World Series, Comebacks & the Focus of Athletes

I give up on baseball a lot. If you had followed the Kansas City Athletics and now the Seattle Mariners, you would too. If you look at the gutting of great but poor teams every year you would too. Last night I gave up on the World Series. I turned off it off in the 7^th inning with Texas leading the Cardinals 7-4.

Three minutes later a good friend called, “you have got to see this,” he laughed. I turned it back on and witnessed history and athletic greatness. The Cardinals pulled to within two.

Now it is the ninth inning. Both teams bullpens are fried. Both teams exhausted, but still in the game. The lead changes six times during the game, and the Cardinals come from behind five times in the game.  Add five errors to the mix. This is about greatness not beauty

Now it is the bottom of the ninth and the Cardinals are up to bat and down by two runs. It  should be over. Neftali Feliz is throwing 98 mph. Two men on base with two outs and two strikes on David Freese, the St. Louis third baseman with one error in the game.

Kids dream of these moments. They hum the roar of the crowd, frown and stare; they focus; the kid can be either the pitcher who strikes the guy out or the batter who hits the home run. Either way, this is baseball, pure.—skill and focus against skill and focus. No people bumping and guarding you, no intermediaries, just one player pitching to another. No more naked moment of competitive testing of skill and focus exists in sport.

More often than not, this moment ends with an out. The great Casey strikes out in Casey at the Bat for a reason; that is the baseball norm. The odds of getting a hit with two outs are low. The odds of getting a hit with two outs in the bottom of the ninth are infinitesimal. Freese looks blank, clear and ready. Feliz delivers, and Freese rips a triple to left; two runs score. Game is tied and on to extra innings.

Top of the tenth, game tied again.  The Rangers’ Josh Hamilton has been hobbled all year and is fighting a slump. He comes to the plate with a man on. Hamilton looks oddly at peace but poised, ready. He slams a home run, and the Texas Rangers are up by two in the tenth.

Now it is the bottom of the tenth. The fans voices come out strangled and hoarse; no one can quite believe the game. The Cardinals have no one left on their bench.  Somehow two more cardinals end up on base. One scores on a fielder’s choice. The Rangers stand one strike from their first World Championship.

Lance Berkeman a grizzled veteran only Tony LaRusso could love walks to the plate. He settles in, takes in his surrounding and battles. The at bat culminates again with two outs and two strikes. Berkeman loops a single, and a run scores. Game tied, again. I turn off the sound for a moment and can’t shout anymore having blown my voice.

Point of information, like many fans I underappreciated this World Series and I was watching it without really have a team, so I told myself. It was an aesthetic exercise watching for enjoyment of the game. I mean I am from Kansas City and American league born and bred so how could I root for the Cardinals? But as often happens to neutral fans like I wanted to be, your body betrays you. When the Rangers got ahead my stomach clenched. Whey the Cardinals tied, I hooted. So league and state rivalry aside, I could not root for the team that signed Alex Rodriquez from the Mariners.

So a hum drum top of the eleventh and then David Freese walks to the plate again, first batter in the top of the eleventh. No need to be dramatic, he hits a walk off home run. People scream, shout, yell, dance. The Rangers trudge off in disbelief and tonight game seven will be played.

I do not know who will win tonight and do not believe it matters to the greatness of the game I witnessed and the two teams both coming back in the ninth, tenth and eleventh innings.

The point of the game to me is how Freese, Berkeman and Hamilton exemplified moral and psychological component of an elite player.

An elite athlete remains a relentless competitor. As Winston Churchhill admonished they “never, never, never give up.”

Lance Berkman got it right. When asked “what were you thinking when you went to bat” in the tenth? He answered, “I wasn’t thinking.” He is absolutely correct. To succeed at this level a player cannot afford to think. It cuts your reaction time. If you think, you’re done. A good player comes to the plate being totally present; not blank, but fully aware. They are anticipatory without anticipating, that commits them too early.

The art of superb play requires total prepared focus and recognition that enables a fine athlete to strike with the right response at the right time. Players on both teams demonstrated this.

The other side of focus and presence is not to get distracted. The world may be going crazy around you, the stakes may be suffocating and the energy may be flowing, but a player cannot afford to be moved by emotions. Emotions distract perception; they color recognition and push people to give up, try too hard, or just lose their timing.

Any one of the players could have been diverted even a nanosecond by the pressure, stakes and noise. Instead each collected himself called up his prepared awarenss and responded, well.

