No one is cursed ⚾
"We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty."
—Data scientist Nate Silver
> the undoing | cursed
After adopting a data-driven approach for evaluating recruits, the Oakland A's baseball team identified unconventional talent that was being overlooked elsewhere in the league.
Their new strategy for analyzing players led the A's to rely less on the error-prone human intuition of recruiters. They eschewed multimillion-dollar superstars and assembled a team of undervalued players that could win on a budget.
To get there, the A's found a Yale economics graduate, Paul DePodesta, who could analyze and interpret granular performance data.
- The team needed to do more than just rely on gut feelings, another name for our intuition or subconscious mind.
Using DePodesta's methods, the A's spotted hidden recruitment opportunities.
They assembled a team of players that often defied conventional wisdom within the A's and around the league.
The A's nonetheless proved the power of data and science by enjoying a long stretch of wins that surprised and impressed fans and analysts in 2002. 📊📈
- The A's experience showed how cognitive biases and judgment errors could impair even the most experienced and knowledgeable sports recruiters.
Incorporating more scientific understandings revealed how baseball teams for decades had relied on mental hunches, premonitions, illusions, and fallacies that led teams to believe they knew more than they really did, wrote journalist Michael Lewis in his book about the A's, "Moneyball."
This scientific revolution in professional baseball shed light on staggering inefficiencies all across professional sports. And everything else.
Lewis wonders how this lack of clarity about the natural operations of our minds applies elsewhere:
>> "If the market for baseball players was inefficient, what market couldn't be? If a fresh, analytical approach had led to the discovery of new knowledge in baseball, was there any sphere of human activity in which it might not do the same?"
This inspired other professional sports teams to embrace data and science in their recruitment methods. The A's showed that baseball's relentless pursuit of costly power players was holding teams back, not propelling them to the World Series.
Baseball fans for 70 years believed that the Chicago Cubs were cursed. Fans for 80 years believed the Boston Red Sox were cursed.
When these teams embraced science and baseball analytics like the A's, suddenly they weren't cursed anymore and each won the World Series.
- next time "The technical concept of rationality is nonsense."
- listening Chet Baker "My Funny Valentine"
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