| Jun 18 | Bottom of the S-curve |
| Jun 12 | Welcome to SABR and the cut list |
David Marasco has a timeline detailing the integration of Major League Baseball, or at least the time when each team added their first black player to their major league roster. Jackie Robinson started the 1947 season with the Brooklyn Dodgers, but Boston Red Sox didn't call up Pumpsie Green until 1959. What happened in between? After the Dodgers, Indians, and Browns integrated in '47, it would take two years before the next team integrated. After that, teams were still slow to acquire black players. It wasn't until 1953 that it seemed most of baseball warmed up to the idea. Between 1953 and 1955, six of the sixteen teams added their first black player. At that point, over three-fourths of the league's teams had a non-white, but the Phillies, Tigers, and Red Sox held out. It would be another four years before these stragglers joined the party. This is the "S-Curve of Adoption" at work. When a new idea or technology comes along, there are "early adopters" who pick it up almost immediately, a delay before the bulk of the market jumps on board, and then second long stretch where the remaining stragglers catch up.
The latest new technology in baseball is the analytic study of players, and more importantly, the willingness to act on that analysis. And the market of baseball teams is still slave to the S-curve. After three where Billy Beane was going it alone in Oakland, analysis now drives much of the decision making process for Toronto and Boston as well. You can split hairs about several other teams -- like the Indians, Royals (?), Padres, and Astros -- but many teams are still slow to adopt Beane's methods. There are several accounts of teams actively shunning books like Moneyball, though they always quote the quotable "unnamed sources". How long will it take before everyone is on board? Well, it's hard to tell. You have to imagine that the cultural pressure against integrating baseball teams in the 1950s is much higher than the pressure against employing someone with a B.S. in the 1990s, but on the other hand, the current generation of front office employees is probably less than enthusiastic about the idea of radically changing the way they do their business. Beane started as G.M. of the As in 1998. We're only just now seeing performance analysis (that's a fancy way of saying "looking at the numbers as well as the players") creep into the front offices of a half-dozen teams at most, so there are likely three or four more years before the bulk of major league baseball places their faith in this idea.
All of this is a long winded way of saying I have some extra time to sock away cash in preparation for a massive pay cut to move into the baseball industry. The odds that eight to twelve teams will suddenly employ a numbers-savvy assistant GM in the next two years is pretty low. Breathe.
We are drowning in information, but starving for knowledge. Tell me about it.
I just got my SABR membership today, and suddenly I understand the feeling of drowning in information. Simply reading through the chapter on . I had four main interests: minority players in the post-Jackie Robinson era; projecting the impact of the transition from A to AA baseball; determining which regions of the world are underscouted and which are overscouted; and how baseball should package it's product to become the biggest of the three major sports again. Suddenly, though, the connections each of these makes to the rest of the game makes doing any meaningful research look impossible. Take the race question. The first generation of post-Robinson black players certainly had heroes growing up. Who were they? Did they try to imitate their childhood idols' playing style? Were little leagues (or whatever youth baseball organizations were around at the time) available to them growing up? Did their playing style conflict with that of their managers? What were there experiences like the minor leagues, likely playing in smaller (read: whiter) towns while threatening the major league careers of white minor leaguers? SABR's reminder is that there are every question will leak into the entire sport of baseball; it's the job of the researcher to carve out a usefully sized question and filter through 100 years of baseball information to reach a conclusion.
So here I am, drowning and starving all at once. This was the first great piece of advice in SABR's guide "how to get published" guide for amateur and semi-pro baseball authors. The second is like unto it: Be yourself. That can be harder to do than it sounds. The act of simply trying to jot down a few vaguely coherent paragraphs two or three times a week has given me a healthy respect for those who write regularly for a living. The ability to transfer one's normal conversational is probably a combination of learned skill and innate ability. Like drawing a walk. I guess I'll see if I have what it takes or not.
At work, my feature was cut today. This being Microsoft, I can't comment on what I would have been working on, or what I'll be working on instead, or ... well ... anything I may or may not be doing. But, absent any specifics, it's a frustrating feeling to be cut. This is after the same feature was cut from the last milestone, so despite all the assurances that being cut is in no way a reflection on my abilities or lack thereof, I feel like that's just everyone being polite. Blech.
So nine months into my professional career, I still don't have the sensation of being a contributor in any way, other than what feels like a small number of bug fixes. And it's unclear what I'll have to show for it until we move on to the next version of the runtime. Compound this with general confusion as to how long I want to be in programming, and it makes for an extra large helping of apathy these days. At least the gray season is over.
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updated by Nicholas Beaudrot on 11:47 13 February 2005