I know that I do not have the mental intensity and toughness to be an elite athlete or manager. I give up too much easily especially on baseball. Luckily the players in this 2011 World Series did not.

Sean Payton's Injury--Never Forget the Violence in Football

It can all look so clean and strategic on TV. The TV overlays emphasize the patterns and schemas of the football teams. The dangerous combination of beauty and force enamors football fans. But all this distanced and technologically enhanced viewing can distance and hide the reality from us, one I have mentioned before—force and violence rule football.

This week Sean Payton, the coach of the New Orleans’ Saints sat in the box calling plays, he could not be on the sideline. He is recovering from surgery last Monday to repair a torn meniscus and a broken left tibia. One Sunday ago  an NFL player ran out of the sidelines and collided with him and Payton's leg fell under the player.  Payton went down. His quarterback later joined him on the disabled list with a shattered collarbone.

Payton is not a small guy and full of the intensity and intelligence common to good football coaches. Yet the collision when he fell under a player fractured his tibia, tore his meniscus and left him with massive contusions.

You can look at the weekly list of broken and battered players who are out for the season in football, college and professional to remember that sheer collective force impacted on the human body by weaponized football players. We can follow the funeral track of premature dementia for men whose brains are battered to insensibility by the game or crippled forty five year olds. We have long lists and codes and forgotten faded once players to remind us.

What happened to Payton really should make clear to us fans on the side of the sheer energy and might unleashed on the football field.

When you stand on the sideline during an elite football game, the sheer vital force on the field overwhelms your senses. The players move so fast; they loom so big and the hits are so fierce you flinch when you feel the concussive power. You can see the players hold their bodies taught to hold the pain or bay or adjust a gait to protect a sprain, hit or bruise. The sheer sound and shaped force can be overwhelming. It feels nothing like the more sterile sense you get watching television. The graph below demonstrates where football hits rank compared to the G force impacts of flying jet airplanes!

 

Much of that power and ferocity is blunted by technique or the armor that players wear. But in Payton’s case we see the sheer violence unleashed upon an unprotected human being by a weaponized football player in full armor. An 200 plus pound football player impacts with  1600 pounds of force when he hits another player. If both players are moving that combined force grows to multiple G levels of force. In the professional league almost 300 players weigh over three hundred pounds and multiple that force impact even more.

The unprotected human body does not stand a chance. It breaks under the impact.

This reminds us that football employs mass+speed=force=impact to achieve its goals. This collision involves immense force and when it is inflicted upon a human body, it transmogrifies into violence. Beneath football's controlled force lurks ever present violence that impacts and hurts the human body.

Violence is force that inflicts pain and disruption to the human system. Every single football player imposes violence on every player on the field for every play. We should never forget this. Technique and armor diffuse some of this, but each player from grade school to professional ball endures this violence. It requires courage and strength and commitment and perhaps a little bid of madness.

As Payton’s experience reminds us, football would shatter normal humans. It would bruise and rupture our tissues; break or splinter our bones; rattle and disable our brains.

When we watch and take pleasure in the game and the beauty and power of the game, we should never forget the foundation of violence upon which it is build..

Only in Baseball: Fielder & Sabathia as Athletes

I was watching this most unanticipated World Series and wishing that the Yankees and Brewers were there. I really hate the Yankees so this has nothing to do with loyalty. No, I wanted to sort of test a hypothesis that my son and I argue about over the years. Baseball provides a haven for the most out of shape athletes in the world.

He claims that baseball is the one sport where players play who can in no way be considered real athletes. He strengthens the argument with illustrations of how many obviously out of shape lumpens actually play baseball and do so successfully. With considerable sarcasm he points out that these so called players can’t run fast or far; they are not really strong in a mano a mano sense; they are not real quick and, above all, they do not look like athletes. He likes to cite two obvious cases: Prince Fielder and C. C. Sabathia.  See these pictures as evidence.

So I wanted to watch a series where two of the most out of shape and least athletic looking human beings I have ever seen were playing. Oddly enough they both seem to possess unidimensional and unique baseball  talents that seem little related to a standard or classical conception of athleticism based upon form, speed, strength, courage and elegance..

Anyone who watches baseball knows what I am saying here. Only in baseball could you get body shapes and types of these two. We are not talking about the muscular strength and size of offensive linemen with their remarkable combination of size, strength, mass and intelligence. We are not talking about the fierce combination of strength and courage that goes into one on one battles in football or soccer or basketball where players jockey for position and movement. Certainly we are not talking about the vast endurance, quickness and strength of the modern soccer player, nor the svelte endurance and elegant form of a modern swimmer.

