Everett Teaford remembers the executive’s curious look from across the room. Teaford, a former major league pitcher, joined Houston Astros as a professional scout in early 2016 and, at an organizational meeting, his new colleague Sig Mejdal continued to look at him.
When the group was closed, Mejdal, then an important Astros executive, approached Teaford and explained his interest. A decade earlier, when Mejdal was an analyst at St. Louis Cardinals, his pre-draft statistical model had offered an optimistic outlook on Teaford’s professional future. Teaford, then a southpaw from Georgia Southern, had a brilliant statistical record – he had a 5-1 record and 1.84 earned on average the previous summer in the prestigious Cape Cod League – which belied his fragile stature.
Teaford is six feet tall, but he was skinny for a professional candidate, weighing 160 pounds “on my heaviest day,” he recalled. As Mejdal recounted the story back to Teaford, he explained, “Well, one of the biggest problems was that the checker thought you were on the field team,” referring to the supervisory scout in the region who saw Teaford sweeping the mound without his even on.
Baseball is full of examples of various types of bodies – the second baseman of Astros Jose Altuve, who is 1.50 m, and Yankees outside defender Aaron Judge, who is 6 to 7 years old, finished 1-2 in the ballot. 2017 American League Most Valuable Player Award – but cognitive bias can also cloud judgment. In the case of Teaford, scouting was predisposed to a mental shortcut called representativeness heuristics, which was initially 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 ideal.
“When we look at the players playing the national anthem, it’s hard not to notice that many of these guys are far from being stereotyped or prototypical,” said Mejdal. “However, our mind is still attracted very loudly by the stereotyped and prototypical.”
Kahneman, professor emeritus at Princeton University and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, later wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, a book that has become essential among many of the baseball offices and technical teams.
There are not many explicit references to baseball in “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, but many executives swear to it. Circulated heavily in the main offices of Oakland Athletics, Los Angeles Dodgers, Baltimore Orioles and Astros, among others. But there is no more fervent disciple of the tome than Mejdal, a former NASA biomathematician who obtained a master’s degree in cognitive psychology and operational research.
“Practically wherever I go, I’m bothering people: ‘Did you read that?’” Said Mejdal, now assistant general manager of the Baltimore Orioles. “From coaches to frontline employees, some respond to me and say that it has changed their lives. They never look at decisions in the same way. But others said, ‘Sig, thank you, but please don’t recommend another book for me’ ”.
Some, however, swear by it. Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers’ president of baseball operations, recently cited the book as having “a really profound impact” and said he reflects on it when evaluating organizational processes. Keith Law, a former Toronto Blue Jays executive, wrote the book “Inside Game” – an examination of baseball’s prejudice and decision-making – inspired by “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. Law said he found out at Mejdal’s suggestion.
John Mozeliak, the president of St. Louis Cardinals baseball operations, sees the book as illustrative.
“As the decision tree in baseball has changed over time, it helps us to better understand why it needed to change,” wrote Mozeliak by email. He said that this is especially true when “we work in a company where many decisions are based on what we see, what we remember and what is intuitive to our thinking”.
Sam Fuld, the new general manager of Philadelphia Phillies, said that reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is a good reminder to be aware of your own basic human flaws. He plans to start a front office book club in Philadelphia that could feature Kahneman’s work, as well as titles by Adam Grant, Carol Dweck and others.
Teaford, who proved his doubters wrong in making the majors after being chosen in the 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 suggestion, saying, “Can a guy who didn’t fully graduate in South Georgia understand this book that Mr. NASA was talking about? “
The central thesis of Kahneman’s book is the interaction between System 1 and System 2 of each mind, which he described as a “psychodrama with two characters”. System 1 is a person’s instinctive response – which can be enhanced by experience, but is automatic and quick. Search for consistency and apply relevant memories to explain events. System 2, in turn, is invoked for more complex and careful reasoning – it is characterized by a slower and more rational analysis, but is prone to laziness and fatigue.
During his time as a college coach, Joe Haumacher, a pitch coach from the Orioles’ secondary league, used to have a policy of not meeting a player until he could offer his full attention. He wondered if that was fair, but reading “Thinking, fast and slow” helped Haumacher understand his reasoning.
Kahneman wrote that when System 2 is overloaded, System 1 can make a decision on impulse, often at the expense of self-control. In one experiment, participants were asked to complete a task that required cognitive effort – remembering a seven-digit number – and then had a choice of chocolate cake or fruit salad as a dessert. Most opted for the cake.
“I don’t want to get into a situation where my mind is in the middle of a topic, and so I’m talking to a player and giving him the answer to the chocolate cake he might be looking for, versus the answer to the fruit salad he you probably do, ”said Haumacher.
No area of baseball is more susceptible to bias than scouting, in which organizations aggregate information from different sources: statistical models, subjective assessments, characterizations of mental constitution and much more. Kahneman emphasized the importance of maintaining the independence of judgments in order to reveal errors – that is, to separate inputs so that one does not influence the other.
“The independent opinion aspect is critical to avoiding group thinking and being aware of the momentum,” said Josh Byrnes, senior vice president of the Dodgers. “There is some purity in how the information is collected and, ultimately, how it is weighed.”
Matt Blood, Orioles’ director of player development, first read “Thinking, Fast and Slow” as a scout in the Cardinals area nine years ago and said he still consults him regularly. He collaborated with an analyst at Cardinals to develop his own scoring algorithm as a trigger mechanism to mitigate prejudice. He also recommends caution regarding the common practice of issuing “comps” – Scouting jargon for comparisons – from a young player to an established professional.
“We have this tendency to compare a player with what we saw in the past, or with a player who is in the major leagues, and then, suddenly, everything about that amateur player starts to look and feel like a major league player,” he said. Blood. “And this is dangerous.”
Mejdal himself was a victim of the representativeness heuristic trap when he started with the Cardinals in 2005. His first draft model designed Stanford’s Jed Lowrie as the best player available. Mejdal lived nearby and went to see this “imagined Paul Bunyan as a second baseman,” he recalled, only to find a player who seemed too small even for a college camp.
Mejdal had just left a job at NASA and was doubting his analysis, triggering a panic attack in the Stanford bleachers. “I remember the disconnect described by Kahneman,” he said, adding that it took him a few hours to identify his mental error, noting that Lowrie’s size did not change the fact that he won the triple crown from the Pac-10 Conference as a second year.
But despite all people’s interest in baseball, the book contains only one notable reference to the sport: a paragraph explaining the premise of Michael Lewis’ bestseller, “Moneyball”.
Lewis later wrote “The Undoing Project”, about the work of Kahneman and Tversky (who died in 1996) as a direct result of a criticism of the book “Moneyball”, in which two academics noted that the inefficiencies of the market in baseball can be explained by the cognitive factor research in psychology of the two psychologists. Lewis later wrote in Vanity Fair: “It didn’t take me long to discover that, in a not-so-indirect way, Kahneman and Tversky made my baseball story possible.”
Kahneman, now 86, declined an interview for this article. He said he didn’t know enough about baseball. Baseball, however, knows a lot about it.