Management by Baseball

One of Baseball's most important lessons for managers beyond baseball is in its depth of metrics -- its meaningful ones as well as its plaque ones. In this entry, we'll cover how to evaluate seriously something people "just know".

An anthropology major I went to college with ended up working on an auto assembly line in Ohio and told me one should special order a new car that was built on a Tuesday because the QC people did their best work on that day (and both management and the line knew it). He eventually ended up doing grad school research on it and found there were no hard numbers anywhere to support it -- that the involved people simply "just knew it".

I call this a JKI.

JKIs are not guaranteed to be true or to be false. They are likely to have been true in the moment the "aha" happened.  In the instances when the JKI turn out to be not-generally-true, more often than not, it's a case of making a judgement on too small a data pool or a case of ignoring the specific context within which the observers initiated the JKI (The Tuesday car-build apocrypha originated during an era when that plant had weekday shifts and Saturdays & Sundays off...¿what would have happened if the days-off were Wednesday & Thursday? And what if it was true in one plant but the JKI was generalized to all plants?). A tonne of JKIs "stick" in contexts where they are no longer true or generally-true.

One of Baseball's most persistent and truly interesting JKIs is "clutch hitting" (a posited ability to perform better either in important games or in important at bats, than the player does in less-than-important ones).

Fans generally believe some players are "clutch hitters" (Tony Perez, Derek Jeter) and some smaller pool are "chokes" (the opposite of "clutch"). Some of the new wave baseball statisticians believe they have proved clutch hitting doesn't exist...based mostly on the idea that in general, it's not reproduceable (i.e., that if a player truly had "clutch hitting ability" or was "a choke", that player would, with some high level of consistency, repeat the pattern season after season and, in general, it's not).

One of the most insightful baseball researchers is the humble, diligent, reliable Mike Emeigh (sort of a Sabermetric Edgar Martinez), and he's recently executed a study of individuals' hitting in the clutch using methods developed by the researcher known as Tango Tiger, and that Tango wrote up in the book he co-authored, The Book.  Here's some of what Emeigh wrote on Baseball Think Factory.

Baseball fans - and sportswriters - who are not oriented toward statistical analysis tend to have a fixation with the concept of “clutch hitting”. In spite of numerous studies over the years that show that clutch ability - if it exists at all - tends to be relatively small, fans still argue that so-and-so is truly a “clutch god” or a “choker”.

One issue that we’ve had in trying to evaluate clutch performance from an analytical standpoint is that it’s been difficult to come up with a consistent definition of “clutch situation” that doesn’t do one of two things:

1. aggregate too many “unlike things” together (e.g. performance with runners in scoring position, which equates runner on second/two outs with bases loaded/no outs even though there is a very different potential impact on the game situation);

2. reduces the sample size to a point where small variations have tremendous impact (e.g. performance with RISP in late/close situations, where many hitters may have no more than 20-30 appearances in a season)

What Leverage Index does is to place every plate appearance on a sliding scale based on potential game impact. As Tango notes in the quote I highlighted above, most people know clutch when they see it, even if they can’t necessarily define it. LI does an excellent job of accurately capturing the relative importance of game situations from the viewpoint of a typical fan.

{SNIP OUT HIS DESCRIPTION OF TANGO'S WEIGHTING SYSTEM & ITS APPLICATION}

One could, in this manner, develop weighted performance for each player, weighting his PA by the LI of each situation in which he appeared. If the player’s weighted performance was better than his actual performance, one could conclude that he produced more value in game-important situations (e.g. was more “clutch"); if the player’s weighted performance was worse than his actual performance, one could conclude that he produced less value in game-important situations (e.g. was more of a “choker"). The advantage of doing something like this is that every plate appearance for every player can be included in the study, and plate appearances are weighted in a more-or-less appropriate manner based on a consistent definition of the value of the PA.