No, we are talking about guys who never hit triples because they would die of heart attacks between second and third. We are talking about guys who would faint the second time up and down a soccer field and guys who would suffer multiple contusions and life threatening damage if we put them in a football uniform. Can you imagine any of them trying to leap in basketball or volleyball? They would strangle themselves in the volleyball net and would suffer heart failure on the basketball court. Girth and width and ponderousness are not qualities any other sport, except sumo wrestling, values. Of course it is also a sport where the Red Sox demonstrated that  star players can eat fried chicken and drink beer during games

I am not denying that some baseball players are superb athletes and many have speed and a remarkable quickness to hit and field. I love baseball but one of its true anomalies is how human beings so obviously and incredibly out of shape and lacking endurance, quickness, speed can actually play and succeed in a professional game.

I think we should celebrate this fact that the nonathletic can play baseball and make it into an icon. After all think about Big Papi, David Ortiz, the immobile designated hitter for the Boston Red Sox. In fact the designated hitter, kind of like being a pitcher, creates a role that permits such individuals to play the sport. We might add the beloved Kung Fu Panda  Pablo Sandoval   of the World Champion Giants from last year’s World Series.

The best analogues I can think of are the accidental seven footers who populate basketball. Many of them have not so great coordination and might be quite slow or have hard hands or little leaping ability. But they are seven feet tall and can take up space and work in a narrow zone when surrounded by four athletic, swift, quick and strong players. And at least they can run up and down the court innumerable times without dying or fainting.

So let’s hear it for baseball. A last bastion! where out of shape people can still play a professional sport. Who else can say that?

Review of Moneyball: Changing a Culture & the Red Sox II

In Moneyball Oakland changes their draft approach and the movie hones in on how they  significantly change their free agent and trade approach. They do not try to replace the lost star players with their full array of talents. Instead Bean and De Podesta seek to replace their totality with a group of players who can get on base and produce runs. This means scanning the horizon for “damaged” players who may not be great all around but manifest the skills at producing on base percentage and runs that the team needs to compete.

This leads to serious conflict with his scouts who cannot and will not understand what he is trying to do. They reflect battles that still occur today in some organizations and certainly in the blog sphere between people committed to evaluate players and teams by statistical approaches that James pioneers and those who reject it in favor of classic personal scouting and broad gauged character analysis.

With the amount of money invested in modern players and with a very limited budget Beane needs higher probability returns than traditional scouting and building upon high school players can provide. He also needs a more granular analysis  of particular and unique skill sets that can produce maximum return in runs and game. This is all prelude to the modern game’s obsession with terms based upon value over replacement where players are seen as radically fungible producers of certain necessary skills and outputs.

Oakland's perilous economics and the new market conditions leave  with little room for error also requires that Beane act ruthlessly when things do not work out. In this he must essentially usurp the function of his manager in terms of player assessment and team assessment. When Jeremy Giambi does not work out, he trades him. Art Howe, an almost unrecognizable and spot on Philip Seymour Hoffman, plays his imperial manager who gets all the credit for the success and blames Beane for the failure. When Howe refuses to play Beane’s choice for first base, Beane trades Howe’s preferred player. When Howe will not start one of Beane’s projects, he trades the pitcher Howe was using. In essence Beane redefines the role of the manager as a subordinate to a game and team plan that focuses upon maximizing a  production function. It also gives the manager a large number of new tools such as a ball by ball breakdown of the probabilities of hits or outs which can open an entirely new world to a thoughtful manager.

 The movie demonstrates Beane and De Podesta slowly educating and changing some of the players approach to the bat by explaining to them the reality of what happens when they are 1-0 rather than 0-1 at the plate. Suddenly not overswinging makes concrete sense in terms of how it increases a person’s chance to get a hit or get on base. Players slowly began to change As they educate and change the culture of the players and club house, they are aggressive to remove players that do not fit or disrupt the model.

The team sets a record with a 20 game winning streak after some disastrous starts. More  importantly the success comes in the face of an incessant attack by most of the baseball establishment and insiders on Beane and this new approach. If he had failed, it would have set back the cause of analytic assessment of talent by a decade. Instead it jolts the mainstream, and one year later finds one of Beane’s admirers Theo Epstein reconfiguring the Red Sox by Beane’s principles to bring them two world series and end the “curse.”

