fewer runs than if they had not attempted to steal any bases at all.   Our capacity to misunderstand the world is almost without limit.  In recent decades this has not been true, but even in modern baseball, the actual success rate is so close to the break even percentage that the runners caught stealing eat up almost all of the value of the stolen base attempts, so that the gain in runs per stolen base attempt is along the lines of one run per 25 attempts.   Stolen bases are essentially irrelevant to successful offenses.    If a baseball team can add a player who hits five extra doubles or a player who steals 50 extra bases, they're usually better off to add the player who hits a handful of doubles.

There are many other ways that one can study the value of a stolen base.   We can calculate the inherent run value—that is, the probable runs scored—when there is a runner on first, no one out, and when there is a runner on second, no one out, etc.

One can create simulations of baseball offenses in which we generate random sequences of events with and without stolen base attempts, and see what the change in runs resulting is when the stolen base attempts are added.

One can evaluate the stolen base attempt with a Markov Chain analysis. . .that is, you may be able to do this; I can't, but many other people have.

The thing is that no matter which one of these approaches one takes, one always comes back with the conclusion that stolen bases are essentially irrelevant to a successful offense.   Of course, this does not prove that speed is not important or that speed is not tremendously valuable; it merely demonstrates that stolen base attempts are relatively insignificant.   Speed is not the same as "stolen bases".

When I published research questioning the value of speed in the late 1970s—and other researchers did as well—we were confronted by a barrage of arguments from the experts offering a hundred different reasons why we had to be wrong.    This was entirely appropriate.   It is not the scientific method that when somebody publishes a few studies concluding that X is untrue, everybody accepts that X is untrue, and stops asserting X.   There are a wide variety of reasons why speed could be important, even though stolen bases were not.   It could be, for example, that the value of stolen bases was hidden by a cross-correlation—that is, that as teams got better hitters they had less need to steal bases, thus bad teams stole more bases than good teams, even though the steals themselves were a positive.   Well, yes, that's true, but it's also pretty easy to remove the cross-correlation and study the stolen bases of teams that are otherwise similar, and the conclusion remains that stolen bases tend not to be closely associated with good teams.
One can study the question of speed without looking at stolen bases by looking at other categories of performance that tend to be dependant on speed, such as triples and grounding into double plays, but that leads to the same conclusion:  there is little or no evidence that fast teams tend to be good teams.

One thing that we would hear often, and still hear sometimes, is that the value of speed is that it prevents double plays.   But the value of the stolen base attempt in preventing double plays is accounted for in many or all of the approaches that have already been outlined, so this argument is essentially simply a misunderstanding of how the conclusion was reached.

The central question of analytical research in baseball is "why do teams win?"  What are the actual characteristics of winning teams?    The rest of baseball analysis consists mostly of breaking that question down into a thousand smaller questions.   The most damning fact for speed teams is that there is essentially no correlation between speed and wins.    You can say anything you want to about why speed is important in baseball, but all this accomplishes logically is to make the mystery deeper.    If there are all of these advantages to speed in baseball, then why don't speed teams win?   The fact remains that they don't, but let's move on to another issue.

Our work can be divided into two areas.   One is efforts to answer the question, "What is the relationship between X and Y?",  and the other is efforts to answer the question "How can we measure that?"   The first half of my career was largely devoted to efforts to state in simple formulas the relationships between different things in baseball—the relationship between runs scored and wins, for example, or the relationship between the different types of hit elements and runs scored.   I developed in the years from 1975 to 1990 a large number of heuristic rules for addressing various problems in baseball research.   The two best known of these are the Pythagorean theory of runs to wins, and the Runs Created Formula.

The Pythagorean theory of runs to wins, which I first published in 1977, states that the ratio between a team's wins and losses will be the same as the relationship between the square of their runs scored and square of their runs allowed.    In other words, if a team scored four runs a game on average and allowed three runs a game, their winning percentage would be about .640, or a ratio of sixteen to nine.  Later research has demonstrated that the Pythagorean theory works better with an exponent other than 2.00, and still later research has demonstrated that it works better still if you modify the exponent for the level of scoring.   Still, those modifications give only tiny gains in accuracy, and the Pythagorean theory is now almost universally understood and is widely accepted in baseball.

The other heuristic that people know is the runs created formula, which states that the number of runs that a team will score can be predicted by the formula hits plus walks, times total bases, divided by (at bats plus walks).   I introduced this formula in 1978.  The essential question about a hitter is not how many hits he gets, or what his on base percentage is, or his slugging percentage, but how many runs he puts on the scoreboard.   I thus looked for two or three years for the simplest way to estimate how many runs each player had produced, and this was it.  There are now dozens of variations of the runs created formula in use, but the simple one from 1978 still works fine.   In 2009, 27 of the 30 teams came within seven games of winning the number of games predicted by the 1977 version of the Pythagorean theory, and 26 of 30 teams came within 5% of scoring the number or runs predicted by the 1978 version of the Runs Created formula.

I developed a lot of other heuristics in those years, many of which still survive, like the Power/Speed Number, Secondary Average, Game Scores, Similarity Scores, and something called the Favorite Toy.   The Favorite Toy is a way of estimating the chance that a player will get 3,000 career hits or hit 500 home runs or some such goal.   The method is so crude and so arbitrary that, at the time I developed it in the early 1970s, I was certain that I would figure out some better way to do this within a few weeks.  It's been almost 40 years, and I never have; the spooky thing about that stupid little formula is that it insists on working, although there are a dozen obvious reasons why it shouldn't.

In the second half of my career, what I have done more of is to figure out ways to define and measure things that people talk about, but which aren't measured because nobody has taken the trouble to figure out how to measure them.   Much of this research is more or less parallel to what a surveyor does.   You know what a surveyor does?  He puts a post in the ground and measures everything from where the post was.   At some point people forget that the starting point of the measurement was entirely arbitrary, and begin to accept the relative nature of the measurements.

Baseball announcers and experts often use terms that have no exact definition, like "manufactured run".    A manufactured run, more or less, is a run that a team scores by putting little parts of a run together, like a walk, a stolen base, a ground out and a single. 

  A walk and a single don't add up to a run, but when you add in the stolen base and the ground ball moving up the runner, you get a run out of it.   That's a manufactured run.There is a sort of general agreement about what is a manufactured run, but there is no data because there is no precise operational definition.   My contribution to this discussion has been to make up a specific operational definition that says what is and what is not a manufactured run.   I did this about four years ago, and, to this point, my definition has had no impact whatsoever on the discussion.    But that's just because, at this time, we haven't yet reached the point at which people have stopped focusing on the arbitrary nature of the starting point.

I didn't make up the definition of a manufactured run out of whole cloth.   What I did was, I listened very carefully to what people were saying, identifying the occasions on which people would use the term "manufactured run".   Then I looked back at what had happened, and tried to identify the circumstances that caused people to use the term.   I am not saying that I got it exactly right.   Perhaps I got it 80% right, perhaps less.   But I am saying that, in the long run, people will accept the definition and begin to use the data, simply because a concept is much more useful when it has a specific definition than when it does not.

