I attended the US Open Tennis tournament this past Saturday with one of my sons and my daughter. We watched great tennis, saw two upsets and watched a 21 year old Belgian serve regularly at 135 mph while returning virtually everything coming his way. Whatever sport these amazing athletes were playing, it wasn't anything like the sport we called tennis when I was a teenager.
I could barely follow a serve to see where it landed, and we were sitting no more than 50 feet away for the entire match.
What did I learn from watching tennis at this level?
Two things actually.
First, every every professional baseball hitter in is a unicorn.
This time of year, everything relates to baseball -- even tennis.
I complain as much as the next guy about the decline in batting averages across baseball. While I was extremely pleased to learn that 70 is the new 50, I have not been as happy about a .250 BA becoming the new .300. Soon enough the Mendoza line will drop to.100.
I hate strikeouts and often comment in ways that suggest I believe that every major leaguer should be able to put the bat on the vast majority of pitches they face. Upon reflection, these criticisms -- all of which come very easily to those of us who have never faced even a soft tosser barely able to get his fastball up to the low 90s -- are largely unwarranted.
To see why, consider the following:
The distance from the rubber to home plate is 60''6". In addition the rubber also sits ten inches higher than home plate, and pitchers actually release the ball about 10% closer to home plate than when they went into their motion.
A 90mph pitch travels over 130 feet per second, which means that the pitch reaches home plate in less than half a second: in fact, closer to .4 of a second or roughly 400 milliseconds.
The average major league swing takes about 150 milliseconds, or .15 of a second.
It takes the brain about .1 of second to identify the pitch, leaving the batter with less than .150 of a second to start a swing and to direct it in a particular direction where he thinks the ball will be when it gets to the hitting zone.
Let's think about this situation for a moment.
During a swing the batter's body does all of the following:
*recruits energy from the ground (which involves a movement into the ground)
*shifts pressure laterally from the heel of the trail foot into the ball of his front foot
*pushes into the ground diagonally from the ball of his front foot which pushes his lead side hip back and around and extends his front leg which acts as break and also adds to the force of his upper trunk and shoulder/arm structure bringing the bat into the hitting zone ultimately releasing his wrists.
All in about .15 of a second.
Just for comparison, the average downswing in a professional golfer's swing is roughly .25 to. .3 of a second. And the ball is just sitting there waiting to be hit.
Any serious golf instructor will tell you that most of commentary you hear from announcer's talking about how a player worked to save the shot by changing his swing path or holding off the club face or... is NONSENSE. It takes .2 seconds for any brain command to reach the muscles that would be capable of doing any such thing, and more time than that for your brain to recognize that you need to hold off the clubface or more rapidly close it, or whatever. Forget it. It's not going to happen.
Golfers have more than 3x the time to execute their swing and hit the golf ball that isn't moving than do hitters who not only have to execute a swing, they have to figure out whether to swing at all and what they are swinging at is moving towards them with spin and is doing absolutely everything other than sitting up on a tee waiting to be hit.
It is amazing that baseball players ever square up a pitch and do damage. Literally amazing.
Try to remember that next time you consider booing when someone from our side swings and misses, or worse yet, strikes out.
Oh and the second thing I learned was also basically a question. How in the world can you teach people how to hit a baseball at the level at which they must in order to have a successful career?
This is something I have thought about a lot in both baseball and golf. And what I strongly believe is that learning complex motor skills has been done by teachers who by an large teach the wrong things. I'll explain what I mean some other time. The following gives you a sense of how I think about it.
You can teach someone what the kinematic or kinetic sequences are, but you can't teach them how to do it. It has to happen naturally instinctively, no matter how complex the skill you are teaching is.
Here's a way to understand my basic approach which turns out to be very different from the way coaching goes on both in baseball and in golf, the two sports I know best and in which I have done the most coaching of skills.
Give your body a goal expressed as a general intention to perform something and your body will organize itself in an effort to do it. If the intention is to hit a nail with a hammer, there is a decent chance an adult will be able to accomplish it without first being taught that you have to bend your elbow, which is a lever and your wrist as well which is also a lever; and then you unlever the levers you have created.