Notice that I did not mention once that the movie stars Brad Pit who does an intense but winning star turn as Billy Beane. Pitt makes the movie but does not dominate it. For the movie tells a deeper and powerful story—any culture can become closed and blind to its own weakens. It reminds us that outsiders and good data analysis can reveal hidden patterns and important insights that anecdote and insider common knowledge miss. Too often cultures without clarity of analysis about what it is looking for resemble echo chambers repeating wisdom that sort of worked but may be less relevant for new conditions. Beane saw this and Epstein proved what happens when you couple that analysis with real money in the Red Sox success.

The movie works and reminds us that it takes courage and commitment as well as decisiveness to inject data and analysis into a self-referential and closed world. It helps to add some desperation and urgency to adapt to a new world. Serious culture change also takes a willingness to fail and take the slings and arrows of abuse. In Beane’s case it helps to have a daughter to give him perspective and keep him sane.

I find it ironic and hard that after Billy Beane  turned down the General manager of the Boston Red Sox, one of his disciples and admirers, a very young Theo Epstein, deployed the same statistical acumen and focus upon run scoring and bat discipline aided by money to win two world championships. Now exhausted after triumphs and living in the intense world of Boston sports, he may be ready to move on for very human reasons.

Theo Epstein brought two world series and revified a town and region. He ended a curse and held the team together a couple years ago when it might have gone south. Yet his team collapsed last year. Now his manager has left and it looks like Epstein will also leave Boston to go to the Chicago Cubs and see if he can exorcise another curse.The whole Boston mess saddens me but also reminds us about how a culture must be sustained even if the analytic foundations are laid. Remember Beane moved out players who did not work or perform and usurped his manager when he needed to. That did not happen in Boston's nose dive.

No one is quite clear what dynamic lead to the implosion of the Red Sox, but they represented in many ways the best the traditional and sabe metric analysis can buy. But in the stretch, the team fell apart and spun into an emotional tail spin that lead the team to come apart at the seam in terms of cohesion and performance. It happened fast, in less than six weeks. Now ugly stories are leaking out and the blame game has started, but we have some sense that levels of discipline, commitment and focus within the team may have changed.

It may be in modern athletics or in any organization, ten years of leading is enough. The Red Sox owner John Henry  saw the power of integrating statistical analysis but mused on the human reality of trying to lead a well assembled team. "The fact is that being general manager in Boston, being manager in Boston, is a terrifically tough job." There may be a "shelf life" to leading in such intense crucibles as Joe Torre or Pat Riley and others have illustrated over the years.  It may mean that the community has forgotten what it gained. It might mean that the team forgets what brought it success. It might be that the leader no longer has the energy to see through the emotional craziness—although no one claims the Cubs fans are sane.  Epstein’s leaving after the collapse of the Red Sox has its own somber logic.

Luck, culture, contagion, momentum all can play their roles. Good leaders can use fine analysis to assemble a team that should work on paper, but the analysis  only changes the probability, humans have to do the rest. 

The Challenge of Changing a Sports Culture: Review of Moneyball

The amazing success of the 2012 Oakland A's to win the American League West leads me to re-post my essay on Moneyball and how to use data analysis and human intuition to build a winning team despite smaller budgets and stacked odds. It continues its relevance because the Boston Red Sox continue to implode after a brilliant utilization of the principles.

The success of the movie Moneyball  provides a remarkable juxtaposition with the implosion of the greatest success of Moneyball’s lessons, The Boston Red Sox. Both the movie’s story of the 2002 Oakland Athletics and the crumpling of the Sox provide strong lessons on the challenges and perils of trying to change a culture, in this case baseball. As is often the case with the sports, the story of Moneyball presents a deeper lesson about society and us.

Changing a culture is hard, very hard. A culture possesses great resilience and is supported by a self-reinforcing world of recruitment where people are socialized into its norms, rise in the ranks and then succeed. The insiders then recruit and train people who replicate them and if the organization  succeeds, all these norms and languages and rituals reinforce each other.

Every organization possesses this inertia but few possess such a staggering array of accreted norms and rituals and self-reinforcing clubs as baseball. Moneyball, the movie version of Michael Lewis’ brilliant book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an unfair Game  tells a powerful tale of an attempt to confront and change the culture of baseball.

People in organizations spend most of their life evaluating other people. They do this every day even in so simple an act as deciding whether and how to answer someone’s email. The key to a culture lies in self-replication of the people and creating a common set of understandings and judgments. Moneyball sets the stage of professional baseball that bares daily judgments through the relentless competition that exposes players and managers to ruthless culling.If you can change how people see and evaluate others, you can change the culture. This is the story of Moneyball.