If you head over to the study, you can see that he then elaborates Tango's Leverage Index weightings and proposes a simple way  to evaluate individual hitters' weightings. He then found the findings were not of overwhelming value for some rational statistical reasons and calls out he's publishing anyway because the findings tend to confirm the fans general perceptions (JKI).

Looking at the group of good hitters, we have.

Top 5, weighted OPS - actual OPS:

    Carlos Delgado, .285/.391/.566 unweighted,   .310/.416/.618 weighted, 77 point gain 
    Carlos Beltran, .278/.368/.517 unweighted,   .295/.388/.550 weighted, 53 point gain 
    Albert Pujols,  .338/.429/.650 unweighted,   .345/.443/.688 weighted, 52 point gain     
    David Ortiz,    .294/.391/.609 unweighted,   .318/.412/.638 weighted, 50 point gain
    Derek Jeter,    .316/.387/.464 unweighted,   .331/.410/.482 weighted, 41 point gain
   

Bottom 5, weighted OPS - actual OPS:

    Travis Hafner, .299/.404/.590 unweighted,    .289/.399/.563 weighted, 32 point loss 
    Javy Lopez,    .298/.347/.518 unweighted,    .283/.350/.486 weighted, 29 point loss 
    Carlos Guillen,.310/.379/.483 unweighted,    .301/.382/.456 weighted, 24 point loss 
    Miguel Tejada, .306/.356/.505 unweighted,    .296/.351/.489 weighted, 21 point loss 
    Carlos Lee,    .290/.344/.513 unweighted,    .284/.344/.492 weighted, 21 point loss

The top five have been well-publicized for their “clutchiness”. The bottom 5 aren’t particularly well-known as “chokers” - with the possible exception of Tejada - but Alfonso Soriano, who was sixth from the bottom, does have something of an “unclutch” reputation.

ARod, FWIW, hit .299/.396/.562 overall, but had a weighted performance of .297/.403/.557, for a 2-point OPS gain. This placed him 24th among the 36 good hitters, and especially in comparison to Jeter probably explains a lot of the perception of ARod as a player who doesn’t produce when it counts. Manny Ramirez, who also has a bit of an “unclutch” reputation, hit .311/.412/.602 overall and .312/.429/.594 weighted, a 9-point OPS gain but with a larger loss of power than the typical good hitter showed.

While there are some mismatches between weighted performance and perception - Bobby Abreu was just behind Jeter, JD Drew and Adam Dunn were also pretty high, and Andruw Jones and Miguel Cabrera are fairly low on the list - as a general rule I think that performance weighted by LI matches perception of clutch value quite well. Whether this has any analytical significance remains to be seen, but I think it offers a starting point.

Here in clutch hitting, then, is a JKI that has a large basis in reality.

THE PROBLEMS WITH TURNING JKIs INTO ACTIONABLE INFO
In your own endeavor, as in Baseball, there is a need to examine your JKIs as well as a challenge in finding ways to examine them sensibly. As a management consultant, I generally collect JKIs when I hear them explicitly stated or alluded to -- unexamined JKIs are easy targets & there can be a lot of value in correcting 'em. 

But in Baseball, as in your own endeavor, the challenges fit into a number of basic categories you can address, and Emeigh's piece covers most of them.

#1. Recognize that the metric you define will strongly shape...if not dictate entirely... the value of the outcome.

Mike said:

Your definition of the performance measure shapes what results you arrive at. If the measure of success in a weight-training program is size, the exercises you use to get there are valued differently than if it's strength and different still if it's some ability to apply strength or size. I worked with a client not long ago who hired wonderfully creative sales people, but who weren't selling a ton. Their approach was a standard reaction for salesfolk compensated by gross and not net...it was to try to cut prices to increase volume. When that failed to acquire enough net, they applied their creativity to inventing custom products -- whatever objection a handful of customers came up with, they invented a unique product for that objection and tired to sell it to them ("What if I could give you..."). 

If you measured the performance of salesfolk by how many clever & sellable products they elicited from customers (a virtuous thing that isn't core to their job), then you could build a measurement you could collect and report on. But it would be the wrong thing.