A great deal of my work over the second half of my career has been to replace free-floating concepts with specific definitions—for example, I've made up specific definitions for "bombs"—that is to say, when an intentional walk blows up on a manager.   It's a common expression; it merely occurred to me one day to ask "What exactly does that mean?"   Once you realize that you don't know, then you can write a definition, then you can produce data based on the definition, then you can study the issue.

            Once the data is produced, of course, it becomes a "statistic", and I become known as the person who has invented yet another new statistic.   But is writing definitions really the work of a statistician?   I'll leave that up to you.   Call me whatever you want to call me.

            Probably the most useful thing that I have ever devised, in terms of practical value to real baseball teams, is Similarity Scores.   Similarity Scores consist of an entirely arbitrary set of values used to measure the differences between any two players—so arbitrary, in fact, that I usually choose to re-invent them every time I use them, rather than sticking with any set of values.           

But Similarity Scores are tremendously useful because, in order to study anything in baseball, you need to identify similar players or similar teams.   If you want to know how much money a player should be paid, the first thing you look at is how much money is paid to similar players.   If you are trying to figure out how long a player might last, how many years he has left, the most useful way to study the issue is to identify similar players, and study what happened to them.   If a player has a very poor year, and you are trying to figure out what his chances are of snapping back, it is very useful to be able to find similar players who had bad years at a similar point in their career.   Although it is grounded in nothing—"similarity" is an entirely subjective concept—the method turns out to be of ubiquitous value to real baseball teams facing real life issues.

But everything depends upon recognizing what you do not know, and this gets back to the Power of Ignorance.   The great mistake that analysts make is that we always want to focus on what we DO know; we want to make inferences based on what we have studied in the past.   We like to do that because, like everyone else, we are trying to purchase credibility based on the work we have done.

But the problem is, you don't learn anything by focusing on the stuff that you already know.    In order to expand the sphere of what is known about baseball, you have to find a question that has an answer, but you don't know what the answer is.    In other words, you have to learn to identify your own ignorance.   You have to get comfortable with ignorance; you have to learn to embrace your ignorance.   By doing so, you acquire the ability to expand knowledge.

If you take a bad baseball team, a team that makes bad decisions, and you ask, "Why do they do this?" it will never be ignorance that is the culprit.    The problem is not what teams do not know.   The problem is what they do know that isn't true.I have spent my career battling experts, working with the raw material of ignorance.   This has always worked for me because ignorance is an inexhaustible resource.   We are all so desperate to understand the world that we manufacture misunderstandings by the yard.    Creating knowledge to combat ignorance. .. .creating tools with which to study something. . .these are slow and time-consuming activities.   Making superstitious connections is quick and easy.   That sounds judgmental and it shouldn't.   The reality is that we're not capable of understanding the world, because the world is vastly more complicated than the human mind.    I don't know if that is a complete explanation of myself or not, but it's the best I can do, and I will be happy to take any questions that you may have.

Sent from my iPhone

Bill James on Baseball, Facts, and the Rules of the Game | Time: 1:02:20

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/01/bill_james_on_b.html

Bill James on Baseball, Facts, and the Rules of the Game | EconTalk 

Baseball stats guru and author Bill James talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the challenges of understanding complexity in baseball and elsewhere. James reflects on the lessons he has learned as a long-time student of data and the role it plays in understanding the underlying reality that exists between different variables in sports and outside of sports. The conversation closes with a discussion of our understanding of social processes and the connection to public policy and the ideologies we hold.

Sent from my iPhone

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Bill James on Baseball, Facts, and the Rules of the Game

EconTalk Episode with Bill James

Hosted by Russ Roberts

Baseball stats guru and author Bill James talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the challenges of understanding complexity in baseball and elsewhere. James reflects on the lessons he has learned as a long-time student of data and the role it plays in understanding the underlying reality that exists between different variables in sports and outside of sports. The conversation closes with a discussion of our understanding of social processes and the connection to public policy and the ideologies we hold.

"Four Thoughts about the Creation of Facts," by Bill James. Bill James Online, October 10, 2017.

Additional ideas and people mentioned in this podcast episode:
Science versus expertise; crime
"The Note," by Bill James. Bill James Online, October 30, 2017.
"Battling Expertise with the Power of Ignorance," by Bill James. Bill James Online, April 14, 2010.
"Use of defensive shifts in baseball is spreading--because it works," by Zach Helfand. Los Angeles Times, July 19, 2015.
Steroid use in baseball
"Joe Morgan: Keep Steroid Users Out of Baseball Hall of Fame," by Victor Mather. New York Times, Nov. 21, 2017.
Arthur De Vany on Steroids, Baseball, and Evolutionary Fitness. EconTalk. March 2010.
Chuck Klosterman on But What If We're Wrong. EconTalk. August 2016.
David Skarbek on Prison Gangs and the Social Order of the Underworld. EconTalk. March 2015.
"Trump, as in Rump," by Bill James. Bill James Online, February 23, 2016. Essay on self-righteousness.

A few more readings and background resources:
Sportometrics, by Robert Tollison. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Sports, by Gerald W. Scully. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Crime, by David D. Friedman. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Friedrich Hayek. Biography. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
A few more EconTalk podcast episodes:
Michael Munger on Sports, Norms, Rules, and the Code. EconTalk. July 2013.
Other prior EconTalk discussions of Bill James, baseball, etc.
Andrew Gelman on Social Science, Small Samples, and the Garden of the Forking Paths. EconTalk. March 2017.
Jonah Lehrer on Creativity and Imagine. EconTalk. June 2012.
Gary Belsky on the Origin of Sports. EconTalk. April 2016.
Leigh Steinberg on Sports, Agents, and Athletes. EconTalk. March 2013. Firsthand sports interview.
Michael Lewis, Moneyball, etc.
Michael Lewis on the Hidden Economics of Baseball and Football. EconTalk. January 2007.
Skip Sauer on the Economics of Moneyball. EconTalk. October 2006.


0:33
Intro. [Recording date: December 1, 2017.]

Russ Roberts: I want to encourage all listeners to fill out your end-of-year survey where you can vote on your favorite episodes of 2017. Please go to econtalk.org and you'll find a link in the upper left-hand corner.

0:48
Russ Roberts: My guest today is Bill James, the man who brought serious data analysis to baseball and who has revolutionized how we see the sport. His perspective has since spread to other sports. He has reduced ignorance and spread light. And in my case, helped me teach my children about how the world works, using baseball--which they love--to help them understand the challenges of thinking about uncertainty and probability. He is the author of numerous books on baseball and outside of baseball, including crime.... Our topic for today will be baseball, but we're going to cover a lot of other stuff, because you have a lot to say about other stuff. So, I want to start with a general point you made in your recent essay. You quote, you said the following,

Daniel Patrick Moynihan liked to say that everybody is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts. This has become a trope, and we hear it every day now.

I think it's kind of a silly thing to say, actually.
Why? What's silly about that statement? Isn't everybody entitled to their own opinion, but not facts?