Moneyball makes clear evaluating players and building teams has three components. The first involves decisions to draft a player and invest in them through the minor league and bonus system. The second comprises whether to get rid of a player by cutting or trading. The trade involves both a decision to get rid of a player but also to add a player. The third dynamics grows from the decisions involved in trading but plays out as decisions to release or sign a free agent. Baseball teams like any large high performing organization incessantly evaluates, hires, fires and brings in new talent build a high performing team.

The movie introduces Billy Beane the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics. The Athletics represent the dilemma of all baseball where some very rich clubs dominate long-term talent and few clubs eke out an existence with budgets 25 percent the total of the rich clubs. Despite this difference, Beane’s teams have done well and in 2002, the year of the book/movie exceptionally well. That year the Athletics, like the Rays last year, their three top players—Beane must perform the impossible task of replacing his best players in two ways through the new draft and with free agent signings or trades.

The movie does not have time to examine Beane’s revolutionary strategy in the draft where he knows he cannot sign a number of players coveted by the Yankees or represented by Scott Boras who will hold them out. Common wisdom called for drafting very young live arms or statuesque can’t miss hitters with “high upsides.” He faces down his own senior scouts who talks about a player who “looks like a player” “has a great upside” has “five tools.” They blather on but Beane has lived the life of a failed can’t-miss five-tool player. Remember these scouts are not idiots and had helped find Oakland’s famous stable of pitchers like Barry Zito , Mark Mulder and Tim Hudson. But Beane has developed an abiding distrust of the wisdom that had such a low prediction rate.

More important Beane must draft in a world of immense inequality of resources where teams like the Athletics and Royals and Brewers and  Rays are now farm teams for the rich teams. Here he pursues aggressive decisions to go after college players rather than high school players based upon their higher probability of success in professional leagues. He also goes after players who have unique and undervalued skill sets such as the ability to get on base, walk, avoid strike outs etc. In each case, looking for a different profile enables him to discover undervalued players that other teams are not pursuing. It also permits him to make trades where he can trade a player who looks valuable by traditional standards and get a player who is more valuable by sabermetric standards. This became one of his hallmarks.

The movie focuses its narrative of how he clashes with his scouts in whom he hires as a free agent or trades for. The movie employs an incessant TV/radio background commentary to confirm the animus the baseball world  holds towards his approach. The key lies in Beane’s willingness to deploy the power of statistical analysis first pioneered by my fellow Kansas Citian Bill James.

Writing alone and in isolation James developed a wide range of statistical pictures of baseball that gave very powerful insights in such things as the natural rise and decline of the average player or the distorting value of playing in different parks or how positional hitting changed the odds of getting on base so that the percentage of getting a hit rises tremendously if a player gets a first ball rather than a strike. Literally each at bat represents a swing in probabilities. This raises the value of players with plate discipline and raises the value of not giving away outs on things like steals or bunts.  The point is that James and an emerging group of young passionate statistical analysts were developing a new way of seeing baseball and creating tools to evaluate players and team construction in new ways.

Unable to compete head up with the rich teams and distrusting the conventional wisdom of his own scouts, Beane converts to this new way of seeing by hiring Paul De Podesta from the Cleveland Indians and relying upon Podesta’s statistical and economic training to rethink how to evaluate players. Well played with tightly wound and guarded intensity Jonah Hill plays him as a character called Peter Brand in the movie. De Podesta believes in algorithms that demonstrate games are won by scoring runs and that run scoring and getting on base are the major variables in the capacity of team to win games. This de-emphasizes pitching, speed and relief pitching and changes the focus to skills like plate discipline, walks, avoiding strike outs and not giving away outs.

More importantly this new way of seeing baseball provides a way to xray players and see their skills in a new light. It enabled Beane for several years to find undervalued players and create a team organized around getting on base and scoring runs which succeeded extremely well at a cost per run one-fourth that paid by the Yankees.

The move manages to inject all these insights in a remarkably well written screenplay with both snappy and insightful dialogues. This really comes to bear when Beane and De Podesta take on the gathered scouts representing a phalanx of insider and established knowledge about what a baseball player should be and look like and think like.

The movie powerfully conveys why rethinking players evaluation matters. The economics of the game without hard caps has escalated salaries and rich teams with strong media markets can now wait upon other teams to develop players and swoop in the take them as just happened to the Rays this last year. The economics has also changed because baseball does not slot players and prices so that agents like Scott Boras have created huge bonuses for high draft rounds like Stephen Strasburg’s 15 million signing salary. 

