198. Playing the Percentages: Baseball and Literature

 

In an earlier post (#195) a baseball fan wanted a key player on his team to shun his dying manager for fear a hug from him would affect his emotions enough to make him lose his poise at a possible key point in a possible key game in the race for the league pennant.  I have finally concluded — you've been waiting five weeks? — that this says something, not about human pathology, but about baseball.

It's that that fan has gotten so accustomed to playing the percentages — the enforced strategy in baseball— that he just can't stop.  You bat a left-handed hitter against a right-handed pitcher, walk the eighth-spot hitter to get to the pitcher, and position your third baseman close to the bag with a man on first in the ninth inning of a close game because most of the time it pays off.

Baseball teaches you to go for the 1% advantage (the "edge") you'll get 1% of the time.  Like with the catcher backing up first base, an example that tests the limits like no other.  In this play you're trying to make sure the runner doesn't go to second on a throw that gets through the first baseman.  Ball gets through, there he is. 

And how often does a ball get through?  I'd say less than three percent of the time.  And only when the throw is coming from the second baseman will the catcher have a chance of fielding it.  From any of the other three infield positions the angle of the throw would make it necessary for the catcher to get to first faster than the runner does.   He, the catcher, leaping up from his tiring squat, is not going to be able to do that.  Even if he were the fastest man on the team he couldn't do it.

So why in the world do you have this usually heavy-set, sometimes glue-footed, always over-worked, probably (after the sixth inning) pretty tired fellow snatch off his mask and, at the risk of stumbling over the discarded bat, dig like a fool for first base?   Because, inside that 3% chance of an overthrow from three of the four infield positions, is the chance that the ball it is mathematically senseless for him to try to intercept will, after it shoots past him, ricochet off the stands back toward him in a way that will let him hold the runner on first. 

How many times in a season is that going to happen?  Once, twice, maybe three times.  How many times in a game is that going to make a difference, one runner being on first rather than second?  How many games in a season are going to turn on that runner being there?  How many of those games are going to make a difference in the pennant race?  Figure all that in and you've cut the 3% chance that a back-up sprint will pay off down to something well under 1%.  After observing 75 years of ricochets I'd say it would be less than one-tenth of 1%.

Yet I still want my catchers to do it!  Why?  Because I want to win the pennant.  And I am not alone.   Catchers, because they want to win the pennant, want to do this too, and if they don't, managers, especially of college teams, make them do it.  If you don't see it happening so much in the major leagues it's because the managers have made a more refined calculation, based on closer observation.  The chance of the right ricochet is set against the chance of over-tiring the catcher, a factor in a long game.

Players adjust the odds as they go.  A catcher walking into a ballpark notes the distance of the stands from the foul line.  "No point in a back-up run here; I'll be too far for a throw even with the best ricochet."  He calculates his stamina.  "Thirteenth inning and I've been running my ass off down to first base?"  And of course the manager calculates the stamina and quickness of each catcher. 

All those percentages are tiny.  Yet a fan like me wants his players and manager to play them. That's the way you win pennants.  And I can't quit thinking that way when I see Fred Hutchinson approach Deron Johnson for a hug.  "If it reduces our chances of winning the pennant even by .005 percent, Deron, don't do it.  Get out of there."

I hope this makes my cry understandable, as I think it might be to a few fans in St. Louis and Philadelphia, and, come to think of it, to fans of literature.  Put one of them in the stands watching Doris Lessing in 1949.  He knows she's got some great work in her, and has made a start.  If she gets to London, and feeds on the minds there, the chances are it will come out.  If she stays in Africa with her two young children she will reduce those chances, probably by a very small amount.  The fan of literature sees her on the train platform, looking at their faces, reconsidering.  Will she, before she turns them over to their father, give them a last hug?  Does the fan want her to?  No more than I wanted Deron Johnson to hug Fred Hutchinson.  It would mean that he might not get The Golden Notebook.

195. Humane Feelings and the Collapse of the Cincinnati Reds.

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Oh how well we clear thinkers understand games.  We know (preceding post) that they are pure tests of ability, that humane feelings gum them up, and that if you don't get rid of them you'll look as foolish as those who let Oscar Pritorius run with a metal foot, Renée Richards play women's tennis with men's muscles, and thousands of handicapped people think they have really won something when they come in first at the Special Olympics.

And where might this superior thinking lead us?  I think the experience of Cincinnati and the players on its baseball team, much of it detailed in my posts on Baseball Pain (#179 through #192), gives us a good idea.

For the players I think right thinking would lead to their shutting out, on the field, every thought of the dying Fred Hutchinson.  That means, distant analyst, that in every at-bat during those thirty-three innings when all they needed (to bring home the runner who would give them victory) was to lay the bat firmly on just one ball, they would be saying to themselves, as each ball came out of the pitcher's hand (see it, analyst, get up close), "Here comes a ball, like any other, that I am going to swing at, or not, according to its position (high, low, out, in) and appearance (spin, little spin, no spin), judged by my experience with other balls leaving pitchers' hands."  That would follow from their knowledge of the game, and indeed from their coaches' instruction.  To win you keep your poise; you don't heighten your determination.  You do not say, it would be fatal to say, "Here comes a ball I'm by God going to hit for Hutch."

