In the movie The Commitments there is a montage-type scene in which various candidates for the band are asked to identify “their influences.” They respond with Bo Diddley, Elvis Costello, Boy George, etc. and are invited in our left on the doorstep accordingly (or something like that given that the last of my five viewings of the movie was in the mid-1990s).
As I too have my influences, I thought I’d trot out a few for consideration so that my readers can move on or stick around accordingly. To start with, I refer to David Foot in the Introduction to this blog. You can hardly be a Canadian interested in demography and not be influenced by Dr. Foot. I also owe a debt to Dr. Nirmala Cherukupalle, who taught me briefly at Queens University and reinforced the importance of accuracy in projection.
The first influence I want to discuss, however, is my favorite writer and one of North America’s most famous statisticians: baseball prognosticator Bill James. James was the subject of the very second article I ever published (“A Whole New Ball Game,” Plan Canada, Volume 26, Number 1, March 1986, pp. 10-11, 25), in which I expressed my hope that the analytical approach that James applied to baseball might inspire planners.
It was a bit odd because James was and is an economist who applied his training to his real interest and developed a suite of methods that at the time I wrote about him were beginning to influence views on baseball management. James was a leading proponent of what is called sabermetrics, named after the Society of American Baseball Research, which was formed to research and assess baseball statistics first made widely available through the 1968 publication of the Baseball Encyclopedia. I have an original copy that my father bought for me in recognition of my middling accomplishments in high school and it would qualify as my personal most read book of the 1970s. Bill James’ Abstracts — at least the published ones as opposed to the early mimeographed ones — were my most read books of the eighties.
What James and other sabermetricians active at the time were doing was digging behind conventional statistical measures and developing new techniques to measure what really mattered on a baseball diamond. James was in the forefront because on top of being an insightful statistician, he was a terrific, frequently very funny writer, who could not only grind out numbers but could also write insightfully on the short-term benefits of hallucinogenic drugs in light of the success of the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates.
There are hundreds of observations by James on life, statistics, and research methods that are well worth the consideration planners, demographers, planners, and people in general. In the 20 plus years since I wrote about him, James has furthermore enjoyed success that more often than not has eluded prognosticators in the dry profession from which he sprung. Despite considerable resistance and even disdain within baseball management during the 1980s and early 1990s, his ideas were gradually adopted. Most notably, the Oakland A’s made statistical analysis a cornerstone of their management approach in the past ten years, and their ability to accomplish more on the field with less in the bank converted the baseball business, with a considerable assist from George F. Will’s book Moneyball. Even before the endorsement of the A’s and Will, James was getting hired by agents and teams to assist in player rating for arbitration hearings and other negotiations. In 2002, he was hired by the Boston Red Sox and assisted Theo Epstein, who at 28 years of age was named General Manager of the Boston Red Sox in 2004, to win the Sox’ first two World Series since they sold Babe Ruth in 1918.
I’m not too sure exactly what James does for the Red Sox, some sort of analysis of player performance to assist the field manager to deploy his team effectively and to help Epstein to figure out who to keep and who to get rid of I supose, but this is what Epstein has said about his influence:
The thing that stands out for me is Bill’s humility. He was an outsider, self-publishing invisible truths about baseball while the Establishment ignored him. Now 25 years later, his ideas have become part of the foundation of baseball strategy. But where’s Bill? Where’s the gloating? Where’s the publicist? He’s like somebody outlining the Internet in the ’80s and watching silently as it comes to pass.
I don’t really care if James is as humble as Christ or more bombastic than Chad Ocho Cinco. What matters to me is that Epstein and many otheers recognize that James has amply demonstrated that his methods — statistical methods — are an effective tool. I can think of a lot of reasons why analysis of this type has fallen into such disrepute. There’s that stupid aphorism about damn lies and statistics for one thing. There is also the fact that most people find math tougher than English. And there is the further fact that economists appear so often to do such a bad job of predicting what will happen with the economy.