In the part of the article I snipped out, Mike discussed Tango's textured weighting system that includes both score differential and inning and pairs them. If you only considered run differential (say, a three-run lead) but not inning, you'd lose the context because hitting a two-run homer down three runs with one out in the 3rd inning is a different context from doing the same thing in the 9th inning...there are fewer outs between you and defeat and in a "normal" game, it's easier to make up three runs in the six innings after the third than it is in the single inning left when the plate appearance occurs in the 9th.

Tango defined meaning around context, and, for this purpose, the right context. They are measuring the right things.

#2. Take care to neither overdefine so you have too few sample cases to reach decent conclusions, or underdefine it and miss the difference in contexts that you'll face happen. 

Mike said:

One issue that we’ve had in trying to evaluate clutch performance from an analytical standpoint is that it’s been difficult to come up with a consistent definition of “clutch situation” that doesn’t do one of two things:

1. aggregate too many “unlike things” together (e.g. performance with runners in scoring position, which equates runner on second/two outs with bases loaded/no outs even though there is a very different potential impact on the game situation);

2. reduces the sample size to a point where small variations have tremendous impact (e.g. performance with RISP in late/close situations, where many hitters may have no more than 20-30 appearances in a season)

What Leverage Index does is to place every plate appearance on a sliding scale based on potential game impact. As Tango notes in the quote I highlighted above, most people know clutch when they see it, even if they can’t necessarily define it. LI does an excellent job of accurately capturing the relative importance of game situations from the viewpoint of a typical fan.

#3. Try to go into the effort with a point of view, explicitly held, but be willing to allow the data to reshape it.

The brilliant Paul Saffo, the only futurist I know of who isn't a laughable failure, calls this process "Strong opinions, loosely held'. Mike showed his skepticism abut the wisdom of the crowds in assessing "clutch" hitting. Yet when he delivered the table of individual clutch performance, he led with the case where people were generally correct: the leaders table.

He then pointed out surprises and counter-examples (batters thought to be one thing when they were another).

The stats gang who initially posited clutch hitting doesn't exist overvalued reproduceability because they already believed it didn't exist. Some of those who argued against the cynics believed clutch hitting existed anyway simply because they wanted it to. The reality is something can exist in a few individuals that doesn't exist in the pool of the population as a whole. The fact that most batters don't have a consistent clutch/choke factor doesn't mean it doesn't exist anymore than the fact that about 97% of people have a "normal" number of adult teeth sprout up, while 3% don't means every human enters the world equipped with the potential for the same number of teeth and that variance doesn't exist (if you can't be hyperbolic, be hyperdontic).

#4. Don't overstate the quality of your measure -- and if it's not decisive, think about how to make it better.

Emeigh concluded:

While there are some mismatches between weighted performance and perception - Bobby Abreu (Jeff note: His rap is that he's a poor big-time performer) was just behind Jeter, JD Drew and Adam Dunn were also pretty high, and Andruw Jones (Jeff note: good reputation as a clutch player) and Miguel Cabrera are fairly low on the list - as a general rule I think that performance weighted by LI matches perception of clutch value quite well. Whether this has any analytical significance remains to be seen, but I think it offers a starting point.

All the performance measures you use are items you should examine...regularly if you know they leave room for significant improvement, just occasionally if they are pretty good. You check into even the effective ones once in a while because context changes over time and that reweights factors that make up the components of your measures.

He states the measure has some value, that it shows The one criticism I have of the piece is around this point #4. Having just  marinated himself in this data for what must have been quite some time, I think Emeigh should have proposed one or more next steps to improve its analytical significance -- no one would be in a much better position to JKI where improvements might be hiding.

JUST KNOW IT
There are always arguments out there about why you can't have as much accountability in some line of work than they maintain in Baseball. That's an excuse to do nothing.

Channel Mike Emeigh, look at the performance data and analyse it with insight and perspective. You are likely t see how to make changes for the better when perofrmance is important, to be a "clutch hitter" yourself.

