Finally had time to read "The Signal and the Noise" by Nate Silver. Few excerpts I liked from the chapter on baseball.
On the "fear" that analysts would be taking jobs from scouts:
Beane told me the A’s scouting budget is now much higher than it has ever been. Moreover, he said it was the A’s fascination with statistical analysis that led them to increase it. As we’ve seen, baseball players do not become free agents until after six full seasons, which is usually not until they’re at least thirty. As Bill James’s analysis of the aging curve revealed, this often leads clubs to overspend on free agents—after all, their best years are usually behind them. But there is a flip side to this:*before*a player is thirty, he can provide tremendous value to his club. Moreover, baseball’s economics are structured such that younger players can often be had for pennies on the dollar
On objective analysis vs. gut-feel decisions:
“From our standpoint in Oakland, we’re sort of forced into making objective decisions versus gut-feel decisions. If we in Oakland happen to be right on a gut-feel decision one time, my guess is it would be random. And we’re not in a position to be making random decisions and hope we get lucky. If we’re playing blackjack, and the dealer’s showing a four and we have a six, hitting on the sixteen just doesn’t make sense for us.â€
On the decision-making process:
The key to making a good forecast, as we observed in chapter 2, is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information. Rather, it’s having a good process for weighing the information appropriately. This is the essence of Beane’s philosophy: collect as much information as possible, but then be as rigorous and disciplined as possible when analyzing it.
On categorization:
When we can’t fit a square peg into a round hole, we’ll usually blame the peg—when sometimes it’s the rigidity of our thinking that accounts for our failure to accommodate it. Our first instinct is to place information into categories—usually a relatively small number of categories since they’ll be easier to keep track of.
This might work well enough most of the time. But when we have trouble categorizing something, we’ll often overlook it or misjudge it. This is one of the reasons that Beane avoids what he calls “gut-feel†decisions. If he relies too heavily on his first impressions, he’ll let potentially valuable prospects slip through the cracks—and he can’t afford that with a payroll like Oakland’s.
On the "fear" that analysts would be taking jobs from scouts:
Beane told me the A’s scouting budget is now much higher than it has ever been. Moreover, he said it was the A’s fascination with statistical analysis that led them to increase it. As we’ve seen, baseball players do not become free agents until after six full seasons, which is usually not until they’re at least thirty. As Bill James’s analysis of the aging curve revealed, this often leads clubs to overspend on free agents—after all, their best years are usually behind them. But there is a flip side to this:*before*a player is thirty, he can provide tremendous value to his club. Moreover, baseball’s economics are structured such that younger players can often be had for pennies on the dollar
On objective analysis vs. gut-feel decisions:
“From our standpoint in Oakland, we’re sort of forced into making objective decisions versus gut-feel decisions. If we in Oakland happen to be right on a gut-feel decision one time, my guess is it would be random. And we’re not in a position to be making random decisions and hope we get lucky. If we’re playing blackjack, and the dealer’s showing a four and we have a six, hitting on the sixteen just doesn’t make sense for us.â€
On the decision-making process:
The key to making a good forecast, as we observed in chapter 2, is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information. Rather, it’s having a good process for weighing the information appropriately. This is the essence of Beane’s philosophy: collect as much information as possible, but then be as rigorous and disciplined as possible when analyzing it.
On categorization:
When we can’t fit a square peg into a round hole, we’ll usually blame the peg—when sometimes it’s the rigidity of our thinking that accounts for our failure to accommodate it. Our first instinct is to place information into categories—usually a relatively small number of categories since they’ll be easier to keep track of.
This might work well enough most of the time. But when we have trouble categorizing something, we’ll often overlook it or misjudge it. This is one of the reasons that Beane avoids what he calls “gut-feel†decisions. If he relies too heavily on his first impressions, he’ll let potentially valuable prospects slip through the cracks—and he can’t afford that with a payroll like Oakland’s.