Everett Teaford recalls the Warden’s curious look across the room. Teaford, a former Major League-pitcher, had joined the Houston Astros as a professional scout in early 2016, and during an organizational meeting, new colleague Sig Mejdal continued to glance at him.
When the group was suspended, Mejdal, then a top executive of Astros, approached Teaford and explained his interest. A decade earlier, while Mejdal was an analyst at the St. Louis Cardinals, his preliminary statistical model had provided an optimistic projection about Teaford’s professional future. Teaford, then a left-handed Georgia Southern, had a scintillating statistical resume – he had a record of 5-1 and an earned run average of 1.84 the previous summer in the prestigious Cape Cod League – that belies his stature.
Teaford is six feet tall, but he was thin for a pro prospect and weighed 160 pounds “on my toughest day,” he recalled. As Mejdal recounted the backstory to Teaford, he explained, “Well, one of the biggest issues was that the cross-check thought you were working on the property,” referring to the region’s supervising scout who saw Teaford on the hill without his uniform. raking. On.
Baseball is littered with examples of different body types – Astros second baseman Jose Altuve, who is 5-foot-6, and Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge, who is 6-7, finished 1-2 in the American League Most Valuable Player Award 2017- mood – but cognitive bias can also cloud judgment. In the case of Teaford, the Scouting evaluation was prone to a mental shortcut, the representativeness heuristic, first defined by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In such cases, a judgment is strongly influenced by what is considered the norm or ideal.
“When we look at the players standing for the national anthem, it’s hard not to realize that quite a few of these guys are far from stereotypical or prototypical,” said Mejdal. “Yet our minds are still quite loudly drawn to the stereotypical and prototypical.”
Kahneman, professor emeritus at Princeton University and winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics, later wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” a book that has become essential to many baseball front offices and coaching staffs.
There aren’t many explicit references to baseball in Thinking, Fast and Slow, but many executives swear by it. It circulated extensively in the front offices of the Oakland Athletics, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Baltimore Orioles and the Astros, among others. But there is no more ardent disciple of the tome than Mejdal, a former NASA biomathematician who earned a master’s degree in both cognitive psychology and operations research.
“Pretty much wherever I go, I bother people: ‘Did you read this?’” Said Mejdal, now assistant general manager with the Baltimore Orioles. “From coaches to front office employees, some come back to me and say this has changed their lives. They never look at decisions the same way. But others have said, “Sig, thank you, but please don’t recommend another book.” ”
However, a few swear by it. Andrew Friedman, the president of baseball operations for the Dodgers, recently called the book “a real profound impact” and said he looks back on it when evaluating organizational processes. Keith Law, a former director of the Toronto Blue Jays, wrote the book ‘Inside Game’ – an investigation of bias and decision making in baseball – which was inspired by ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’. Law said he found it through a suggestion from Mejdal.
John Mozeliak, the president of the St. Louis Cardinals’ baseball activities, sees the book as illustrative.
“As the decision-making structure in baseball has changed over time, this helps us all better understand why it had to change,” Mozeliak wrote in an email. He said this was especially true when “in a company that many decisions are based on what we see, what we remember, and what is intuitive to our thinking.”
Sam Fuld, the new Philadelphia Phillies general manager, said reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” was a great reminder to be aware of your own basic human shortcomings. He plans to establish a front office book club in Philadelphia that could include Kahneman’s work as well as titles by Adam Grant, Carol Dweck and others.
Teaford, who proved his doubters wrong by making it to the majors after being elected in the 12th round, is now the pitching coordinator for the Chicago White Sox. He advises his coaches to read Kahneman’s book, even though he was initially skeptical of Mejdal’s suggestion, “Can a man who’s not quite a graduate of Georgia Southern understand this book Mr. NASA was talking about?”
The central thesis of Kahneman’s book is the interaction between System 1 and System 2 of each mind, which he described as a “two character psychodrama.” System 1 is a person’s instinctual response – a response that can be improved through expertise, but is automatic and fast. It seeks coherence and will apply relevant memories to explain events. System 2, on the other hand, is invoked for more complex, thoughtful reasoning – it’s characterized by slower, more rational analysis, but prone to laziness and fatigue.
During his time as college coach, Joe Haumacher, a minor-league pitching coach for the Orioles, had a policy of not meeting a player until he could offer his undivided attention. He wondered if that was fair, but reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” helped Haumacher understand his rationale.
Kahneman wrote that when System 2 is overloaded, System 1 can make an impulsive decision, often at the expense of self-control. In one experiment, subjects were asked to complete a task that required cognitive effort – memorizing a seven-digit number – and then given a choice of chocolate cake or fruit salad for dessert. The majority chose the cake.
“I don’t want to get into a situation where I’m halfway through one topic, and then I talk to a player and I give him the answer to the chocolate cake he’s looking for versus the answer to fruit salad he probably needs,” said Haumacher.
No area of baseball is more prone to bias than scouting, in which organizations gather information from a variety of sources: statistical models, subjective evaluations, mental makeup characterizations, and more. Kahneman stressed the importance of maintaining the independence of judgments to garnish mistakes – that is, to separate inputs so that one doesn’t affect the other.
“The independent opinion aspect is critical to avoiding groupthink and being aware of the momentum,” said Josh Byrnes, a senior vice president for the Dodgers. “There is some purity in how the information is collected and ultimately how it is weighted.”
Matt Blood, the director of player development for the Orioles, first read “Thinking, Fast and Slow” nine years ago as the Cardinals Area Scout and said he still consults it regularly. He teamed up with a Cardinals analyst to develop his own scouting algorithm as a tripwire to reduce bias. He also urges caution regarding the common practice of spending “Comps” – scouting jargon for comparisons – from a young player with an established pro.
“We tend to compare a player to what we’ve seen in the past, or to a player who’s in the big leagues, and then all of a sudden everything about that amateur player starts to look and feel like that big one. competition player, “said Blood.” And that’s dangerous.
Mejdal himself fell victim to the fall of representativeness heuristic when he joined the Cardinals in 2005. His first concept model projected Stanford’s Jed Lowrie as the best player available. Mejdal lived nearby and went to see this “imaginary Paul Bunyan of a second baseman,” he recalled, only to find a player who seemed too small even for a college field.
Mejdal had just quit his job at NASA and questioned his analysis, triggering a panic attack on the Stanford stand. “I remember that disconnection described by Kahneman,” he said, adding that it took him a few hours to identify his mental slip. Recalling Lowrie’s size didn’t change the fact that he won the Pac-10 Conference triple crown as a sophomore.
Yet despite all of people’s interest in baseball, the book contains only one notable reference to the sport: a paragraph explaining the premise of Michael Lewis’ bestseller, “Moneyball.”
Lewis later wrote The Undoing Project, about the work of Kahneman and Tversky (who died in 1996) as a direct result of a ‘Moneyball’ book review in which two academics noted that the market inefficiencies in baseball could be explained by the cognitive psychological research of the two psychologists. Lewis later wrote in Vanity Fair, “It wasn’t long before I found out that Kahneman and Tversky had made my baseball story possible in a not-so-cumbersome way.”
Kahneman, now 86, declined an interview for this article. He said he didn’t know enough about baseball. However, baseball knows a lot about him.