In the status quo that Beane confronted, the highest traditional evaluated talent would get to the richest teams immediately or in five years. A small team like Oakland with an owner who would not spend money, must maximize value. It cannot play the same game other teams are playing. Neither can they play the game of paying exorbitant salaries for eight-year contracts for 31-year-old players who are already on the statistically risky side of their careers.

In Moneyball Oakland changes their draft approach and the movie hones in on how they  significantly change their free agent and trade approach. They do not try to replace the lost star players with their full array of talents. Instead Bean and De Podesta seek to replace their totality with a group of players who can get on base and produce runs. This means scanning the horizon for “damaged” players who may not be great all around but manifest the skills at producing on base percentage and runs that the team needs to compete.

This leads to serious conflict with his scouts who cannot and will not understand what he is trying to do. They reflect battles that still occur today in some organizations and certainly in the blog sphere between people committed to evaluate players and teams by statistical approaches that James pioneers and those who reject it in favor of classic personal scouting and broad gauged character analysis.

With the amount of money invested in modern players and with a very limited budget Beane needs higher probability returns than traditional scouting and building upon high school players can provide. He also needs a more granular analysis  of particular and unique skill sets that can produce maximum return in runs and game. This is all prelude to the modern game’s obsession with terms based upon value over replacement where players are seen as radically fungible producers of certain necessary skills and outputs.

Oakland's perilous economics and the new market conditions leave  with little room for error also requires that Beane act ruthlessly when things do not work out. In this he must essentially usurp the function of his manager in terms of player assessment and team assessment. When Jeremy Giambi does not work out, he trades him. Art Howe, an almost unrecognizable and spot on Philip Seymour Hoffman, plays his imperial manager who gets all the credit for the success and blames Beane for the failure. When Howe refuses to play Beane’s choice for first base, Beane trades Howe’s preferred player. When Howe will not start one of Beane’s projects, he trades the pitcher Howe was using. In essence Beane redefines the role of the manager as a subordinate to a game and team plan that focuses upon maximizing a  production function. It also gives the manager a large number of new tools such as a ball by ball breakdown of the probabilities of hits or outs which can open an entirely new world to a thoughtful manager.

 The movie demonstrates Beane and De Podesta slowly educating and changing some of the players approach to the bat by explaining to them the reality of what happens when they are 1-0 rather than 0-1 at the plate. Suddenly not overswinging makes concrete sense in terms of how it increases a person’s chance to get a hit or get on base. Players slowly began to change As they educate and change the culture of the players and club house, they are aggressive to remove players that do not fit or disrupt the model.

The team sets a record with a 20 game winning streak after some disastrous starts. More  importantly the success comes in the face of an incessant attack by most of the baseball establishment and insiders on Beane and this new approach. If he had failed, it would have set back the cause of analytic assessment of talent by a decade. Instead it jolts the mainstream, and one year later finds one of Beane’s admirers Theo Epstein reconfiguring the Red Sox by Beane’s principles to bring them two world series and end the “curse.”

Notice that I did not mention once that the movie stars Brad Pit who does an intense but winning star turn as Billy Beane. Pitt makes the movie but does not dominate it. For the movie tells a deeper and powerful story—any culture can become closed and blind to its own weakens. It reminds us that outsiders and good data analysis can reveal hidden patterns and important insights that anecdote and insider common knowledge miss. Too often cultures without clarity of analysis about what it is looking for resemble echo chambers repeating wisdom that sort of worked but may be less relevant for new conditions. Beane saw this and Epstein proved what happens when you couple that analysis with real money in the Red Sox success.

The movie works and reminds us that it takes courage and commitment as well as decisiveness to inject data and analysis into a self-referential and closed world. It helps to add some desperation and urgency to adapt to a new world. Serious culture change also takes a willingness to fail and take the slings and arrows of abuse. In Beane’s case it helps to have a daughter to give him perspective and keep him sane.

I find it ironic and hard that after Billy Beane  turned down the General manager of the Boston Red Sox, one of his disciples and admirers, a very young Theo Epstein, deployed the same statistical acumen and focus upon run scoring and bat discipline aided by money to win two world championships. Now exhausted after triumphs and living in the intense world of Boston sports, he may be ready to move on for very human reasons.

