greenback44 wrote:clement wrote:True, but what explains fluctuations in performance? Good year to bad year to good year again? Just normal random variation? It could be, but when a variation extends to months or even a whole season, it becomes hard to categorize as random.
I don't see the connection here. The way baseball is setup, it's built for random variation. Your generic .270 hitter can't get .270 hits each at-bat. He can't get 1.35 hits when he gets 5 at-bats in a game.
I didn't say anything about .270 at bat, I was talking about over the course of a season. What explains a hitter over the course of 500+ at bats hitting .330 one year and .250 the next? Surely 500+ at bats is a sufficient enough sample size that he should have regressed to his mean, which in this case would be around .290. Or what is his true mean?
Going back to the weather analogy, this spring we've had weekends where the high temperature was in the 70s then in the 30s; that's not psychology.
Sorry but I don't really get the weather analogy. Weather is affected by science, not psychology. There are no humans involved in weather performance, unless you are talking about global warming, which is a different debate entirely.
I'm sure teammates, clubhouse, etc. do have some impact on players, but I'm also sure that there's a tendency to overstate their significance and to give post hoc credit/blame to what's merely the noise of a dynamic system. These tendencies have reached the point of mysticism, and I'm not really sure what the gain is when you go from "random variation" to "psychological forces beyond our comprehension are at work."
Well, what you are sure of, I'm quite not sure of.
It may be difficult to understand and pin down, but that doesn't make it mystical. The thing to gain is recognizing the importance of human behaviour, attitudes, motivations, and social interactions, in performance. Businesses took decades to realize it, going back to scientific management, to today. Fortunately for me, times have changed, and dramatically so. CEO's, bankers, engineers, and executives in general are pretty talented people by and large. Yet they seem to have recognized (or at least have been fooled into thinking) that teamwork, creating good "chemistry", work environment, managing conflict, managing relationships, etc. are pretty important. I don't see the harm in baseball players, managers, and GMs also trying to figure this stuff out and learn to benefit from it.
And I don't think these things are beyond our comprehension. They just aren't easily quantifiable and some aspects aren't quantifiable at all. How do you measure the quality of a manager? Wins and losses? I think that's a pretty poor and extremely limited measure, although the more games managed, the more weight such a statistic might carry. Now that might be what most GM's do, but that doesn't mean they are doing it in the best way. Now I'm sure people can devise all kinds of quantifiable ways to measure managerial performance, and I guess you could do an analysis of managerial decision-making (which really is only one of the many duties of a baseball manager). But what about things like keeping the team together when they are down, motivating the troops, getting the most out of each and every player, managing conflicts, communicating well, etc etc. You know, the same kinds of things that managers of businesses have to do.
Ultimately a manager has to deliver results, and he will be held accountable for that. But to suggest that we can't possibly understand what good leadership is, or what good teamwork is, or what good chemistry in a team is, and therefore we have to chalk it up to random variation, to me is giving up way too easily. It's difficult. It's difficult for a baseball team just as it is for multi-national corporations. But I believe it can be done and it does have an effect on team performance.