James, however, is the counterpoint. Before him, notwithstanding the astonishing statistical database maintained by the sport, baseball people for the most part went by the seats of their pants. They weren’t total Luddites about this. Kevin Kerrane’s Dollar Sign on the Muscle gives a good insight into the methods by which scouts rate and record the “five tools” that normally define the potential of a baseball player (i.e., hitting for average, hitting for power, running speed, arm strength, and fielding ability). Its a quantitative approach too but it relies heavily on the feel of experience over the measurement of performance.
As James has amply demonstrated time and again, many a 6′ 4″, 220 lb. stud with afterburners on his arms and legs does not necessarily live up to his assets. Observation is valuable but it can also be deceiving, particularly when it is formed and reinforced by group think. Ultimately, James wanted to know how the big guy actually performed and, in particular, how he performed relative to others who could be given the opportunity instead of him. By no means was James simplistic about this. He was among the first to recognize that baseball parks often had a big impact on how a player performed and that a key issue in assessing players was to equalize for the different places that they played their games. He also recognized, as did some others, that many of the measures used to track baseball performance were not all that they were cracked up to be. He recognized, for example, that the Little League chant, “a walk’s as good as a hit” was actually true and that on base percentage ((hits + walks)/at bats) was a better measure of a hitter’s contribution than the traditional batting average (hits alone/at bats). He also recognized that more complex measures were often needed with the constant goal being to determine what players, management and strategy contributed to winning.
By no means am I James biggest fan. I’ve read most everything he’s written but a quick Google cruise with his name will throw up literally thousands of largely male North Americans who have actually read everything and strive to out do each other in their devotion. I am just one modest member of the cult, who sees value in James’s approach in my professional field where it should much more easily have a home. A fair number of planners are economists or statisticians and most of us, like me, have at least taken a fair number of courses in economics and/or statistics. For most of my career, however, these disciplines have been anything but ascendent in my profession.
Planning is now seems to be primarily a combination of animation and consultation techniques combined with collection of prescriptions like Smart Growth developed by other professions (including economists) that we accept and promulgate largely on faith. Its not that I disagree with consultation. I most certainly wouldn’t want to return to the 1950s approach when planners influenced by Howard Roark school of modern architecture ran roughshod over “slums” so as to provide a better life for the residents, whether those residents liked it or not. I do think, though, that consultation has its own set of problems, particularly when its practitioners choose to be ciphers who refuse to commit to ideas of their own.
The particularly sad part of planners’ desertion of method is that the tools for applying quantitative tehniques have been so much improved. Obviously, the last 30 years have seen a computer revolution that have made the refinement and appplication of quantitative methods infinitely easier. That revolution has been key to the success of sabermetrics. Personal computers on every desk and in every home have allowed James and many, many others to look at issues that interested them that they weren’t allowed to take near the university mainframe. We planners, on the other hand, have always been considered to have a legitimate call on institutional resources and can even get paid to apply them to the issues that concern us. We’ve made big advances with GIS, for sure but when I look over my copy of the 1974 edition of Donald Krueckeberg and Arthur Silvers’ Urban Planning Analysis: Methods and Models, I do not see one method or model presented that has been supplanted by a superior technique in three and a half decades.
My fixation has been demography but I could also see benefit in planners taking more interest in the techniques of transportation planners and the lessons they provide in human behavior. I wonder, in the same vein, if we couldn’t develop a better statistical understanding of pedestrian movement, parking lot usage, community facilities location, and a variety of other areas in which our communities perform less well than they should. There is also the area of building design and densification, which we slavishly endorse but in which a whole collection of poorly understood but quantifiable trade offs are made. For example, while I may save gasoline living an apartment building next to the office tower where I work, what energy is consumed by elevators, security lighting, and mechanical HVAC systems? Its exactly the kind of question, it seems to me, that once intrigued James about baseball and spawned his niche profession and still ought to motivate mine.