And if you instruct someone to hit a baseball on a tee, it won't go so well for a five year old, but may prove to be no problem for one of us. It is enough for the person you ask simply to intend to hit the ball and his or her body will organize itself sufficiently well to do so. Again there is no need to explain how the body moves in order to get the player to hit the ball on a tee.
Now when it comes to teaching someone how to hit a baseball that is moving or a golf ball that is not, I assure you that the vast majority of instructors explain to their students how to stand to the ball, how to start the swing, how to shift their pressure, how they should load their spiral lines, how to ......
The one thing I assure you they do not do is tell their student to form an abstract but directed intention to complete an action and then let their body organize to see if it does so effectively. And if not, to keep doing it and also to give the body similar tasks in the same neighborhood so that it can get more information that will impact how it organizes itself; and so on.
I do the latter. Most instructors are in the business of staying in business.
Me, not so much. Here's my working hypothesis. We wouldn't play golf or baseball if we didn't already develop a set of skills, in this case, the skill of throwing, which we have done forever, whether spears or javelins or stones or balls.
Evolutionarily, we have developed this basic skill set and then we have been able to adapt the skill to different environments in which the basic skill is already instinctive. If we didn't have a body that already could organize itself to perform the basic skills that are involved in hitting a golf ball that isn't moving or a ball that is, we wouldn't have developed these sports, and they sure as hell would not have lasted as long as they have!
Coaching in these sports is really a matter of identifying the basic skill that's needed then giving prompts to your student to get them to learn how to adapt that skill that makes it work for them to perform the task at hand. All of us pretty much can adapt the general skill we have developed evolutionarily to hit a ball off a tee, but far fewer of us can adapt the skill at the level we have it to hit a ball thrown our way at 80 miles an hour; fewer still at 90 and very very few, a ball thrown at a 100 mph by a pitcher who also throws an indistinguishable (upon leaving his hand) change up at 85 mph; and so on.
How will I change my behavior as a fan now that I have learned that all the baseball players I have booed when they strike out in a big spot are unicorns who are basically magicians with a bat in their hands?
I'm an not going to stop being disappointed when my guys' strike out or fail to make good contact. But sure as hell I ain't going to boo or treat them as failures.
They ain't failures; they're unicorns. I'm lucky I get to watch them
Labor Day and the Collective Bargaining Agreement
It's Labor Day as I write this post and so that brings to mind the need for the Players' Association and the Owners to negotiate a new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA).
I will do a series of posts on the Bargaining once the season ends. I hope to be able to get some inside information, but most of what I will discuss will not depend on details, but on the issues on the table and the degree to which there is solidarity within the two bargaining groups. What I will report on will be based on my own work on rational bargaining theory and group decision making.
Just to make a few points that will highlight what I will be looking at.
Both the Players Association and the Owners are made up of subgroups. In the simplest terms, all owners, rich or not so rich, share some common interests, but there are many issues on which their interests diverge -- sometimes significantly. The same is true of the many more players represented by the Players' Association. There are many issues on which they all agree (more or less), but others on which they surely have different perspectives. There are those who are most concerned about the floor. Their focus is on raising the floor. There are others who are worried about the ceiling. Their natural focus is making sure the ceiling is not lowered.
So we have a very complex situation. Both the owners and the Players Association have an incentive to strke a deal. There is too much money at stake not to. So there is a sense in which they each need the other side to come to hold a unified position. If the other side cannot get agreement among its constituents, they become a very difficult party to negotiate with.
On the other hand, both sides have incentives to exploit the divergence of interests within the subgroups of the Group across the table. They just can't exploit differences too much and throw the entire process into doubt. This is the nature of game both sides are playing -- from a structural point of view; and I will endeavor to show how it is playing out once real bargaining begins.
I am quite confident that we are nowhere near the stage of real bargaining. Right now we are at the stage of pre-bargaining information gathering. There is a big difference between market transactions and bargaining. In a market, price typically reflects thousands if not millions of discrete transactions having occurred. With rare exceptions everyone knows what the price is and there is little haggling to be done. Not so in a bargaining case.