And what are you saying if you are a clear-thinking fan?  "Way to go.  Keep it up.  No Hutch."  And if you are a clear-thinking analyst you're saying, "Yes, that's the right thing, for player and fan."

Us now.  What do we say?  We know the full story.  We know what a great job these players have done maintaining their poise.  It's almost unbelievable.  For months they have watched Hutchinson lose weight and sag, and walk more and more slowly out to relieve his pitcher.   They have followed him as he went out of uniform and into the stands.  They have seen him up there as a spectator, and they have managed, apparently, to put that and all those other pictures of him out of their minds as they made their plays and swung their bats and climbed in the standings.  And then, during a road trip that removed the pictures, when there remained only the temptation to think of him at home, listening on the radio, they had continued to keep their balance, on and on, through now nine straight victories. 

Sure, in the last six of those wins, in these days when the visible finish line tightens the tension in every pennant race, the schedule had blessed them with the advantage of playing out of sight (and, often, radio range) of Hutchinson, in distant cities, and that must have made it easier.  But now they are in their home town, with Hutch's hospital close by, and his picture in the papers.  We know that the fans know that.  They know that the preceding tests are small compared to what the players are going to face in the coming games.

What most of them don't know, and won't learn until later (as I did, from Doug Wilson's book, Fred Hutchinson and the 1964 Cincinnati Reds), is that Hutchinson, within six weeks of his grave, was in the midnight crowd at the airport waiting to greet the returning team, and that he would make his way to them, and hug each of them.

That's a test we have to imagine, before we face our own test.  Say you're Deron Johnson, clean-up man, counted on to bat runs in.  You know you have the best chance of being up at bat with the game on the line, maybe the season on the line.  You know that you have the best chance of coming through if your mind is empty.  And you, by this time, know how much effort it takes to keep Hutchinson's image out of it.  You know the odds, and what your emotions will do to them.  OK.  You see Hutchinson coming down the line giving hugs.  Do you bail out?  Sneak off, go home, try to forget him?  Or do you risk the hug? 

That's Johnson's problem, and we, forgetting what we know about the actual outcome (that Johnson, with one out in the fourteenth inning of the crucial game, with the winning run on third, struck out), have to imagine what Johnson faced at that time, feeling what he knows he would feel in that hug — the looser grip, the closer face, the bone in the sagging shoulder.  Our problem, our test, is whether or not we want him to do it.  Wanting is what makes the spectator complicit with the actor. Don't object that the test of the fan here, wanting or not wanting a hug, is microscopic.  Trace elements are good enough.  One small slide and there it will be: character!

What we will have a trace of may be small but there will be no mistaking it.  One kind of character says, "No!  No!  No hugs!  Go the other way.  Ignore him.  Forget Hutchinson.  Do anything, callous or not, to win.""  The other says, "Forget winning, forget the game, forget logic.  Feeling for a suffering human being comes first."

It's a small test and we baseball fans are, culturally, small people, but it's a test to be taken seriously.  Here is our chance to share in the decision-making of the great — Ulysses Grant counting the number he will have to sacrifice at Antietam, a scientist like Gottlieb (in Arrowsmith) anticipating the deaths in his control group, Tennessee Williams foreseeing the suffering of the sister he will abandon, Doris Lessing seeing the same in the children she will leave in Africa, all great generals and scientists and artists, really, all who have to be ruthless to succeed.  We can share in their decision-making by reading about it but that doesn't really test us, not like getting into a baseball season (or a novel, or a play) and being forced to decide, up close: do I really want this ruthlessness?  There's so much supporting either answer, whatever the grandeur of the outcome. Say No and in our culture you've got Christ behind you.  Say Yes and you've got the Greeks, the Romans, and Machiavelli. 

And there's so much to lose, either way.  Yes and you lose your humanity (in older terms, your soul).  No and you lose your reason, the faculty that told you what a game was, and distinguished it from parties and treatments, and made your words fit into a logic — in short, put things in conceptual order.

Try to go both ways, want both success and humanity, and you lose your reputation with analysts. You get called a "coward," one unwilling to pay the necessary price, or a "dullard," one unable to see the connection between success and price, or, both together, a "sentimentalist," one who wants "every idea without its sequence and every pleasure without its consequence."

These are the hazards once you throw yourself into spectating or reading, and quit just filling a seat.  Do that, become a fan in the old full, sense ("fanatic"), follow your passion one way or the other, and, by the experience of the fanatics in Cincinnati, I think your imagination will carry you well beyond the season — or the novel, or the play.  Did I make the right decision?  Do I have the right character?  We all want to be justified.

So some of us will have Johnson, after he has avoided the hug, meeting Hutchinson in Heaven.  "Hell, Hutch," he says, "my mind was on the next game."  We are seeing Hutchinson's character tested.  If he is the good manager we think he is he will understand perfectly. He'll forgive Johnson as Billy Budd forgave Captain Vere.  You do what you have to do to win. Superior ballplayers, superior beings, don't make a big deal out of hugs.