Theo Epstein brought two world series and revified a town and region. He ended a curse and held the team together a couple years ago when it might have gone south. Yet his team collapsed last year. Now his manager has left and it looks like Epstein will also leave Boston to go to the Chicago Cubs and see if he can exorcise another curse.The whole Boston mess saddens me but also reminds us about how a culture must be sustained even if the analytic foundations are laid. Remember Beane moved out players who did not work or perform and usurped his manager when he needed to. That did not happen in Boston's nose dive.

No one is quite clear what dynamic lead to the implosion of the Red Sox, but they represented in many ways the best the traditional and sabe metric analysis can buy. But in the stretch, the team fell apart and spun into an emotional tail spin that lead the team to come apart at the seam in terms of cohesion and performance. It happened fast, in less than six weeks. Now ugly stories are leaking out and the blame game has started, but we have some sense that levels of discipline, commitment and focus within the team may have changed.

It may be in modern athletics or in any organization, ten years of leading is enough. The Red Sox owner John Henry  saw the power of integrating statistical analysis but mused on the human reality of trying to lead a well assembled team. "The fact is that being general manager in Boston, being manager in Boston, is a terrifically tough job." There may be a "shelf life" to leading in such intense crucibles as Joe Torre or Pat Riley and others have illustrated over the years.  It may mean that the community has forgotten what it gained. It might mean that the team forgets what brought it success. It might be that the leader no longer has the energy to see through the emotional craziness—although no one claims the Cubs fans are sane.  Epstein’s leaving after the collapse of the Red Sox has its own somber logic.

Luck, culture, contagion, momentum all can play their roles. Good leaders can use fine analysis to assemble a team that should work on paper, but the analysis  only changes the probability, humans have to do the rest. 

Defending College Presidents on Conference Alignment II

PART II

No President can or will eliminate athletics or deliberately downgrade the athletics by going to a lower status or less economically viable conferences. As Clotfelter’s book and the politics of athletics makes clear, the external constituencies are too strong and the benefits are quite real.

This is where conference affiliation comes in. Conferences control both money and media access and can confer stature.

Let no one romanticize conferences. They are plastic and porous voluntary associations of schools that have changed a lot over the years. The Big East was created solely to gain money for east coast basketball schools. The SEC only took final shape in 1991 after the Southwest conference broke up over Texas’ hubris. The Big 12 was a shotgun wedding of my old Big 8 and the Texas remnants of the end of the Southwest Conference in 1996. The Pacific 10 has permuted from 3 to 5 to 8 to 10 to 12, and even the vaunted stable Big 10 once kicked out Michigan and lost Chicago as well as letting in Penn State. So let us be clear, the conferences are voluntary associations for the combined advantage and regulation of athletics for the member schools. They have no sacred status and constantly evolve.

Thanks to Supreme Court decisions, Universities and Conferences control their media rights. Most of the possible increases in revenues that universities can attain to offset athletic costs are tied into conferences. Media companies care nothing about Olympic sports and barely care about basketball except to fill media slots; the real money is in football. The real football money lies in conference contracts.

Except for Texas and Notre Dame, the most successful and powerful schools have agreed to assign their media rights to conferences, and conferences negotiate the complex media deals and distribute the money among the member schools.  Conferences also launch their own media networks. This economic structure launched the incredible wealth of the SEC and the Big 10 in the last ten years. It also drove the consolidation of the western teams into the new PAC-12.  So moving conferences offers one major set of opportunities for schools to increase revenue and offset structural deficits and also increase their stature. Any president who seeks to protect their school must consider conference membership.

A clear hierarchy of status and prestige exists among conferences. This cachet is both about sport as in the SEC but also extends to academic prestige as in the Big 10 (even if it can’t count). So switching conferences presents a twofold opportunity to a university and its President. It can increase the revenue stream needed to minimize the internal subsidy; the freed subsidy money can be spent on other university activities. Conference membership can also raise the profile of the school in non-athletic areas.

 If you look at recent alignment decisions, the Presidents made good calls for their schools. When Nebraska left the Big 12, it entered a better academic conference and better athletic conferences, a true win/win. It also escaped the suffocating arrogance and control of Texas in the Big 12. When Colorado and Utah jointed the PAC-12, they both experienced similar win/win. The most recent move of Syracuse and Pittsburgh to the ACC not only rationalized the ACC’s geography by connecting Boston College to the rest of the league, but served as huge prestige win/wins for both colleges.

This is not about greed or tradition; it is about financial responsibility, quality of competition and prestige. The Presidents are doing their jobs and should be praised for what they accomplished for their schools in terms of getting more revenue to close their subsidies, better competition and higher status.

