It’s never a bad idea to step back and re-examine conventional wisdom. After all, just because things have been done the same way doesn’t mean that’s the best way to do them, right?
That’s the essential underlying theme to Brian Kenny’s “Ahead of the Curve.” His specific focus is on the game of baseball and how teams make inefficient choices largely based on the idea that making new ones is too risky.
“Failing conventionally is accepted,” he says. That is, fail doing things the way everyone else does, and the blame goes elsewhere. Fail doing something different, and it’s on you.
Kenny is far from the first person to say this, especially when it comes to baseball. He’s also far from the first to promote different statistics as far more important than ones like batting average and RBIs. But he does have compelling points when it comes to his media colleagues and their lack of racing to embrace such things.
He writes about many baseball writers who not only don’t value advanced statistics and new ideas about how the game should be played, but go out of their way to mock those who do as nerds.
“I know they mean well, but too bad. This is your full-time job. Do some work. Keep up with the advances in your industry. If the stock-in-trade is analyzing numbers, spend a little time gaining a fundamental understanding of those numbers. At the very least stop making fun of those who have.”
Plenty of people don’t like Kenny. I generally do, and I agree with most of his points in the book. That said, he can come off as a liiiiittle arrogant at times.
“I told Dr. Fuhrman what I do in my study of baseball, how I challenged conventional baseball thinking in the mainstream media. He said, ‘So people are annoyed by you, right? We have a lot in common. People are infuriated by me.'”
I followed him on Twitter for a while but chose to stop after one too many self-congratulatory tweets. But to each their own.
He examines things like, who do teams hire as managers and why? In baseball, so often the picks are former players because there is the perception that you need someone who has played the game to run a team. But he points out that while 83 percent of MLB managers had top-level pro experience in 2015, only 50 percent did in the NBA and only 15 percent in the NFL. So he asks, is there something about MLB that requires a former player to understand?
Kenny also talks about work that stats guys have done in showing how you should set up your lineup, basically going against the notion of hey, just throw the fast guy up front and see what happens. Instead, they say, you need a guy who is likely to get on base, followed second by your best hitter.
I’ve been aware of some of these things, but only since reading the book have I paid real attention to how I set up my lineup in video game land. Of course, they don’t get into the beauty of rolling out a lineup that is not one bit afraid of a right-handed pitcher:
One thing I’m unable to do in the game (because it won’t let you) is deploy the Kenny-approved strategy of upending how you use pitchers. Instead of a starter who throws seven innings, a reliever or two and then a closer, he argues that you should use a bunch of pitchers for an inning or two, or even a batter, based on the idea that they can go all out for a short time and not have to deal with the well-proven phenomenon of batters doing better each time through the order. If you want to use a traditional starter, have him come in after a few innings and pitch the middle of the game.
“Over the last decade the All-Star Game has become a primer on an all-out bullpen attack,” he says.
He also says the idea of a closer in general is fine, but that the final inning is rarely the time to deploy them. Have the bases loaded in the 3rd and nobody out down by two runs? You better get your best shutdown pitcher in the game. This I have actually paid much more attention to in my own games.
When will we see MLB managers doing any of these things? Kenny, quoting Thomas Paine, says it will just be a matter of time.
“But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”
If you’re super interested in baseball, this is a decent primer on advanced stats and how they relate/should relate to the modern game. If you already think pitcher wins are dumb, you probably already get it.