Bill James: That statement by Moynihan has become a cudgel that people use to try to beat up anyone who tries to disagrees with them about what the underlying facts are. In the tax debate, each side will do an analysis of what the effectiveness will be. And these are just facts. And if you disagree with their conclusion based on their facts, then you are ignoring the facts. The reality is that there are a number of situations in which the facts are absolutely clear-cut, and the conclusion you would draw from them is clear-cut, is pretty limited. And the generalization that everybody should share the same facts is of limited use.

Russ Roberts: Well, you make the point--there are a lot of facts. As one listener, EconTalk once wrote me, and I'll put his name in the transcript offhand [Sam Thomsen--name supplied by Russ Roberts; Econlib Ed.], but he said, 'There are a lot of dots in the universe. You can connect them up to make any shape you want. But the question is: Why did you leave out some of the other ones?' And I think that's the big challenge in any kind of use of data.

Bill James: Exactly. That's stated better than I could.

Russ Roberts: You recently made suggestions for speeding up baseball. Baseball's got a big problem, I believe. I'm a huge fan. But, as I get older, and I see what young people are interested in, and what keeps their attention, baseball appears to be a game that's designed for not being popular in the 21st century--other than the fact that you can, I guess, text and surf the Net on your phone in between innings and in between pitches. But, baseball is very concerned about this. And they are trying to speed up the game. And they haven't been very successful. And most of the suggestions have not been very successful. You recently wrote an essay on this, and you suggested a very different approach. Why--what were some of your ideas, and why do you think that approach is better than the sort of standard ones of timing people with a clock and penalizing them and that kind of thing?

Bill James: The problem is that we've been trying to attack a--we're trying to keep the lawn in order not by mowing the lawn but by pulling up the biggest weeds. And that's never going to work, because there's always going to be another weed. We're trying to say, 'We're going to control this particular abuse, and it doesn't have any impact at all and never will have any impact at all, because there's always going to be some other abuse.' What you have to control is not the, a specific problem, but the general problem: Which is, people time to their selfish benefit within the game but not to the benefit of the game itself. It's often in the hitter's interest to slow things down so that he's in control of the at-bat. Or, in the pitcher's interest to slow things down so that he's in control of the at-bat. But it's not in the interest of the game itself. You have to put an overall control on it of some kind, such as an economic incentive to a team to play their games in a--an unlearnt manner. Otherwise, you are never going to solve the problem.

Russ Roberts: And so, what do you suggest?

Bill James: Well, there are a lot of things you can suggest. And, the Red Sox don't like them, so I'd better be careful.

Russ Roberts: You're a consultant to the Red Sox, that's why you say that, right?

Bill James: That's right. But you could put into the system rewards to a team that played their games in a quick fashion. What you can do is you can say a game which has this many half-inning breaks, and this many play appearances, should be played in this amount of time. Right? And if the game is played in that amount of time then the team receives some sort of incentives or alert play. Whereas if a game is not played in that amount of time, then for every 5 minutes you go over, there is a disincentive. And there are a million things you could use as incentives. For example, you could use draft picks as incentives. Or you could use disbursements from the MLB [Major League Baseball] television funds as incentives. Or you could use roster rules as incentives. Or, a lot of things you could use as incentives. But you would have to--if you really want to solve the problem you would have to manage the incentives involved rather than managing the details of it.

Russ Roberts: I think you mentioned even home field advantage? Was that one of your ideas?

Bill James: That's right. You could have a system in which if a team doesn't play attention to the clock and plays slowly, that they could give up a, one or two, home series a year. Which would be, of course, a tremendous disincentive to slow play.

Russ Roberts: Couldn't it just be simpler? Couldn't it be, um--and I'm sure people have proposed this--the pitcher takes more than 25 seconds, a ball is called automatically? A batter that takes so many seconds, a strike is incurred? What's wrong with that?

Bill James: What's wrong with it is it won't work. Because, if you punish one delay-of-game, another one will appear. There are many, many different ways that a player can waste time within a baseball game, throwing to first base; commercial breaks; the batter stepping out; pitchers taking too long; the fielder is moving around on the field; defensive positioning. We have tried, since at least 1960 to regulate the problem by regulating one of these or another. But, if we can persist in trying to regulate specific behaviors, what's going to happen is we're going to get into fights about whose fault that was. Was it the pitcher's fault, but he took too long between pitches? Was it the batter's fault, but he didn't get ready until the last instant? I mean, I'm not saying that that approach could not make any progress. For example, if you could convince the umpires not to call 'Time' when the batter asked for 'Time,' you would make progress. It's actually--in a certain sense, a really simple problem in that it's simple--it's obvious what the solutions are: Stop calling 'Time'. But we don't have the determination to do those kind of brutal things, like order the umpires to stop, not call 'Time.' So, the problem will persist until we change the incentives.

8:53
Russ Roberts: It's a beautiful example of public policy generally--that, you fix one thing here, you monitor one thing here, and you cause an unintended consequence somewhere else that doesn't, that actually will often make things worse. And it reminds me that--I think you were an economics major in college, is that correct?

Bill James: I was. Yes.

Russ Roberts: So, one of the great themes of economics, some of the themes of economics that I think about all the time are, we just mentioned one: Incentives. There's: The seen and the unseen. There are tradeoffs; opportunity costs. And your work, to a large extent, or applications of those ideas: You wanted to measure whether stolen bases were good for a team, you didn't just look at the stolen base; you looked at the fact that sometimes people were caught stealing--the unseen. You noticed that people walked. And that was boring to most people. And they didn't, their statistics of the day didn't account for it; they just used batting average not on base percentage. And, as a result we learned that getting on base was extremely important no matter how you did it. Did the study of economics affect you in any conscious way? You are clearly--you think like an economist--one of the reasons I've always found your work so interesting. But, I'm curious if it ever consciously affected you?

Bill James: Tremendously. I mean, yeah. Yes, absolutely it consciously affected me. In fact, all that I've done throughout most of my professional life is applied the principles of economics as best I understood them to baseball-related questions. One definition of economics is that economics is the science of value. And what I have done is try to figure out the value of everything on a baseball field: What is the value of a stolen base? What is the cost to be caught stealing? What's the value of a walk? And what's the cost of a walk to a pitcher? Essentially, what I've brought in to baseball, I brought directly from the study of economics; and I would never have done the things that I did had I not studied economics. There's no question about that.

Russ Roberts: I just want to mention that you and Bill Belichick, who was also an economics major, are my two favorite economists who don't do formal economics. And having grown up in Boston, I've been the beneficiary of both of your expertises and understanding.

11:16
Russ Roberts: And I just used the word 'expertise.' You recently wrote about the difference between science and expertise, which I thought was really interesting; and I think we are in a watershed moment in how we look at science and expertise. So, what's the difference between the two in your mind?

Bill James: Expertise establishes validity by the credentials of the person who speaks about it. And, I think I was writing about handwriting analysis.

Russ Roberts: You were.