The first thing the parties want to know is what the other sides' reservation price is -- what they will not accept any lower than. And once reservation prices and aspirations are identified the bargaining space is well defined more or less. And that's where you want to be able to figure out whether a serious offer is on the table or instead just one designed to elicit information about the relative importance of various issues to one or the other side. So you will often see an offer that elicits some info which is then followed up by another that is designed to confirm whether what you have learned is real or a fake.
This is the kind of activity that takes time, and you can bet that both sides will have a way of blaming the other for not being serious. They both know that the other will do this regularly and will have ways of signaling to the other side that their complaints of bad faith are really designed to keep their own side behind them. Remember the representatives at the table are in a very awkward potentially vulnerable position.
The people they represent are anxious to reach a deal but one that is favorable to them; and they also have to stay fairly united. So a lot of PR and posturing may look like it is directed at the other side of the table, but it's not. It is actually directed at the group you are representing so that you can keep them unified behind you and the easiest way to do that -- up to a point -- is to complain that the other sides is not being serious.
My hope is that the approach I take to this kind of activity -- looking at strategy, incentives and structural and collective action issues proves entertaining and educational, and not just depressing and exhausting.
We'll see. Till then, count me as cautiously optimistic!
It's obvious that the increased pitching speed has created lower batting averages
ReplyDeleteThrilled you will be writing about the owners/players bullshite
ReplyDeleteI agree - was just thinking about that this morning. We all know that it will be difficult for the two parties to come to full agreement, yet the game in 2027 depends upon it.
DeleteWhen I was old enough to drive there. I used to go to a batting range a mile south of the Whitestone Bridge. Loved it, because it was not all netting. If you hit a ball 350 feet, you could watch it sail. I hit well against “fast” pitching. The VERY FAST machine was however much more challenging, but I adapted fairly well to it. I think that machine was 85 MPH. I can’t imagine hitting against Misiorowski’s 104 MPH.
ReplyDeleteAny loss of games due to a strike is grossly unfair to marginal major leaguers.
I’d like them to do their negotiating kabuki dance and ultimately not cause games to be cancelled.
I was intrigued by the opening about tennis. I remember being in my teens, reading a book called, "Inner Tennis" that talked about state of mind and how it affects performance. It really stuck with me and to this day it helps me understand how and why players have slumps and surges.
ReplyDeleteLuis Robert Jr. is already on the Injured List. Guess that was a pretty good plan to save $5M.
ReplyDeleteGreat read CO, like always.
ReplyDeleteToo bad the fans aren’t organized enough to represent a third side in the negotiations to tell the other sides how ridiculous and unfair it is to spend so much to go to a ball game?
This is the case of all entertainment from Super Bowls to Bruce Springsteen concerts. At least, in the case on baseball games, there is no political statements
DeleteThanks for the comments so far. I think all the points are well taken. I have a few additional comments. First, both market transactions (like buying food at a grocery store) and bargains (like buying a rug at a street bazar in Istanbul) can produce externalities -- consequences for third parties who are not themselves party to the transaction. The same is true of more dangerous interactions (like wars between nations). In each case, in theory you want to be able to make the parties engaged in the transaction 'internalize' the costs they are imposing on third parties (this is called 'internalizing the externalities.' Or you want the third parties to participate in one way or another in the transaction. In effect, zozo that is the point you are bringing up -- and it is an important one. I say more about this point in the following comment
ReplyDeleteYou forgot that rugs in Istanbul Aldo contain endangered species
DeleteFollowing up. In a military conflict between nations, there are several ways of trying to take into account the externalities that befall citizens. In the US, for example, the power to declare war is granted to the legislature which is theoretically a representative body that is designed in part to reflect the interests of the people -- those who are not directly party to the conflict -- but who bear risks and costs nonetheless; and why the President who is not explicitly a representative of the people does not have the power to declare war but by being Commander In Chief has the power to execute it. That's why he or she is said to be part of the Executive Branch.
ReplyDeleteNot in the case of Clinton, Bush, Obama, or Trump
ReplyDeleteIn a democracy, lots of externalities are theoretically dealt with through the elections of representatives who are agents of the people -- those who cannot be direct parties to all activities, from public works projects to treaties with other nations, but who bear the costs and secure the benefits.