"It is the price of progress that there never can be complete consensus.
All creative advances are essentially a departure from agreed-upon ways of looking at things
 and to overemphasize the agreed-upon is
to further legitimize the hostility to that creativity upon which we all ultimately depend."
-- William Whyte, "The Organization Man".

In the last entry, I discussed the departure of Seattle Mariners' Mike Hargrove. His successor, John McLaren, had been a long-time "organization man", a widely-populated role within, and beyond, baseball.

"Organization men" are rarely charismatic, rarely had an illustrious, if any, major league career (I can't think of a single organization man who played in an All-Star game, but please write to me if you know of one). They labor long hours for crappy salaries, persistently get overlooked for promotion (well, there are a lot of them; a lot do get promoted, even as far as the bigs, but there are so many of them relative to the major league positions available, most will never make it to a big league team's manager position at all).  McLaren worked at many levels in several jobs, knows the game inside and out, and is the one of the relative few of his populous breed who has gotten to be a major league manager.

In some outfits, they get overlooked because they aren't excellent, especially within a profession like Baseball that is relentlessly meritocratic. In other, less healthy outfits, it's because the overlooked  lack charisma or apparent "leadership" attributes ("he doesn't look the part"). Beyond baseball, individuals are constantly being pulled between being "a team player" and being outstanding enough to be noticed but not so noticed they elicit in others the competitive need to subvert them.

Organization women and men can feel (legitimately in many cases) trod on, undervalued or overtly disrespected when people from outside get jobs they might have been promoted to. Periodically, an one of them will get a position from which they can promote their buddies, either because they value them as individuals, want to equalize the lost opportunities or for simple cronyism.

FULL-TILT COMMITMENT
Mariner manager McLaren not only got such an opportunity this month, he grabbed it by the job application. According to this 7/4 story from the Seattle Times, the new skipper promoted a loyal foot-soldier, Gary Thurman, to be his first base coach, a position that opened when McLaren promoted the incumbent, loyal foot-soldier Mike Goff, to be his bench coach, the position from which he had ascended. A nice, cozy promotion chain redolent of something pre-teens would envision was the norm if they played The Game of Life (but not if they'd played The Game of Real Life).

So it appears that McLaren has launched something like The Revenge of the Organization Cogs, bringing together a management team made up of such folk. This happens beyond baseball on occasion. Is it a good thing?

Organization men and women are the loyal foot-soldiers who make things happen in a healthy organization or keep them from happening in unhealthy ones. I attached no automatic virtue or vice to the role -- it's neither an intrinsically "good" or "bad" thing for a team to install an organization man in the dugout -- context and the individual dictate the potential and kinetic accomplishment of the chosen candidate.

ON THE UP SIDE...
within and beyond baseball, the organization man or woman promoted has connections, knows the current methods. She or he tends to make for a gentle transition, turning a few knobs based on personal observations made within the system, grokking executive management's wishes. Combining a ground-floor knowledge of people and their individual potential and the chance to make small changes in one's initial days generally leads to some immediate gains.

And organizations count on loyalty. In a functioning free enterprise system (though usually not in a free market system), to get consistent loyalty, some has to be given. To promote organization folk to higher positions dangles some realistic hope for the rest they might be promoted, that their loyalty might be returned in kind.

As in any social system, promoting from within reinforces values, minimizing change other than that planned by the head office's objectives, advances and simplifies the tacit knowledge of how things get done, and this leads to better harmony, and that in turn lowers the overhead of coping with change.

The big change the new management has committed to so far is to use the bench more. For this team, I think it's a good idea -- it was pretty obvious Mike Hargrove wasn't using his bench much, and while not holding as much potential this year as last, the bench can make contributions if given the chance. Note, bench players are the equivalent of organization men with cleats. It's not hard for the organization-originated coach or manager to empathize with the overlooked two- or three-tool player who is good enough to advance through hard work and commitment only to be ignored at a moment he might have made a contribution.