Bill James: And, handwriting analysis--you know, crime--it has few characteristics consistent with being a science. In science, something is known to be true by methods that are shared and known to lots of people; and other people can follow the same steps and determine that this is in fact true. Whereas, in something like handwriting analysis which is based not on science but on expertise, the only way that we know that this is true is that an expert tells us that this is true. And this is problematic--very problematic in areas that rely on--we all have to rely on expertise, right?

Russ Roberts: All the time--

Bill James: I get described as an expert; you do. And, you know, we do tend to know things that others don't. But the problem with expertise is that experts tend to agree on a certain number of things that aren't true. Every field gets to be infected by accepted principles of knowledge that do not stand the test of time. So that, the scientists in one generation know that the scientists in the previous generation were wrong about hundreds of things. Science is a method of rooting those things out and discovering, and replacing them with more solid analysis. Whereas, expertise passes those things along from generation to generation.

Russ Roberts: Well, a reporter once asked me some questions about international trade; and then suddenly in the middle of the interview she had a moment of unease, and she said, 'You are an expert, aren't you?' And I was thinking about it--I'm not sure how to answer that--and I said, thinking I'd reassure her, 'Well, I wrote a book in international trade.' And she immediately said, 'Oh, okay. Fine. Thanks. Oh, that's great.' Because for her, that meant I was uttering truth. And I think in areas that are highly controversial--climate change, economic policy of various kinds, whether there should be a designated hitter in both leagues--the key central questions of life--people do tend to look to experts, and just--they want to be reassured that, 'Oh, okay.' Because they know that--we all know we can't figure everything out for ourselves. We need some help. And that credentialing thing--I find it deeply disturbing in economics, actually. You know, that people--one version of this is people say, 'Well, you know, Hayek'--who I happen to respect greatly and have learned a lot from--'Hayek was in favor of Social Security.' As if I'm therefore supposed to be in favor of Social Security myself. Because Hayek was. And I always say, 'Well, he's not a prophet. He didn't get his words from Mt. Sinai. I'm allowed to disagree with him.' It's crazy.

Bill James: And, in a true science--I think true scientists understand that. If a Junior High or an undergraduate physicist is able to prove that Albert Einstein is wrong about something, then, he's supposed to be taken seriously despite his lack of credentials. Of course, it's difficult for that to happen. But, it's supposed to happen.

Russ Roberts: And, it can, and does. And, of course, as you say--I did an interview with Chuck Klosterman on But What If We're Wrong? Because there are thousands of things, as you point out, that we're wrong about. Right now. We just don't know what they are. It would be great if we could just get an expert to tell us which are the wrong things. And we should have the right ones.

Bill James: Exactly.

Russ Roberts: Now, you were writing about a ransom note for JonBenét Ramsey in that story. And what was your conclusion? A lot of people had speculated that that ransom note had been written by her mother. What was your thought on the evidence?

Bill James: It could not be more obvious that it was not written by her mother. And no expert will go into court and swear that it was written by her mother. But many experts will opine, not in court, that it was written by the mother. And, the problem is that the construction of the letters is identical between Patsy's handwriting and the ransom note. The way that they construct letters is the same. But, the individual execution is just totally different. So the question is whether you focus on the construction of the letters or the execution of the letters. And the way the letters are executed is different with every letter. I mean, the way she makes her 'a's is different; the way she makes her 'b's, her 'c's, her 'd's--the construction is always the same but the same but the execution is always different.

Russ Roberts: And is this an example--which is true in economics constantly--of people who want to believe something, so they convince themselves that it must be true, and only note it and cherry-pick the things that are similar?

Bill James: Right. Right. You construct a narrative, and then you fill in facts that fit your narrative.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. We all do that, of course. How did you get interested in crime? Is it a natural outgrowth? Is it a search for truth? Is it the elusiveness of truth and how challenging it is?

Bill James: I think so. Crime stories are by their nature puzzles, because crime--one old definition of murder is: A murder is a killing done in secret. Since it's done in secret, it creates a puzzle. And puzzles bother me. I've been interested in crime stories since I was less than 10 years old--as soon as I started reading the newspaper. Newspapers are full of them. And the way that I tried to figure out the world as a young person was through the newspapers.

17:46
Russ Roberts: Now, you've changed how a lot of people thought about baseball. Not everybody. There are still some holdouts. And, because of Michael Lewis, and the book Moneyball, which was an application of your thoughts and insights and analysis, you changed how people think about a lot of things. Not just baseball, but people talk about taking a 'moneyball approach,' by which they mean some hidden advantage that's being missed; some opportunity that the data might illuminate. What's your--are there areas of sports, and maybe in baseball, where you think that's been taken too far? And, are there are areas you think are ripe for application that have not been done yet?

Bill James: Well, I wouldn't say that it's taken too far. We do have a lot of problems in our area, and one of those is that people discover an advantage and want to rush toward the exploitation of that advantage, often without stopping to consider whether the negatives of doing that might outweigh the positives. A few years ago, the relevant example was defensive shifts. Once we had good charts, scientific charts, of where batters hit the ball, people immediately wanted to start moving the fielders to where the balls were hit, without stopping to prove that this was actually, I was going to say[?], more hits. And I was--I got on the wrong side of that debate, because I kept saying, 'Let's hold on. Let's hold on. Let's make sure what we are doing is right.' But, it turned out that there were more benefits than costs to shifting in a lot of cases. Thus, you know, I was on the wrong side of the issue. But we're in a similar debate now about how soon you go to the bullpen. What is called 'bullpenning,' which means playing the entire game with pitchers pitching just a couple of innings at a time. I mean, there is an advantage in that, in that a relief pitcher pitching just a couple of innings has the same advantage that a sprinter does, as opposed to a marathoner. You can pitch more effectively in a short burst than you can in a more sustained effort. And there's no question about that. The thing is that: Can you apply that without limit--without causing yourself other problems that are greater than your benefits?

Russ Roberts: Well, it slows down the game a lot--

Bill James: yes--

Russ Roberts: the use of the bullpen, right? Because that--

Bill James: It can.

Russ Roberts: It can. And has. Recently, I think.

Bill James: That's another thing that's going to--you know, if you regulate how rapidly the pitcher changes, then that's another thing that consumes the time that you saved.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. They'll figure that one out easily.

20:39
Russ Roberts: That reminds me of a question that's bothered me for a long time. I don't know if you've ever written on it. Which is: I've often noticed that after a successful--it just seems to my intuition that this is more of a problem in baseball than other sports. After a successful season, a World Series run, for example, that the pitchers the year after struggle to be as effective. And, it could be just luck: They won the World Series because they happened to have a good string of luck. And then it's reversion to the mean. But, it's also possible to me--and I assume this is true--that in situations of high import--crucial at-bats, crucial innings, crucial games, pitchers reach back for a little bit extra and damage themselves to some extent. You think there's any truth to that? They try harder. With certain batters. With certain innings. With certain games. They try harder.

Bill James: There could be some truth to that. But, pitching is a perilous activity by its nature. And, the more of it you do, the more likely you are to encounter some sort of negative [?] free arm and take a step backward. So, it has not been established that I am aware of that there is a special risks associated with [?] in play. Although a lot of people believe that there is. But I don't think it's clearly established.

