Revolutions may start on the outside, but revolutionaries (including individuals, institutions, markets, communities) bring change from the outside to the inside by bridging the edge and the core. Today’s example: an insider testing conventional wisdom in professional baseball…

From a conversation between Joe Posnanski and Bill James (link via Rob Neyer):

Bill James: The problem with the move toward pitch counts was that there was never any logic or research that said that limiting a pitcher to 100 pitches would prevent injuries, as opposed to 130 pitches, or 130 for young pitchers and 160 for mature pitchers, or as opposed to getting the pitcher out of the game at the first sign of a problem, or as opposed to improving his training regimen. I am opposed to making decisions based on fear, and in favor of making decisions based on logic and research, and therefore I support what Nolan Ryan is trying to do.

I always admire people who have the courage to confront the conventional wisdom … I mean, people within the system. Those of us on the outside … it’s easy for us to say whatever we think, because there are no consequences to it. It’s much harder to say, “I think the conventional wisdom is full of beans, and I’m not going to go along with it,” when you’re inside the system and exposed to the possibility of actual failure. I think the people who do this drive the world to get better, whereas the people who snipe at anybody who dares suggest that the conventional wisdom is malarkey are, in my view, gutless conspirators in the mediocrity of the universe. To me, what Ryan is doing is the clearest and boldest example of challenging the conventional wisdom from within the system that I’ve seen in years, and I’m applauding.

There’s actually a fair bit of recent research into the topic; Baseball Prospectus introduced Pitcher Abuse Points in 1999 and has continued to review and refine their research over the years. But the results are far from conclusive and we’re still basing decisions on limited data and a mix of qualitative and quantitative analysis, old-school tradition and new economic realities.

Ryan is the latest person to question conventional “wisdom”. Mike Marshall, for one, used unconventional training methods throughout his career as a MLB pitcher and pitching coach; now out of the game, Marshall leverages his experience and PhD in kinesiology to continue to promote his business based on his training methods.

My biggest worry? Ryan was himself an outlier, a pitcher who racked up near-certainly enormous pitch counts in a different era (in fact, in an era when pitch counts weren’t regularly recorded); my hope is that Ryan bases his decisions on actual research from the last 20 years of pitch count data and his own trained eye and position on the field, rather than his own experience. Almost by definition, outliers aren’t blueprints for successful tactics or strategies.

In short, the debate over pitch counts is far from over; but at least the debate exists inside the game and not just outside the game.

Related

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