Not a significant change likely to upset anything. Which could lead to the down side.

ON THE DOWN SIDE...
within and beyond baseball, the organization woman or man knows-what-she-knows. Inventions that make a difference just about never come from twiddling standard operating procedures. For the manager whose ambition is to keep things smooth and not upset or confuse anyone. And promoting from within, while promoting harmony diminishes the portfolio of methods, practices, insights available for problem-solving, which, in turn, limits the number of problems that management team can successfully solve.

In human cultural evolution, early tribes of people had choices based on a continuum that fell between endogenous (inward-looking) and exogenous (outward-looking) behaviors such as trading and marriage/kinship arrangements. Endogenous cultures had cohesion while exogenous ones were more likely to be exposed to innovations and more likely to apply them. As one of the parents of anthropology, E.B. Tylor, said:

‘Exogamy (marrying outside the tribe), enabling a growing tribe to keep itself compact by constant unions between its spreading clans, enables it to overmatch any number of small intermarrying (endogenous) groups, isolated and helpless. Again and again in the world’s history, savage tribes must have had plainly in their minds the simple practical alternative between marrying-out and be killed out.’

In any given context, the short term gains might go either to a hiring-from-within or importing-talent choice. But in a competitive line of work over time, the purely hiring from within endogenous choice dooms the organization to a certain brittleness of response likely to suffer seriously in the face of changes.

McLAREN McNOW
John McLaren as a bench coach owned the traditional "Mom" role -- it was his job to show warmth, interact a lot with each individual, freeing his manager to be somewhat aloof and without the need to get involved with every emotional hangnail every player had. And he was good enough at it that many players think he's the bee's knees, including Ichiro Suzuki who is a key component for the team in any successful run for the flag.

If the players play significantly harder for McLaren out of loyalty, that extra effort is likely to, in the short term at least, squeeze a bit more torque of the talent they have available. Or not.

For the Mariners, as for your own outfit, for this season, and maybe next too, a McLaren hiring may make a positive difference in the franchise's fate. But at some point, the organization man at the helm either will have to display an ability to design and execute innovation away from the franchise's norm or break up the consistency of organization folk on his management team or suffer the consequences.

"The highs were no longer high enough and the lows were too low."
-- Mike Hargrove

Managers don't always have the chance to choose their own exit. If you can choose your own final curtain, you can't choose a better model than the one one chosen yesterday morning by Mariner manager Mike Hargrove. "The Human Rain Delay", as he was known during his playing career (he wouldn't be known as that today...he would be a tiny bit above average average in how often, and for how long, he stepped out of the batter's box between pitches), made his departure announcement at a pre-game press gathering before his final game after a seven game win streak & with his team in second place, four games out at 45-33. He would leave after the Sunday game's conclusion.

When I worked a suicide hot line, one of the precepts we got in training was that among the people who were most likely to try a serious self-termination attempt were those who were getting a high period after suffering a long-term down. Their impetus: As opposed to being down and holding out for a positive stretch, they realized the positive stretch, as good as it was, just didn't outweigh/overshadow the down times.

Pretty close to a sentence he spoke during the gathering: "The highs were no longer high enough and the lows were too low." It wasn't the losing that ate his competitive guts -- it was his realization that even winning didn't feed his need to win enough to make every day the first day of the rest of his managerial life.

He cited another reason. He said, and I'm paraphrasing from memory here, that he had spoken to his wife about his decision over the last ten days -- and that this had been more talking with his wife than he had for the previous ten years.

One day, you will be facing the possibility of separating from your management position. You might be in a struggling organization, knowing one of those brain-dead layoff plans is likely on its way (brain-dead = the talent quotient of the thrown overboard is no lower than those staying...in short, the norm for large American business, academia and non-profit organizations). You might sense the organization is moving away from your sweet spot or growth opportunities for you. Or it may be that you're just tired of the say-to-day routine.

Or like Hargrove, you might have lost the ability to deliver the effort to achieve excellence that you demand (and have to demand) from your staff.