Russ Roberts: I guess one way to think about it is whether a fastball gets faster in those crucial situations. I'm not thinking of "trying harder"--which I think is a bizarro concept for professionals--that somehow, you know, I love this when they say, 'They never quit.' It's kind of their job to do their job. I don't even think--it's bizarre that people would say that. But, rearing back for a little bit extra has always seemed to me to be a real thing. But I don't know.

Bill James: Right. I think it is a real thing. But it's also, particularly in baseball, a dangerous thing. But also you see that in basketball. In basketball, with the game on the line with 2 minutes to play, score a tie, one of the things the coach is going to tell the players is, 'Don't try to be a hero here. Don't try to do something that is not within your skillset just because the game is on the line. That won't work.' Instead, you have to have--the coach has to have something in his back pocket that he's worked on and planned for to pull out at that moment.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. When you get to the--I don't know if you didn't want to answer, or just forgot--but are there are other areas of sports that you think are ripe for the sabermetric approach? The sabermetric approach being the phrase that you coined to describe the application of data and facts to the question and facts, of baseball?

Bill James: There are so many of them that it's beyond anyone's understanding. My belief is the things that we don't know outnumber the things that we do know. Not by 10% or 20%, but by ratio of billions to one. Consequently, when you remove a little bit of ignorance from the world, it doesn't have any impact on the amount that remains, because it's the ratio--because of the ratio. Just last night, I was watching a football game; and there was a play in which a quarterback, Kirk Cousins, threw a flat pass that was tipped[?] at the line of scrimmage and then intercepted. So, I went on Twitter, and asked my Twitter followers: What's the data on this? Is throwing a flat pass, because it may be tipped at the line, is throwing a flat pass more likely to be intercepted than a pass that has some loft to it? And, the answer I got was: Nobody knows. It's never been studied. There are millions of things like that: just, you know, that seem obvious. It's an obvious question you'd think someone knows the answer. But nobody does.

Russ Roberts: Do you follow other sports? With anything close to the intensity with which you used to follow baseball? And I don't know how much you follow baseball now. I assume still quite an intense amount.

Bill James: Yeah. I'm a huge college basketball fan. I live in Florence, Kansas, the home of the JHawks. I go to every JHawk home game. The Jhawks play in Allen Fieldhouse, which is an historic fieldhouse. I've seen more than half the games that are played in Allen Fieldhouse. It's--I've been to games for a long time. And, it's a big part of my life.

Russ Roberts: Well, I think you are 5 years older than I am. I'm 63. According to my father, when I was 3 years old and we lived in Ames, Iowa, my dad was going to--I was [?] for grad school, we saw, and I was [?] played Kansas. Which would have been Wilt Chamberlain's time.

Bill James: That's right.

Russ Roberts: So, I guess that was probably an away game. You probably weren't there. But I like to think we were kind of close there.

25:33
Russ Roberts: Is there anything that you've changed your mind about? And why? Importance? Is there anything that you mocked in your mind, at least, the traditionalist, or the older approach to baseball that you later conceded to yourself or to the public that, 'Yeah, they were right about that?'

Bill James: Well, there--I'm wrong about so many things that it's hard to pick one. I mean, every book is, in essence, a review of what we wrote of last year of what we were right and what we were wrong. How can we improve what we did? But, about an answer to your question: There is a whole area called chemistry and character--

Russ Roberts: Yep--

Bill James: that--and the problem with it--and I used to, I'm sure I used to write derogatorily about people who referred to these things. I would so write mockingly about anyone who pretended to understand these things. But, what I understand, as an old person that I did not understand as a young person is that a problem with these concepts is not that they are false, but that they are too broad. The problem with the concept, the chemistry, is not that it's a real thing, but that it's so ubiquitous that it encompasses hundreds of different things. And, in order to understand it, we have in front of us, a long, long path that we have to walk of breaking down that huge concept in chemistry or in individual character into components; and gaining an understanding of each of those components, before we have any, before we should be discussing the overarching concepts of that makes them exempt[?].

Russ Roberts: Yeah, I just don't--I'm skeptical about our ability to measure those in any useful way, right? I think--again, as a Red Sox fan, John Farrell and Terry Francona, I think, ran a good clubhouse. That's the impression I got, whatever that means. As you said, I don't know exactly what that means. Then there came a time when they weren't. When Francona wasn't running a good clubhouse. Evidently, the players, they chicken. Suddenly things went off the rails, in between innings or something. But, it clearly--it matters. But I can't imagine we'll ever have much insight into it. But, you disagree?

Bill James: No. Ten years ago I would have agreed with you. But now I think we can gain a--I think we can improve our understanding of those areas. I think, you know, we might be 100 years away from truly understanding the bunt. But I think that we can improve those, our understanding. I think we could--I think I have an idea now, which I didn't 10 years ago, about how you could approach those problems.

Russ Roberts: You're going to keep that to yourself, I assume.

Bill James: No; I've written about it. But I'm too old to benefit from it anyway, right? We're not going to--[?]-- until I've been dead for a long time. So, there's no benefit to me.

Russ Roberts: Well, I thought you'd share with the Red Sox and not let anyone else have it. That's what I was thinking.

Bill James: Nah. It's too big a subject. The Red Sox aren't going to figure it out, either. I mean--Terry Francona knows something. Right? Anybody who thinks Terry Francona doesn't know anything that we don't know in our field about managing the clubhouse or to keep the right game chemistry--anybody who thinks he doesn't know anything is wrong. He does. But, creating a systematic equivalent of that is a big task.

29:25
Russ Roberts: So, one of the things I emphasize on this program is humility--with respect to knowledge, especially statistical data-based questions that appear to be solved by some approach. And you seem pretty good at that, too--at least that's my reading of your understanding, that you are happy writing, 'I was wrong about this,' unlike many professional economists who that phrase has never been uttered by them in their lives. Is there anything you thought you were pretty sure about, maybe even totally sure about, that you had to go back on and realize, 'What was I thinking?'

Bill James: Well, one thing that we definitely took too hard a stance on in the 1980s--I say 'we,' but I should say myself--is clutch hitting.

Russ Roberts: That's what I was thinking about. Yeah.

Bill James: There was early analysis in sabermetrics which suggested that there was probably no such thing as a clutch hitter. And I had bought into that analysis, and endorsed it, and seconded it.

Russ Roberts: So fun. Because it's so contrarian to the received wisdom.

Bill James: Right. What we know for certain, now, is that the concept of clutch hitting was enormously overstated by previous generations. Anyone who says it knows that it's not what it was once believed to be. But: The conclusion that it doesn't exist at all and that no one has an ability to step forward in a key situation was reached too early by bad methods. And, we should have known better.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. It's--it's the same issue of the hot hand in basketball, it's the same [?] challenge. It's actually a surprisingly difficult question to analyze carefully. A lot of people criticize me for being too skeptical about data. And yet, I'm very passionate about the application of data to baseball. And I feel that way because it's a pretty closed system--the relationship between performance and outcomes. It's not perfect, of course. There's uncertainty; there's all kinds of random elements that enter in. But I think of it as a closed system, as opposed to, say, the economy, where people are trying to measure, say, the effect of stimulus spending. Do you agree with that? Do you think that's true?