And some of us will have Johnson, after he has hugged, meeting Socrates, who will understand and sympathize, but who yet will say, "Yes, you have seen the injury you might have done to a man, but do you see the injury you have done to the laws, the laws of thought?  Logic.  The ordering of our concepts."  And he will go into the consequences of that for later generations, including his own children and grandchildren, who will look to his example.

Since those who give in to their hearts can track consequences in the same way, though, and we don't know how it will come out, we are left pretty much in the air.  It looks like a lady-or-the-tiger kind of choice.  I myself choose the hug-avoiders, but I'd be interested in hearing from others.  My email: hswardson@yahoo.com

182. Baseball Pain (4). The Pythagorean Number

 
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When you're a fan you become so focused on your own ballplayers that you get to thinking they're the cause of everything.  The other guys don't "get" three hits; your pitcher "gives them up."  He "gets" batters to swing at bad pitches, hit the ball on the ground, pop up, even line out.  When your guy comes to the plate and does that it's all his fault.

Other teams are known mainly by what they have done to you. The Phillies beat us up in the first two series we played with them in 1964 and after that they were "the mighty Phils," kept on their eminence by memory — and, of course, the numbers in the won-lost column.  That's why I referred to them (in the preceding post) and the Giants as the two "really talented" and "strong" teams, up there battling for first place.  Well the Phils weren't nearly as strong as they appeared, as I recently found out.

One number in one of those genius statisticians' columns, called "the Pythagorean number," made it all clear.  The number is the percentage of wins a team "should have," given their talent, measuring talent by the differential between number of runs scored and number of runs allowed up to that point (see note, below).  You can see right away whether or not a team is "playing over its head" — that is, beyond its basic talent — or not.  If it is, you're not so surprised at a fold.  Class will tell.

Well, on September 21, the day Ruiz greased their skids, the Phils had a Pythagorean number of  .561.  Their won-lost percentage at that point was .600.  They had been playing "way over their heads."

What a useful number!  How much it tells us about past pennant races.  Knowing that on the 21st the Phils were playing .39 over their heads I check the Reds and see that their Pythagorean is .564 while their actual won-lost is .557.  They're playing a little under their heads.  If there had been a Pythagorean number in '64 I'd have been saying, "Yeah, man, we'll catch 'em.  We got the class."  To a Philly fan after the fold I could have said, "Don't take it so hard, buddy.  It was in the cards.  Class told."

In the cards.  In the cards.  Easy to say but when I think about that old fatalist expression, especially during a game, it troubles me.  In my seat I don't for one moment believe that Brandon Phillips' game-changing break for third base (see Post #172) was in the cards.  It was a decision he made, and it came out of his character.  Everything my players do is a manifestation of character.  I see it in every action on the field.  I can't help it.  That's the way I watch and that, I think, is the way most fans watch.  Do the numbers show that we're fools?

If we are fools some of us, the nuts for whom "in the cards" will suggest simulated games, should know it well by now.  Robert Coover, the novelist, certainly should know it.  One of his heroes matches every percentage event in a baseball game to a comparable percentage throw of the dice.  Most nuts use playing cards (jack for a single, queen for a double, and so on) with the proportion of cards in an arranged deck adjusted for event (only one ace for a home run, for example) and player (more face cards for sluggers).  Play that game over the winter and you'll have no doubt that "in the cards" refers to a mathematical outcome independent of human agency.  Or, where the shoe pinches, that winning a pennant has nothing to do with character.

A cynical, illusion-smashing statistician could really drive this home.  "Oh sure, you can find parts of a season — winning streaks, losing streaks, sudden turns — that appear to be character-driven, you can use words like 'confident' and 'demoralized' and 'momentum.'  You can talk about 'psychological advantage' and a player 'choking.'  But those are just you, constructing something dramatic and intelligible." 

And you know, as you learn more about statistics you begin to wonder if that killjoy has a point.  Do you know that 100 random win-lose tosses will produce, more often than not, at least one six-game winning streak?  Look at that streak in your winter game and try not to make up a story about it.  Hell, that's the point of playing the game, to trigger your imagination.  Turn over one card and a team boards the train home fired up, turn over a different one and they're in the dumps.

If you upped the technology and had ballplayers running on batteries wired to a talent program that cranked out their performance would the season they produced be in any way distinguishable from a season produced by human ballplayers?  Might you produce the 1964 season this way?  How, to go Cartesian with this, do I know that the 1964 season wasn't produced that way, by some all-powerful demon?

What a prospect!  Every team's line on the graph wobbling toward its Pythagorean number, every player's line showing more and more accurately how much a victim or beneficiary of his basic talent he is.  But then there are those streaks at the end of 1964, by all three teams we're interested in.   Once you acquire the statistician's view you can't get rid of it.  So, fair warning.  The drama in the rest of this narrative could have no basis in nature.  An evil demon could just be playing with my mind.

Note: The Pythagorean number was first obtained by dividing runs scored² by the sum of runs scored² and runs allowed².  The exponent was then changed to 1.83 in order to bring the number closer to results in the world.