"I've daily challenged my players to give me the best that they've got, 100 percent of what they've got that day - physically and mentally. And they've done that. Without fail, they've done that," he said.

"I have never had to work at getting that level myself - ever - until recently. I've found that I've had to work harder in making that same commitment to my bosses, to my players and to my coaches. And that's not right," Hargrove said, turning away and choking back tears. (Seattle Post-Intelligencer story by AP's Gregg "Don't Call Me Jorge" Bell)

It's terribly hard to walk away from what the outside world sees as success, regardless of how strong your own ego is. It requires a lot of courage. So Mike Hargrove left as he served -- as a classy gentleman, not carried off the field of battle on his shield at the whim of his bosses, not in the throes of a bleak stretch, but knowing he had done a very brave, extraordinary thing. Within the baseball realm, he had not been an exceptional manager for quite a few years; he made many a tactical move that made many of us roll our eyes, and was rarely good at using his Mariner bench, even when the front office provided him a way-better-than-average one and he had a very mortal everyday line-up against which to cobble them. But he was and is a class act, a solid man a clever manager (more capable than 95% of managers beyond baseball at the required crafts), very honest but never cruel, very accountable. 

Here are three elements to The Hargrove Exit worth remembering when it comes time to separate from a management position.

THE THREE LESSONS
#1. Leave on Your Terms, Not Your Bosses'. Departures can be pretty intense, especially if you've bonded to the organization or the people or your craft developed there. Hanging on until someone else decides you should go, while gratifying to the passive, results more often than not in more traumatic departures...bittersweet with the accent on the bitter.

#2. Leave on a High Note. More often than not, you're remembered for whatever big event or set of events happened just before you left office. Gerald Ford will always be remembered as the President who "lost" the war on Vietnam (even though he just happened to inherit the inevitable endgame he had helped in his own small way set in motion during his congressional career) -- when his four predecessors had a lot more to do with it than he -- Ford just happened to be in the Oval Office when Saigon fell. 

So more than just leaving at a time of your own choosing, try to leave on a highlight, a new accomplishment, something positive you will always be remembered for.

#3. Leave If You Know You Can't Get Better Every Day/Week. If you can't decide between achieving more than has ever been achieved before and taking a mental health day off more than about three or four days in a row, it's probably time to move on. In a competitive world, you're not doing your workgroup, your organization or yourself much of a favor by going through the motions. The exact number of days you struggle with this is inexact. For Hargrove, it was about ten -- he had told his GM, Bill Bavasi, ten days earlier he was thinking about it -- at the end of a losing streak. Bavasi sagely advised him to wait and make sure this seemingly radical move was the right one for him. Hargrove waited, tasted the win streak, and still realized it was, in the realm of his full life, dust in the wind (that is, the theme song of the 2007 Kansas City Royals).

#4. Remember Not-Work Life Counts, Too. There will always be moments -- weeks, even months -- for a manager when work is all that counts and non-work life has to take a back seat. But there has to be balance to maintain perspective to be able to act with any wisdom; you might put decisionmaking on auto-pilot...make repeated standard operating procedure responses over and over. This doesn't guarantee failure in any specific action...in fact any individual following of standard operating procedure makes it less likely that the individual choice will be a two-pitch strikeout, but over time it guarantees rigidity which, ove the long haul almost certainly guarantees failure.

Hargrove knew his life balance had gotten out of whack -- in part, he hinted, it was the constraint on his ability to perform to his managerial potential. It took him a lot longer than it would for managers in most lines of work because Baseball demands more focus and commitment than most endeavors, and pulls the balance away from not-work more than most.

You, on the other hand, are not in a crucible as zero-sum, as relentlessly grinding a competitive line f work as Baseball. You've got it easier than The Human Rain Delay or any other baseball manager.

AFTER THE BOTTOM OF THE NINTH
Remember Hargrove's choice. It's not a reason to leave, just a way to walk off the field, down the dugout steps, and into the tunnel with your head held high.