Bill James: Oh, absolutely. That is why baseball fascinates us, I think--is that it's a miniature universe which is small enough that one could figure out what is happening within that miniature universe. I mean, all of the things that we argue about in baseball have parallels in real life. But, in baseball, the universe is small enough and closed enough that we have a chance to figure it out. Whereas, real life is so messy and so complicated that we have little chance to figure it out. I mean, what we were just talking about--team chemistry--it's not a baseball issue. It's an issue that affects every business and the economy and society in general. But, in the society in general it's so complicated that we're not talking about a hundred years to figure it out, but thousands. In baseball, the universe is small enough--it's a closed universe, so you've got a chance to figure out what's happening there.

Russ Roberts: Even in that small universe, of course--well, there's one other important point which is that baseball has a lot of individual activity, individual interactions. So, where I'm pretty sure Tom Brady is a really good quarterback; but I'm not so sure that if he had to play for the Cleveland Browns from Day 1 that he'd be anybody.

Bill James: Right.

Russ Roberts: I'm pretty sure Bill Belichick's a good coach; but there's a lot of randomness in sports outcomes--people complain, my fellow Patriots fans complain, 'We could have won 7 Super Bowls.' Yeah, and we could have lost all 5 that we won, too. All of them were close games where little, small things here and there could make a difference. Whereas, in baseball, it's true that if you're lucky you might get to bat a little more often against mediocre, bad pitchers in the course of a year. But it's 162 games--it's really hard to argue that José Altuve is not a good offensive baseball player. But you could argue that a lot of other things in the real world--they are just not as--a lot of the other variables aren't present; and I think that's the closed/open aspect of it that's relevant.

Bill James: Right. By the way, [?] the small issue: we wondered for years whether it was true that some players might have good years because the team just doesn't face a lot of good pitchers.

Russ Roberts: By random luck of the rotational way it plays out.

Bill James: Right. But we finally reached a consensus that, no, that's not true. It's not a big variable in whether teams have good years or not. You know, you might explain a two-game variation; but the standard deviation of luck based on who you face in terms of starting pitchers is probably less than a game a year.

34:54
Russ Roberts: You went from being--crazy guy in the basement who had this self-published thing called the Bill James--the Baseball Abstract, I think it was called originally. Which I loved. 1977. It was like an exhilarating thing, when I found it; and when I got it every year. And now, you are a consultant to the Red Sox; you've been involved, I think for some time in arbitration cases. What most surprised you in that move from outsider to insider about what baseball is actually like, once you got on the inside? That you can share, at least? The most surprising thing was an understanding of how many people contribute to a championship. And it literally is impossible to explain to an outsider how many people it requires doing how many different jobs at a high level in order for a baseball team to win a World Championship. And, the number of streams--the number of little streams that feed into that river, is--it's almost incalculable. You'd have to--if you [?] on a single player--let's say, Dustin Pedroia--you have to look at everybody who had a big influence on Dustin Pedroia, which may include your Minor League managers, your Minor League coaches; it may include the scouts--the first scout who focused on him and the other scouts who focused on him. But it also includes, you know, his father, and his high school coaches. And, all of those people had some impact on the Red Sox's eventually winning World Championships in 2007 and 2013.

Russ Roberts: So, I can appreciate that. Why did that come to your mind? You could have understood that in 1977: that, for Dustin Pedroia to have a good year in 2007, he had to have had all kinds of good things happen. What made that insight so vivid to you?

Bill James: Just seeing it in--what makes it vivid is seeing it in action. When you work around the team, you see these people come and go. And, you run into a lot of people who are trying to claim their little acre of credit or their little inch of credit. And they are all right. They are all correct. They all deserve it. So, you just--I don't think I could have understood it in 1977 because it runs counter to the other point we were just making: which is, we were talking about being a closed universe. And it is a--it does appear to be a closed universe. In a sense it is. But, it also draws upon a much larger and more open community.

Russ Roberts: So, when I watch football players after a game, from each side, they swarm the middle of the field; and usually they're smiling as they face these people who have been trying to rip their head off for the last 2, 3 hours. And it's always struck me that those of us outside football have no understanding whatsoever of what it's like to be a football player. We think we do, because we see, 'Oh, he got knocked down; that must have hurt.' But, you know, they hurt for days after a game. Now we're starting to get some appreciation of it because of the worries about concussions. But I think there's a camaraderie about what they experience, literally as warriors, that we on the outside don't know. Is there anything like that in baseball that you observed that is--I'll give you an example. Fans will cry after a loss. Some players will, too, of course; and some go out and have a good time. Are there things like that in terms of the psychology of a player who has to play 162 games that have, that you notice?

Bill James: Well, I'm not all that close to what happens on the field, so my ability to observe that is limited. There is a world there that we can't enter. I mean, no matter what you--an awful lot of people approach a Major League player and try to buy his respect for my, their understanding of what he's going through. And, it's a futile task, because you cannot enter their world unless you are one of them. And it's never going to happen, right? I think that you get a little bit of a sense of that if you have a child who does karate or tae kwan do or something. There you get a little bit of a sense of that--that these young people will try to knock each other flat; and they actually are enjoying doing it. And they create a little universe in themselves--there's a shared experience that is meaningful to them and you can't share it.

Russ Roberts: I remember--it's probably 1979 Baseball Abstract--where you talked about Butch Hobson; and you said he played baseball like a football player. And as a result, his elbow had about 900 chips floating in it--bone chips--and he couldn't throw. And so he--he was not just a below-average fielder, he was perhaps the worst fielder of maybe the 20th century. And you wonder whether a lot of players are like that; and you want to say, 'Don't crash into the wall. It's not worth it.' I just wonder if that kind of advice is not receivable by the recipient.

Bill James: Yeah. I don't know. But I have said in meetings with scouts in which the scouts would talk about a player having a football mentality. And, it's the same observation that I had about Butch Hobson. The scouts will sometimes say, 'This guy's got a football player's mindset. He wants to dominate every play.' But, in baseball there are too many plays. You can't win by trying to dominate every play. You'd just wipe yourself out. You've got to look at the long, the big picture. And so, it is an observation that other people make as well.

41:22
Russ Roberts: Recently, Joe Morgan suggested that steroid users should never be allowed in the Hall of Fame. They don't belong in the club. I don't know if you've written about that. I apologize if I haven't seen it. But, have you written about it? What are your thoughts on that? And have you thought about whether steroids actually made a difference or not? We've had Art de Vany on this program, who suggests that Barry Bonds and Sosa, McGwire, were just extraordinary home-run hitters; and we were fooled by the fact that they had big muscles into thinking that's why they hit home runs.

