Sports Biblio Digest, 7.10.16: The Battle Over Baseball Analytics
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Durant Lights Out for the Coast; Melo on Police Shootings; Aussie Rules for Women; Remembering Pat Summitt
Welcome to the Sports Biblio Digest, an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 46, published July 10, 2016. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website, which is updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. To view this newsletter in a browser, please click here.
I’d love to hear what you think about the Digest, and Sports Biblio. Send feedback, suggestions, book recommendations and requests for interviews to Wendy Parker, sportsbiblio@gmail.com. You can also follow Sports Biblio on Twitter and hit the “like” button on Facebook.
* * * * * * * *
What new, interesting and novel material can be written about baseball analytics and fresh data- and psychology-based insights into the game these days?
Plenty, according to pugnacious MLB Network host Brian Kenny, who is as no-bullshit about baseball and numbers and conventional "wisdom" surrounding the game as he is about general sports topics on his national radio show and previously at ESPN.
This week marked the publication of his baseball analytics book, “Ahead of the Curve: Inside the Baseball Revolution,” and it’s a no-excuses exhortation to resisters to own up to their own willful ignorance.
In an interview with Bryan Curtis of The Ringer, Kenny insisted that the problem is more with old-fashioned dolts in the sporting press than a more sophisticated fandom that has embraced the use of data to better understand a game—one that he believes needs to be further demystified:
“I think the audience is thirsty for it. But, again, the media is very slow to move out of its mob mentality. ‘What we want is Charles Barkley!’ OK, great. There’s one of them.”
The ongoing feud between Barkley, the NBA Hall of Famer and TNT pundit, and Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, a co-founder of MIT’s high-profile Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, has reinforced an unfortunate zero-sum edge to the debate over metrics in sports: You can be a poet, or a quant, but not both. For those of us who believe that both sides of the sports brain need to fed in healthy fashion, this is frustrating.
A crusader for the “Kill the Win” campaign that he waged largely on Twitter, Kenny does little to quash the notion of having to pick a side. His own on-air analytics battles with Harold Reynolds, an ex-major league second baseman and MLB Network sidekick, reached such a fever pitch that they no longer appear together.
As Curtis explains well elsewhere, and as I learned from my own experience with Kenny, he’s an all-purpose contrarian, confident to the point of being cocky, and even if you think you’re well-prepared to take him on, it might not matter.
He interviewed me on his radio show in 2014 on the subject of gender and coaching in women’s sports, a topic I've covered for many years. I tweeted this post to him, and a day later we were sparring over whether men should be coaching female athletes at all.
He explained that he had daughters who played sports, and thought it was good for young girls and women to learn from female role models. While I agree, my point was that the development of sports for females is more imperative at this point, regardless of the gender of the coach. Females need better coaching above all else, and men who coach them are often denounced by strident feminists and media types with little knowledge of women's sports.
I’d hate to see where women’s sports would be without Geno Auriemma (UConn basketball) and Anson Dorrance (UNC soccer), among other males who’ve devoted their careers to coaching women. More than that, I argued that the accelerated way female coaches were being groomed, especially in women’s college basketball, was in some instances setting them up for failure.
Kenny wasn’t buying a bit of this, which isn’t surprising given the mainstream media view of sports and gender. As I wrote here recently, a single narrative prevails in press coverage of women’s sports, and there’s little room for other views to be heard, much less considered.
While I appreciate Kenny giving me a chance to offer another perspective, it quickly vanished into the ether. I hope this doesn’t happen to those who even mildly take issue with his thoughts on baseball analytics.
As one of those math-challenged sports “poets” trying to grasp metrics (I’m researching some posts now on analytics that will be published later this summer), I find the “I’m smart and you’re not” attitude of far too many "quants" a little off-putting.
I WANT to learn and understand this stuff, I really do. But I also believe in the power of narrative. Humans need stories AND data. We need to understand the vagaries of human mystery as well as logical insights gleaned from decision sciences and statistics.
However, in our polarized media atmosphere, even public discourse on sports analytics has been largely reduced to an either-or quality that makes a neutral party cringe.
To be fair, Kenny’s thinking is a lot more nuanced than I’m making it sound, especially if you read this excellent Q and A with Evan Davis of the Beyond the Box Score blog. Kenny details the analytics books and authors who inspired him (starting with Bill James, natch), as well as official baseball historian John Thorn, who implored him to “plant your own flag.”
Kenny also has been influenced by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of the 2011 book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and admitted that acceptance of new ideas about time-honored practices is incremental, and often at a very slow pace. When the gradual breakthrough occurs, the issue becomes why it took so long:
“Right now, look at the number two hitter on every team. It was only a few years ago that you would never put your best hitter there in the lineup. It never happened. Not even Harold Reynolds gives me crap on that anymore. It's just fact. Why do you have some weak-hitting second baseman batting second? Why? There's no reason.”