ReplyDeleteSports bargaining imposing lots of externalities -- the negative ones include ticket prices for fans, and the positive ones include the entertainment value of the sport -- but the fans are not directly parties to the negotiations. But they can have their interests 'represented' in either of three ways that are familiar -- Exit, Voice, Loyalty -- first described in a book of the same name. They can leave, complain or stick it out (the latter is qualitatively different since it has the feature of 'degrees'. So I can be loyal but less than before, and there is a breaking point). And then there is the feature of Demand. Some goods are relatively insensitive to price. These are inelastic. We just need them and have to pay almost independent of cost. Other goods are very elastic. The most elastic are the ones that we have the most replacements for, and so we have little devotion to brand and decide what to do mostly on price.
To take an example: Online universities compete with one another on the basis primarily of price and convenience, not reputation. They are fungible. They don't invest much in branding beyond price and convenience. Legacy universities are very much the opposite. They invest heavily in reputation designed to deepen loyalty and the ability to price beyond the costs of providing the relevant service. (Hopefully this gives you some additional insight into issues in the political economy of higher education.)
Where do sports fit in this world of goods and services? I don't know. But I do know that the fans are right to wonder whether (as the fans often say) the players or the owners 'care' about us at all. Another key part of the Bargaining in the light of the so-called Exit, Voice and Loyalty options!
As to skills and evolutionary biology and Paul's reference to the 'Inner Game of Tennis.' There are books about golf as well in the same vein. There aren't many about football, basketball or baseball (I believe). I am not aware of any in fact. The problem that those books in tennis and golf have experienced is that they often read more like the work of Alan Watts and books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In other words they make it all sound so mysterious and fueled by 'Eastern Thought' and not the Enlightenment.
ReplyDeleteThey were both ahead of and behind the times. For there is now a lot of scientific research in fields like Epigenetics and Neuroscience and Biology that scientizes a lot of the insights of these books.
I am on the Board of a newly formed organization called the Human Potential LAB that is working on showing how many of the institutions we have adopted are based on poor science, treating things like human potential as fixed and knowable in advance (think of the Bell Curve), when in fact nothing about humans are fixed in that way. That's a story for another group of readers. :-)
It is 'inner' in a sense, but not just in what seems like an ineffable and entirely imaginative or mental way, but in a very sophisticated biological way. So the authors who have been scorned by the 'scientists' were on to something, but not what they thought exactly, but what contemporary science is revealing to us.
Enough of that for now.
Mack, absolutely right. And that's why I emphasized 'theoretically.'
ReplyDeleteNo politics here so I didn't say more. I could add something about the combatants and not just the civilians without saying something politically ideological. It's the difference between a draft and an all volunteer army. In a draft, the soldiers are more like the Civilians but without the Exit option. But because in theory everyone, from all classes and economic positions, are sent off to war, the Voices against War are stronger and potentially more influential. Going to War is politically riskier and potentially more costly. In theory. On the other hand, you might say that those who go off to war in an all volunteer military have consented to the risk and are not like the Civilians. But one could argue, that this makes going to War less politically risky as well since those with the most lobbying power and influence aren't having their kids sent to war. They aren't raising their Voices. This makes war less 'costly' publicly. The forever wars and the most recent one impose broad costs on the larger population (like gas prices or food prices and supply chain issues, etc).
And that's when the Voices come back in, but for different reasons than they do when there is a draft.
The only reason I mention military conflict is to point out the structural similarities between what look like (on the surface) very different phenomena. Bargaining in baseball and Fighting Wars. Of course they are very different, morally and otherwise. But the structure of those engaged and those impacted but not included in the 'negotiation' (Remember the phrase 'War is politics by other means') is very much the same.
And that is how I approached all the issues I worked on in my academic career. Look at the structure of problems first. Things that are very different can have very much the same underlying structure.
It's also how I approach coaching: look at the underlying structure of the motion and skill set.
If I were to explain my approach to a student or client I was coaching, I'd put them to sleep or they would,as they say, EXIT