Bill James: Well--you'd have some distance to go to convince me about that one. I mean, I don't have any question in my own mind, that these steroids did have a huge impact. Where I think that--look, I--I'll end this up by talking about respect for the other side's opinion on this. This is the way I see this: Rules have to be enforced in order to be rules. If they are not enforced, the essential nature of their being rules is lost. There has to be a written policy, and a specific set of guidelines that say: If you do this, we will find you and this is how we will find you and this is what will happen. Baseball, in the steroid [?] didn't have any of those things. So, players could use steroids without any consequence. And, a player has massive incentives to succeed. So, of course, players did use steroids to help them succeed because there were massive incentives to do so, and in reality there was no rule against it. People come along after the fact and say, 'That was outside the rules.' And it's very much like the illegal immigration debate--

Russ Roberts: Yeah--

Bill James: And, if you don't enforce that rule at the time that you are supposed to enforce it, which is at the place where you are supposed to enforce it, it becomes very hard to say, after the fact, that we--that this--

Russ Roberts: They are a cheater--

Bill James: They are a cheater. Because we didn't enforce the rules. I don't think that's--I don't think you can do that. I don't feel that any action against McGwire or Bonds or Clemens or any of those other people accused of using steroids is--if it was in the period when there were no rules, and no rules were being enforced, I don't feel that there's a justification for that. That's my opinion. On the other hand, I do know that Mr. Morgan and others merely want for the game to be--it is better for, if we play the game without those things. Right? It's better if we can play baseball without using substances that may harm us. And without using artificial things that create statistical illusions. It's better if we can do that[?]; and I know that these people merely wanted to keep the game healthy, wanted to keep it pure; and did not want anyone to get unfair advantage. And so there is general perspective on the issue. But I do disagree with it.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. We're not doing this over video; but when you said that thing about rules that aren't enforced aren't rules, I spread my arms and looked to the heavens. So, I can't document that. But, long-time listeners will know that we make a big distinction on here, on the program, between law and legislation. Legislation are the things that are decreed by the--by government policy and statutes; but law is what is actually what people follow. And there are a lot of laws that aren't legislation. And, there's a lot of legislation that aren't laws. And what you are saying is that: There is no norm. There is no norm to--it's like the--there's so many rules in baseball that aren't written down. There's so many rules in prisons that aren't written down. We had an episode with David Skarbek on that, which I recommend to listeners because it's so fascinating. But it's an enormously important point, which you said very well.

Bill James: Thank you.

Russ Roberts: Is there any--we're talking a little bit about the Hall of Fame, there, implicitly. Is there any--and you wrote a very thoughtful book on the Hall of Fame--do you have a personal player that you feel strongly about who deserves to be in the Hall of Fame? Are there any that you have an emotional attachment to? Like, for me, it's Jim Edmonds. I think Jim Edmonds was an extraordinary player. But he's not--I don't think he's going to make it.

Bill James: He's not going to make it this year. Or he's not going to make it in the next 10 years. He was an extraordinary player; eventually there may be more recognition of that. The guy who you sought[?] was Minnie Minoso--that was a long time ago. And Minnie played in the 1950s. Minnie was not--he was a player of--you know, he was Cuban, but he was quite dark. And he was discriminated against first in an absolute manner: 'You can't play because you are black.' But later, in a lesser level, so that he didn't get to play in the Majors until he was halfway through his career. Then he had an extraordinary career anyway. And I feel that Minnie should be in the Hall of Fame. But he's not anywhere near going in.

47:01
Russ Roberts: Do you believe the data on catchers being able to frame pitches? And have, you think umpires have responded to those claims in any way? And, finally, do you think we are going to go to a world where umpires aren't out there but electronics are, for accuracy, for balls and strikes?

Bill James: It's kind of a Schroedinger's Cat problem. That, once you expose that this, this is being done--and you demonstrate that it is being done--that it can't be done any more. Because people know that you are trying to do that. I do think we have reached--I think a corner has been turned. Whereas, 5 years ago, some catchers were really good at framing pitches. Now, it is dangerous for a catcher to grab a pitch and draw it back into the strike zone, because the umpire will see that movement and will decide that the ball was outside the strike zone--or he would be trying to drag it back in. The, uh, so, I believe in it; but not too much. You know.

Russ Roberts: You think there are make-up calls in sports like that? Also, where you get one wrong, you realize you [?] one later?

Bill James: Umpires say that they are able to not, to learn not to do that. I suspect that probably they are. And again, it relates earlier question about how do you see things different after your profession or when you are an amateur? When you are an amateur, you tend to think that nobody will get to that level at which your emotion doesn't cloud your judgment. But you do. You do reach that level when you are making decisions about baseball players that you stop being a fan enough to know that a play on a different team really is better--I'm not going to say it is better than Dustin Pedroia because it might cause problems. But, you do reach the point at which you realize that there are players on other teams that are better than your players. And you learn to judge them without that deep, deep fans' bias. And I suspect that umpires do learn to discard that bias.

Russ Roberts: However, there is a study--that could be true. I'm not going to say, 'Studies show,' because I don't believe in that phrase--it's my least kind of phrase, probably in the discussion of these kind of things. But there is an interesting study that suggests that basketball referees favor the home team. And, of course, it would be, it could be--I'm not suggesting that there is a decree. But, if it's good for the game that home teams then do better--not infinitely, not always win, but do better--I could see that in sports you would favor the home team to make sure that you get the good--you find that that leads to get the better assignments. I just think it's interesting how--at least it from a fans' perspective, how little careful analysis there is of the accuracy of referring? And calls of course in football have become a big issue with replay; and now a little bit in baseball with replay. But, I think it would be interesting to go back and look at some of the old calls and see if there was systematic bias there. I suspect there is; maybe there isn't.

Bill James: Um, yeah. There could well be. But that touches on an issue which is a bugaboo for me, which is: journalists will not talk about umpires deciding a game, or referees deciding a game. In college basketball, in the tournament, there are an astonishing number of games which are decided in the tournament by calls by umpires that aren't necessarily right. And I don't believe that it's right not to write about those things. Of course, the players are banned by the leagues from commenting on their officiating--which I think is wrong. I don't think they should be banned; and I don't think legally they could be banned, if somebody would fight it. And, but also, the journalists cooperate in that; and they think 'We don't want to make the umpire in the story here, so we'll write about the players.' And they skip over the umpire. But it's not right; and it allows some standard umpiring to flourish, because nobody calls it out. So, I feel strongly about that issue--that journalism is on the wrong side of that subject.

Russ Roberts: Well, it's interesting to me about coaches. I think coaches do this for different reason than pursuit of truth: they'll say, 'Oh, that call didn't cost us the game. There were 40 other plays.' And 'We could have averted that being a decisive play.' And, I think they do that on purpose: they would certainly have an interest in doing that to keep their team from whining as a strategy. And, of course, many coaches do whine incessantly as a way of--I think soccer, it's a lot of control; I think it's really unfortunate. And it's true in basketball, too, the tendency to try to draw a foul call by doing something that's dishonest--deceptive is a better word; it's not dishonest. What do you think of that?