A Few Good Reads
ESPN’s Zach Lowe ruminates on the white hot NBA free agency season, punctuated on July 4 by Kevin Durant’s decision to join the Golden State Warriors, and how in the world Steve Kerr will manage a roster with four All-Stars in the lineup;
Carmelo Anthony of the New York Knicks is one of the few high-profile American athletes to speak out on the tragic police-related shootings this week in Baton Rouge, Minnesota and Dallas. He urged his fans to press their lawmakers to “demand change,” but didn’t elaborate on what that might be. He also posted a photo from the 1971 summit Muhammad Ali organized for activist athletes that included Jim Brown and Lew Alcindor;
Teddy Greenstein of the Chicago Tribune writes about the Black Sheep Golf Club, a rarity in America in that no female members are allowed. Owner and founder Vince Solano happily declares that there is “no feminine touch” to be found on his refuge in suburban Sugar Grove, Ill;
Larry Brown abruptly resigned as men’s basketball coach at SMU on Friday, and it’s hardly the first time he’s left a job in haste. Mike DeCourcy of The Sporting News is among those hammering the 75-year-old Brown for a “graceless” exit after contract extension talks broke down. Don’t be surprised if the ever-itinerant Brown pops up somewhere soon;
The college football season is just around the corner, but Phil Steele has been working virtually around the clock for months to prepare his mammoth eponymous yearbook that’s just off the presses. To say that Steele is an “obsessive,” as Michael Weinreb describes him in a piece for Vice Sports, is putting it mildly. After 22 years of doing this, I wonder when Steele may just drop dead from exhaustion;
France’s Antoine Griezmann leads the European soccer championships with six goals and can deliver a title for his nation today near Paris in the finals against Portugal. For his family, a win would be even more meaningful, given its brush with death during last year’s terrorist attacks. His sister was among the survivors in the deadly shootings at a Paris nightclub;
At The Allrounder, Deb Waterhouse-Watson celebrates the arrival of a women’s Australian rules football league in 2017. Women have been playing Aussie rules for a century, but she asserts that the eight-team league, to be run by the Australian Football League, “may also ultimately change the way we view Aussie rules football, and what women are capable of.” More on all this on the Fox Sports Australia Footy Podcast.
A Few More Good Listens
Juliana Barbassa, a Brazilian journalist and author of “Dancing with the Devil in the City of God: Rio de Janeiro on the Brink,” discusses growing concerns over the staging of the Olympics with USA Today sports columnist Nancy Armour;
The latest guest on the New Books in Sports podcast is Norman Macht, author of “The Grand Old Man of Baseball: Connie Mack in His Final Years, 1932-1956;”
Sports Illustrated media writer Richard Deitsch sat down with former Grantland writer Rembert Browne, who offered up his own theory on why the now-defunct ESPN sports and pop culture vertical was shuttered;
The new Bill Simmons podcast associated with his recently launched site The Ringer has been an instant hit. This week he served up a mea culpa to Adrian Wojnarowski, the domo of Yahoo! Sports’ new NBA vertical The Vertical, which got the scoop on the Durant signing with Golden State before anyone wanted to believe that was going to happen.
Passings
I tried to write this tribute to Pat Summitt before her death at the age of 64 on June 28, since friends, colleagues and former players had been summoned to her bedside during the days before, her rapid demise from Alzheimer’s having accelerated.
The nasty disease that forced her retirement in 2012 as basketball coach of the Tennessee Lady Volunteers robbed her even of her precious time as a non-coach, not even four years. She was taken like a storm, after a lifetime of changing perceptions about women's sports.
I couldn’t find the words before she passed, and those I managed aren’t very good. There are much better words from Sally Jenkins of The Washington Post, who ghosted Summitt’s three books and was a close friend. In her Summitt farewell column, Jenkins delved into the larger, more troublesome issues of how to deal with Alzheimer’s victims, especially those like Summitt who were still in late middle age:
“How do we treat people who are older and ailing? As if they are sentient and sensitive beings, whose life and belongings are still theirs? Or do we treat them as if they are husks, largely insensible and defunct and somehow a little less human, so it doesn’t much matter what their care is? The answer to that question happens to be the essence of Christianity. Pat herself never failed the test.”
In my mind, no other person, save Billie Jean King, did more to advance the cause of women’s sports in America than Summitt, whose 1,098 wins are a collegiate basketball record. She did this without being the overt political crusader that King has been. Rather, Summitt’s shining example was her very example of uncompromising hard work and devotion to her life’s passion.
A memorial service for Summitt takes place Thursday in Knoxville at Thompson-Boling Arena, where eight NCAA championship banners won by her Lady Vols teams hang above the court that bears her name.