Everett Teaford remembers the curious look of the driver in the room. Teaford, a former major league worker, joined the Houston Astros in early 2016 as a professional scout, and at an organizing meeting, his new colleague Sig Mejdal kept watching him.
When the group adjourned, Mejdal, then a general manager of Astros, approached Teaford and explained his interest. A decade earlier, when Mejdal was an analyst at the St. Louis Cardinals was, his statistical model before the concept presented a positive outlook on the professional future of Teaford. Teaford, then a left-handed Georgia Southern, had a sparkling statistical CV – he had a 5-1 record and scored a record 1.84 in the prestigious Cape Cod League last summer – which is small in stature rejected.
Teaford is 6 feet tall, but he was slender for a professional outlook and weighed 160 pounds ‘on my heaviest day’, he recalled. While Mejdal told the backstory to Teaford, he explained: ‘Well, one of the biggest problems was that the crosshairs thought you were working on the premises,’ referring to the region’s supervising scout who saw Teaford up the hill. rake without his uniform. on.
Baseball is littered with examples of different body types – the second baseman of Astros, Jose Altuve, who is 5 feet-6, and the Yankees campaigner Aaron Judge, who is 6-7, finishes 1-2 in the 2017 American League Most Valuable Player Award votes – but cognitive bias can also cloud judgment. In the case of Teaford, the exploratory evaluation tended toward a mental shortcut called the representativeness heuristic, first defined by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In such cases, an assessment is strongly influenced by what is believed to be the standard or the ideal.
“When we look at the players who stand for the national anthem, it’s hard not to realize that quite a few of these guys are far from stereotypical or prototypical,” Mejdal said. “Yet our minds are quite strongly attracted to the stereotypical and prototypical.”
Kahneman, an emeritus professor at Princeton University and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, later wrote ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, a book that became essential among many of baseball’s front offices and coaching staff.
There are not many explicit references to baseball in ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, but many executives swear by it. It has circulated 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 biomathologist at NASA, who holds master’s degrees in cognitive psychology and operational research.
“Wherever I go, I bother people: ‘Have you read it? “Mejdal, now an assistant general manager at the Baltimore Orioles, said. ‘From coaches to people in the office, some come back to me and say it’s changed their lives. They never look at decisions the same way. But others said, ‘Look, thank you, but do not recommend another book to me.’ ‘
Some, however, swear by it. Andrew Friedman, the president of baseball operations for the Dodgers, recently called the book a “profound impact” and said he thinks about it when assessing organizational processes. Keith Law, a former Toronto Blue Jays CEO, wrote the book ‘Inside Game’ – an investigation into baseball bias and decision-making – inspired by ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’. Law said he found it through a proposal from Mejdal.
John Mozeliak, the president of baseball operations for the St. Louis Cardinals, sees the book as illustrative.
“As the decision tree in baseball has changed over time, it helps us all better understand why it had to change,” Mozeliak wrote in an email. He said this was especially the case when “we work in a business, that many decisions are based on what we see, what we remember and what is intuitive in our thinking.”
Sam Fuld, the new Philadelphia Phillies general manager, said reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is a good reminder to be aware of man’s basic human flaws. He plans to start a book club in the Philadelphia front office that could contain Kahneman’s work, as well as titles by Adam Grant, Carol Dweck and others.
Teaford, who proved his doubts wrong by catching the majors after a 12th round, is now the pitch coordinator for the Chicago White Sox. He recommends that his coaches read Kahneman’s book, although he was initially skeptical of Mejdal’s proposal and said, “Can a man who has not fully graduated from Georgia Southern understand this book that NASA was talking about?”
The central thesis of Kahneman’s book is the interplay between System 1 and System 2, which he described as a ‘two-character psychodrama’. System 1 is the instinctive response of someone – one that can be improved by expertise, but is automatic and fast. It seeks coherence and will apply appropriate reminders to explain events. System 2, meanwhile, is used for more complex, thoughtful reasoning – it is characterized by slower, more rational analysis, but is prone to laziness and fatigue.
During his time as a university coach, Joe Haumacher, a minor league coach for the Orioles, had a policy that he would not meet with a player until he could give his undivided attention. He asked himself if it was fair, but reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” helped Haumacher understand his rationale.
Kahneman wrote that when system 2 is overloaded, system 1 can take an impulse, often at the expense of self-control. In one experiment, subjects were asked to complete a task that required cognitive effort – to remember a number of seven digits – and then they had the choice of chocolate cake or fruit salad for dessert. The majority opted for the cake.
‘I do not want to get into a situation where my mind is halfway on one topic, and then I talk to a player and give him the answer to the chocolate cake he may be looking for, as opposed to the fruit salad answer he probably needs, said Haumacher.
No area of baseball is more susceptible to bias than exploration, in which organizations gather information from diverse sources: statistical models, subjective evaluations, characterization of mental composition, and more. Kahneman emphasizes the importance of maintaining the independence of judgments to decorrelate errors – that is, to separate inputs so that the one does not influence the other.
“The independent opinion aspect is critical to avoiding group thinking and being aware of momentum,” said Josh Byrnes, a senior vice president for the Dodgers. “There is a degree of purity about how the information is collected, and ultimately how it is weighed.”
Matt Blood, the director of player development for the Orioles, first read ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ nine years ago as a Cardinals area scout and said he still consults it regularly. He worked with a Cardinals analyst to develop his own reconnaissance algorithm as a three-chain to reduce bias. He also appeals to the general practice of issuing ‘comps’ – a language of exploration for comparisons – of a young player with an established pro.
“We tend to contribute a player to what we’ve seen in the past, or to a player who’s in the major leagues, and then all of a sudden everything starts to look like the amateur league to the amateur player,” he said. Blood said. “And it’s dangerous.”
Mejdal himself fell victim to the trap of representational heuristics when he started with the Cardinals in 2005. His first draft model projected Stanford’s Jed Lowrie as the best available player. Mejdal lived nearby and went to look at this ‘proposed Paul Bunyan of a second man’, he recalled, only to find a player who seemed too small even for a university field.
Mejdal has just resigned from NASA and doubts his analysis, which caused a panic attack on the Stanford stands. “I remember the disconnection described by Kahneman,” he said, adding that it took several hours to identify his mental defect, while remembering that Lowrie’s size was not the fact that he was the trio of the Pac-10 conference won second year.
But for all the interest in it in people in baseball, the book contains only one notable reference to the sport: a paragraph explaining the premise of Michael Lewis’ best-seller, “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 remarked that the inefficiency of baseball in the market explains can be through the cognitive psychological research of the two psychologists. Lewis later wrote in Vanity Fair: “It didn’t take me long to realize that Kahneman and Tversky made my baseball story possible in a not so great way.”
Kahneman, now 86, declined an interview for this article. He said he did not know enough about baseball. Baseball, however, knows a lot about him.