Thoughts on Baseball and Outsiders

I enjoy Bill Simmons.  I don't feel I have to apologize...I think the guy was remarkably fresh when his columns first popped up, and I still enjoy his point of view, even if I disagree with his insane love of the NBA and his extreme Boston homerism. Anyway, with that out of the way, I was reading through his archive and came across this wonderful bit that really spoke to me.  I thought I would share it with the community... 

What I came across an exchange he had with writer Malcolm Gladwell about a variety of topics.  (LINKY HERE TO THE RELEVENT SECTION)  Gladwell has what seems to me a brilliant bit of writing in this exhange about why he would make a better GM than Isiah Thomas...it's because he actually knows LESS, and therefore would make painfully obvious moves and not outsmart himself.  He says it much prettier than I, because he's a bajillion times smarter.  This got the old wheels-a-turnin' in my head. 

I find this idea wonderfully applicable to baseball too.  Moneyball, which Billy Beane wrote to prove how smart he was (or not), deals a lot with the cloistered old boys club that Lewis saw in baseball, and how certain ideas that seem stale and tired at best and patently crazy at worst, at least to those who stop and think from an objective P.O.V., are or were considered conventional wisdom within baseball.  Examples:

• The strong chin
• Guys with physical tools make the best players, even if those tools never seem to translate to performance
• How teamwork and toughness and grit and fortitude overwhelms talent

I am sure that we can all think of many such examples we have encountered in our lives of baseball fandom.  As Baseball got smarter, it started to challenge these ideas and look at baseball in new and interesting ways.  To me, it is no surprise that some of the most dynamic, intelligent, and influential people within both Baseball and baseball analysis did not come from baseball backgrounds.  Bill James was a student of literature who loved to write and think, and first began doing so as a security guard at a pork-and-beans factory.  Keith Law, who is a bit prickly in my mind but has an exceedingly sharp baseball mind, holds undergraduate degrees from Harvard (sociology and econ.) and is a Carnegie Mellon MBA.  Paul De Podesta, who I think got a raw deal in LA no thanks to Bill "I AM the idiot" Plaschke, was a college athlete at Harvard but also got a degree from there in economics.  Theo Epstein studied American (American studies degree from Yale) and is a J.D.  

My point is this, and this ties back into what Gladwell was saying in his exchange with Mr. Simmons, is that sometimes a fresh, outside perspective is what is necessary.  In Gladwell's hypothetical GM of the Knicks scenario, he would use something of a KISS approach and make seemingly obvious decisions based on not-overthinking things.  In baseball's case, some of the most successful writers and franchises of recent years have been successful largely because of an outside perspective, because they let a smart person run things and said smart person was not corrupted by Baseball's collective conventional wisdom.  I am not one of those who finds that The Old Baseball Man and the Steely-Eyed/Copenhagen-chewing scout do not have a place in the game...their understanding of the minutae of actually playing the game is key and the collaboration of smart outsiders and experienced insiders can create a perfect storm of baseball awesome...however this is no prerequisite.  I reference you all to lboros's post from 2007 regarding the concept of Moneyball 2.0.  The teams may not be great, but the sentiment of drawing from both scouting and intellectual perspectives is.  

To conclude, I think this thought has some connection to our very own Cardinals and their endlessly comment-provoking manager Tony La Russa.  La Russa is someone who can be viewed as either conventional or radical, or perhaps even both simultaneously.  He is the man who hits his pitcher 8th regularly, who designed the modern bullpen as much as anyone could have (whether this is a good thing or not, I leave for another discussion), who juggles his lineups like a madman in pursuit of 9 perfect matchups, and so on.  He is also the man who refuses to hit Albert anywhere but second, who seems to have an affinity for known mediocrities over unproven talent (see the playing time handed to Miguel Cairo and Mike Gallego, for no apparent reason), the man who at times is prickly and unkind to anyone who dares broach the subject of advanced sabermetric analysis, and so on.  Many of his decisions leave us scratching our heads (cough13 man pencough).  To me he is a wonderfully thought-provoking character, and for the most part a very good manager.  I think within the person of Tony La Russa we see both a man willing to try anything and a man unwilling to try anything.  At any rate, he is ceaselessly interesting to those who love baseball and love the Cardinals.