Forecasting it right

“As Michael Lewis said, the debate is over,” Billy Beane declared when we were discussing Moneyball. For a time, Moneyball was very threatening to people in the game; it seemed to imply that their jobs and livelihoods were at stake. But the reckoning never came — scouts were never replaced by computers. In fact, the demand to know what the future holds for different types of baseball players—whether couched in terms of scouting reports or statistical systems like PECOTA—still greatly exceeds the supply. Millions of dollars—and the outcome of future World Series—are put at stake each time a team decides which player to draft, whom to trade for, how much they should pay for a free agent. Teams are increasingly using every tool at their disposal to make these decisions. The information revolution has lived up to its billing in baseball, even though it has been a letdown in so many other fields, because of the sport’s unique combination of rapidly developing technology, well-aligned incentives, tough competition, and rich data.

This isn’t necessarily making life easier for Beane, who expressed concern that the other teams have copied the A’s best tricks. Very few teams, for instance, now fail to understand the importance of OBP or neglect the role played by defense—and what hasn’t changed is that those teams still have a lot more money than the A’s.

In the most competitive industries, like sports, the best forecasters must constantly innovate. It’s easy to adopt a goal of “exploit market inefficiencies.” But that doesn’t really give you a plan for how to find them and then determine whether they represent fresh dawns or false leads. It’s hard to have an idea that nobody else has thought of. It’s even harder to have a good idea—and when you do, it will soon be duplicated.

That is why this book shies away from promoting quick-fix solutions that imply you can just go about your business in a slightly different way and out predict the competition. Good innovators typically think very big and they think very small. New ideas are sometimes found in the most granular details of a problem where few others bother to look. And they are sometimes found when you are doing your most abstract and philosophical thinking, considering why the world is the way that it is and whether there might be an alternative to the dominant paradigm. Rarely can they be found in the temperate latitudes between these two spaces, where we spend 99 percent of our lives. The categorizations and approximations we make in the normal course of our lives are usually good enough to get by, but sometimes we let information that might give us a competitive advantage slip through the cracks.

The key is to develop tools and habits so that you are more often looking for ideas and information in the right places—and in honing the skills required to harness them into W’s (wins) and L’s (losses) once you’ve found them.

It’s hard work. But baseball will remain an unusually fertile proving ground for innovators. There hasn’t been a really groundbreaking forecasting system since PECOTA’s debut ten years ago. But someone will come along and take advantage of Pitch f/x data in a smart way, or will figure out how to fuse quantitative and qualitative evaluations of player performance. All this will happen, and sooner rather than later—possibly in the time that this book is at the printer.

“The people who are coming into the game, the creativity, the intelligence—it’s unparalleled right now,” Beane told me. “In ten years if I applied for this job I wouldn’t even get an interview.”

Moneyball is dead; long live Moneyball.