Defending College Presidents on Conference Alignment I

“Greedy!” “Hypocrites!” “Traitors!” No Tradition!” University Presidents have felt a hailstorm of criticism around the most recent movements of schools from athletic conference to conference. More are on the way. Amid the universal dismay and attacks upon college athletics, special bile seems reserved for the Presidents who are portrayed as driven only by greed and hypocrisy. Even NCAA President Mark Emmert has jointed in the condemnation of athletic decisions based on greed. The criticisms are overblown, romanticize very unromantic conferences, and I believe the Presidents are making good decisions and trying to act reasonably in an irrational system.

The modern university President has an impossible job. Wide public support for public universities has collapsed. Public and private universities face yearly deficits, and legislatures brutally cut universities abandoning higher education as a public aspiration for all. The Presidents face endless economic cuts and lack of support. 

They are trying to protect their institutions in awful times and must cut jobs, classes and salaries while raising tuition. Modern college Presidents spend most of their time trying to raise money, cultivate donors, deal with legislatures and regulators while articulating a mission that can create coherence in their diverse and divided institutions. The average university President lasts about five years given the stress and political complexity of the position.

One ingredient of this witches brew stands out, the internal subsidies that athletic departments require. Although 80 million Americans care about college football, college sports is accidental appendage to a university’s real mission of teaching students and expanding human knowledge. No college Presidents except in the SEC would wed college football and basketball to universities in this way. Most wish they did not have to bother with athletics and almot all programs run large structural deficits. But external constituencies and reputation force Presidents to take college athletics seriously. The external constituencies highly value college football and basketball, far more than internal university groups. Presidents inherit this historical marriage and must make the best of it.

Good Presidents understand that modern intercollegiate athletics can be as Mark Emmert calls it “the front porch of the university.” High profile athletic competition can generate visibility and repute for the university. It can help solidify relations with alumni and stimulate loyalty with the state electorate and in the state legislature. Done well it can sometimes increase enrollments and solidify contributions to the university as described by Charles Clotfelter in his book Big-Time Sports in American Universities. 

In the past major universities such as UCLA and Michigan State University strategically used sports to raise their standing and profile out of the shadow of Berkeley and Ann Arbor. At the same time these universities increased their academic excellence. Even today this siren song tempts colleges to add money-losing football or enter the Division I athletic sweepstakes.

The problem is that athletics lose money. Let me repeat: college athletics loses money, lots of money. With the bare exception of 22 schools, at best, all athletic departments require significant external fund raising and internal university subsidies to break even.  The vast majority of Division 1 programs hemorrhage money. Like any academic endeavor, building an intercollegiate athletics program costs money and requires a large infrastructure including stadiums, facilities, coaches, compliance, health and training personnel and scholarships, academic support, staff to maintain facilities and run events and strong marketing and media staffs. The infrastructure requirements of athletic programs are immense.

Modern Presidents oversee huge universities of which athletics is a very very small economic and student part. At Washington we have 45,000 students and 600+ student athletes! The athletics budget have tended to be a very stable 5 percent   of total budget at universities for years. But the cost structure and the visibility stand out. In times of great economic distress and endless budget cuts and uncertain philanthropic contributions, Presidents are trying to figure out how to keep the advantages of athletics but minimize or eliminate the internal subsidies.

Some money for intercollegiate athletics comes in independent revenue streams of tickets and media rights and contributions, but faculty see this as a distracting zero sum game. At most schools with small stadiums and erratic attendance, modest revenue is generated. The median structural deficit for Division 1 schools hovers around 9-10 million dollars.  Faculty and most students resent internal subsidies whether paying for heating and grounds or electricity for athletics. They really resent internal transfers directly from university general funds, and most students who do not attend or follow athletics resent student fees that support athletics.

Internal constituencies resent and resist funding sports as everything else gets cut. External constituencies either support athletics or are indifferent, few are hostile. As tuition goes up and up to cover the declining state and donor support, Presidents face intense stress to limit or eliminate the subsidy for athletics. More paradoxically as the school raises tuition, it raises the cost of athletics that must pay the increased scholarship costs. In a double paradox many Presidents believe that raising the profile of athletics will help their fund raising and state appropriations in the long run.

In this light College Presidents look at the conference change decisions through the lenses of their stewardship obligations to protect the economic viability of their institutions and raise its reputation and visibility. The conference change decisions are not about greed but Presidents doing their jobs in time of great difficulty.