Paul DePodesta

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“There Will Be An IT Coach At Some Point In The Dugout”

March 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

In the years since the work of Eric Walker, Sandy Alderson, Billy Beane, Paul DePodesta and others culminated in the literary and big-screen versions of Moneyball, baseball analytics has become a never-ending space race of sorts.

In “Beane Counters,” Jonah Keri of Grantland, no stranger to those trying to eke out wins on the margins, visits with “Brad Pitt” and Lew Wolff, the Oakland A’s owner, as the team with a terrible stadium and economic disadvantages tries to win its third straight division title. An excerpt:

While Moneyball the book and especially Moneyball the movie pumped up certain aspects of the A’s success while downplaying certain others (Messieurs Zito, Mulder, Hudson, Tejada, and Chavez would surely like a word), they perfectly pegged Beane’s distrust of industry insiders. While acknowledging that Melvin’s playing experience helped his candidacy for the manager job, Beane admitted to still harping on the value of outsiders’ perspectives when hiring people for other positions.

“I don’t want a lot of guys like me who played the game,” Beane said. “Quite frankly, I want blank canvases, I want people to come in with new ideas. I don’t want the biases of their own experiences to be a part of their decision-making process. Listen, our whole staff — [assistant GM] David [Forst] played at Harvard, but that doesn’t count because it’s Harvard — didn’t really play. The bottom line is that any business should be a meritocracy. The best and brightest. Period. This game is now evolving into that.”

Beane credited Michael Lewis for helping to spark that shift.

“That’s the best thing about the book and what it became,” Beane said. “I just talked to a young lady, a freshman at Santa Barbara. She’s taking a course, and Moneyball’s one of the required readings. This young lady could dream of one day becoming a general manager. That would have been much harder to imagine 15 years ago.”

One of those outsiders could be in the dugout before long, Beane said. Given the challenge of watching for subtle physical cues such as pitcher fatigue while also cycling through the many possible strategies and outcomes during the course of a game, managers and bench coaches would seemingly benefit greatly from employing a new aide.

“There will be an IT coach at some point” in the dugout, crunching numbers in real time and sitting right next to the manager, Beane said. The A’s have yet to actually create such a position for very practical reasons. “It would be an extra coach, and [MLB] is pretty strict — we aren’t even allowed walkie-talkies,’ Beane said about league restrictions on how many coaches a team can have, and what kind of contact they can have with the outside world during games. “But I believe at some point this will happen. There’s too much data that’s available not to want to use it.”•

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“The Guiding Principle Of Our Work Is Figuring Out A Way To Deal With Uncertainty”

October 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Paul DePodesta will always, always be asked about Moneyball, but he continues to have interesting thoughts on the topic. And he’s clearly aware that even a great MLB GM is wrong a lot. Those who minimize risk have the best chance of winning–but no guarantees. From Kevin Berger’s Nautilus interview with “Peter Brand”:

“Question:

Were there authors or books who shaped your thinking about baseball?

Paul DePodesta:

Yes. But it wasn’t necessarily out of my formal education. The summer after my freshman year at college, I interned in Washington D.C. for Jim Pinkerton. [Pinkerton was a White House analyst for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Today he is an author and panelist on the TV show, Fox News Watch.] On the first day I showed up at the office, Jim gave me $20 and told me to go down to the bookstore, buy a copy of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and don’t come back until I finish it. So I did. The thing that struck me about the book was how paradigms change and what needs to change for progress. I also read Peter Drucker—his interesting management-efficiency stuff. I remember Drucker talking about the value question. Very simply put: If we weren’t already doing it this way, is this the way we would start? Jim looked at everything that way. I remember talking to him about the DMV, and him explaining if we weren’t already doing it this way, do you think this is the way we would do it? So he got me thinking that way. 

Question:

What’s the guiding principle of your work now?

Paul DePodesta:

The guiding principle of our work is figuring out a way to deal with uncertainty. That’s what we deal with every day—an uncertain future. What’s going to happen on the next pitch is uncertain. We can’t figure out exactly what’s going to happen, but if we can get our arms around a range of possibilities, that gives us a much better chance to at least make better decisions. We’re still going to be wrong a lot, but hopefully we’re wrong less often now than we were 10 years ago. But we’re never going to be in a situation where our analysis tells us what’s going to happen. These are human beings interacting with one another in a highly stressful situation. So we’re never going to be perfectly predictive. But that’s what makes baseball interesting, makes it emotional.

Question:

Do you rely on probability theory, the math of potential outcomes, to help assemble a team?

Paul DePodesta:

Absolutely. We use probability theory every day, as it provides a framework for dealing with the uncertainty. The nice thing about baseball is that all of the possible outcomes are known—it’s not quite as messy as the real world. That makes the game an excellent playground for probability.”

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