Bill James: Um, for a couple of years I coached one of my son's Little League Baseball teams. And, these were just 8- and 9-year-old kids. But that actually is one of the keys to having a good year--is, you've got to get the kids not to focus on the umpire. What 8-, 9-year old kids will do is: A call will go against them; they'll start complaining about the umpiring. And, you've got to tell them, 'Guys, we are not blaming the umpires for this. This is on you. It's not on them.' And, of course professionals have been told that since they were 8 years old, so they have a different perspective on it. But, I do think that--a coach has a legitimate reason that he has to keep his players focused on what they're doing rather than on what the umpire is doing.

Russ Roberts: For sure. Did those 8- and 9-year olds know who their coach was?

Bill James: No, they didn't have a clue.

Russ Roberts: Because if I'd been the dad of one of those kids, I'd want to say, 'Guys, we're going to mop up this league. We've got the greatest baseball thinker of all time in our dugout.'

Bill James: You ought to try that. There were people who--I don't know how many of the parents would argue with me about this, that, and the other. And you can't say this, of course, but you're thinking, 'Do you guys have any idea who you are arguing with?'

Russ Roberts: Right. 'I'm an expert. I am an actual expert.'

Bill James: Right.

Russ Roberts: Having been a Little League coach myself--which is one of the great character-building exercises of all time--I'm very sympathetic.

54:03
Russ Roberts: But it reminds me of another thing I wanted to ask you, as a consumer of sports commentary--which has improved immensely over the last 40 years, because of you, and others like you. There's been a huge improvement in the thoughtfulness and analytical nature of sports writing. But there's still quite a bit that's not very analytical, not very thoughtful. And one of the ways that manifests itself in my--there's a lot of ways, but one of them is that a manager will make a decision, or a coach, and it doesn't turn out well. And the fans go nuts. And they can't understand why so-and-so pinch hit for that guy, or didn't pinch hit for that guy; why Pete Carroll called that passing play--it was so obvious a run was better. And I'm struck, as an outsider, and I would love to hear your perspective, of how ignorant we are of what goes into those kind of decisions. It goes back to the chemistry point--the care with which a manager will take not to discourage a player; that they're looking ahead to other situations. I just have the feeling that many of the things that are called 'stupid' are not.

Bill James: Right. And within an organization I will tell you that it does become tremendously important that you not second-guess your manager on an hour-to-hour basis. Because, once you start permitting it to happen, then everybody in the front office is second-guessing the manager 10 times every game. And it does interfere with the operation of your franchise. So, you just can't allow that to happen. But, there is an area in which, as a professional, I have an entirely [?] outgrow it when it gets to [?]. I mean, I can stay on the page when it comes to the Red Sox. I don't second-guess Red Sox managers, even in my own mind. But, when it's not the Red Sox, and I do. An example is Dave Roberts' going to the bullpen: in my view ridiculously early and for no damn good reason, for no good reason, in the World Series. Roberts went to the bullpen early, and ran out of pitching. And I was like any other fan: I thought, 'Why in the world would he do that?'

Russ Roberts: Does it make you try to think of why it might be true? Why it might have been a good decision?

Bill James: Well, it started a debate--in this case it started a debate on that issue.

Russ Roberts: Well, Dave Roberts is one of those people who, one of the millions of people who made that Red Sox championship possible--with one single play. Ironically, a stolen base, right?

Bill James: --right.

Russ Roberts: that you and I are very skeptical about, in general. For me it's the Joe Maddon use of the bullpen the year before--keeping Chapman in for as long as he did. It was driving me crazy. I was--despite my having two Cardinals fans in my family, having made the mistake of living in St. Louis and they don't like the Cubs. I was rooting for the Cubs. And I just--he was killing me. But, they managed to somehow win the game.

Bill James: Right. Despite some decisions that didn't work out, in the end it did. And everybody--if it works out in the end then everybody forgets the interim decision--

Russ Roberts: Any stella[?] genius. Thank goodness. Right.

Bill James: But are you saying it's a mistake to let him [?]?

Russ Roberts: Well, it was obviously was. Because if I hadn't, my kids wouldn't have been Cardinal fans. And we've had a lot of pain in my family, because I have two children who are very, very intense Cardinal and St. Louis general Rams fans, now, LA Rams fans. But, you know, unfortunately, the Red Sox and the Cardinals, the Patriots and the Rams, went head to head more than once. Which is--it's tough. It's tough. I've got to pretend I don't care.

Bill James: Well, in one company, John Henry, owner of the Red Sox, grew up as a Cardinals fan and was a passionate Cardinals fan. And he told me that in 2004, when the Cardinals were playing the Red Sox in the World Series, it was hard for him to root for the Red Sox. Although he obviously did. But that tug of, to see those Cardinals come through was still there.

Russ Roberts: Wow. That's fascinating.

58:22
Russ Roberts: Now, you were, at least, a lifelong--at some point in your life--a Royals fan. Are you still a Royals fan? Does being associated with the Red Sox make--is that hard for you?

Bill James: Well, being a Royals fan was hard no matter where you were.

Russ Roberts: They had a few great years.

Bill James: Yeah. The Red Sox offered me a job in 2002, and this was after 10 years of, in which the Royals had lost something like a thousand games--it wasn't a thousand, but it seemed like it. And it was really, really tough being a Royals fan, anyway. Once I had a reason not to be a Royals fan, it was really, really easy to give that up. So, I still--I mean, I watch the Royals and I root for them because my mother-in-law does, and she uses [?], and you like to see her have a good day; you like to see your other friends have a good day. But, I don't care that much, honestly.

Russ Roberts: Wow. That's interesting. I wouldn't have thought that. So, if it was Red Sox against Royals, to get into the World Series, you'd root for the Red Sox? Or, do you care about anybody?

Bill James: The Red Sox--

Russ Roberts: Or maybe you don't have any teams you care about?

Bill James: No, no. If the Red Sox fired me tomorrow, I'd still root for the Red Sox for the rest of my life. It's--I'm committed.

Russ Roberts: Back in February 2016 you wrote a really provocative essay on self-righteousness, and that we've become, 1) a nation of whiners--which we alluded to earlier, and 2) we don't stand up for ourselves, and 3) we're overconfident about a bunch of stuff. What was your argument? What do you mean by--and of course we've seen it play out on college campuses a lot on speech. What was your argument about self-righteousness?

Bill James: Self-righteousness is the great problem that afflicts our political culture. And, the problem is that large numbers of people on both ends of the political spectrum are so convinced that they are correct and that failings to see their correctness are moral failings, that we have lost much of our ability to communicate from one end of the spectrum to the other. And, there's no justification for it on either end. None of us understand the world. The world is vastly more complicated than the human mind. No one understands whether these policies are going to have the intended effects, or whether the unintended effects are going to be greater than the intended effects. No one knows the answers to those questions. And the people who are convinced that they know the answers to those questions are just wrong. And it's become a huge concern, because people are so angry, based on their self-righteousness, that we are: anger repeatedly expressed--anger building on anger, building on anger eventually leads to violence. And we need to get people to back away from the conviction that they are right and see that they may be wrong not about something but about everything.


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