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Credit: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
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A psychology book by a Nobel Prize-winning author has become a must-read in front offices [of baseball teams]. It is changing the sport.
Everett Teaford remembers the curious gaze from the executive across the room. Teaford, a former major league pitcher, had joined the Houston Astros as a professional scout in early 2016, and at an organizational meeting, his new colleague Sig Mejdal kept shooting him a look.
When the group adjourned, Mejdal, then a top Astros executive, approached Teaford and explained his interest. A decade earlier, when Mejdal was an analyst with the St. Louis Cardinals, his pre-draft statistical model had offered a bullish projection on Teaford’s professional future. Teaford, then a Georgia Southern left-hander, had a sparkling statistical résumé — he’d had a 5-1 record and 1.84 earned run average the previous summer in the prestigious Cape Cod League — that belied his slight stature.
Teaford stands 6 feet tall, but he was scrawny for a pro prospect, weighing 160 pounds “on my heaviest day,” he recalled. As Mejdal recounted the back story to Teaford, he explained, “Well, one of the biggest problems was that the cross-checker thought you worked on the grounds crew,” referring to the region’s supervising scout who saw Teaford raking the mound without his uniform on.
Baseball is littered with examples of varying body types — Astros second baseman Jose Altuve, who is 5-foot-6, and Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge, who is 6-7, finished 1-2 in the 2017 American League Most Valuable Player Award voting — but cognitive bias can cloud judgment, too. In Teaford’s case, the scouting evaluation was predisposed to a mental shortcut called the representativeness heuristic, which was first defined by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In such cases, an assessment is heavily influenced by what is believed to be the standard or the ideal.
“When we look at the players standing for the national anthem, it’s hard not to realize that quite a few of these guys are far from stereotypical or prototypical,” Mejdal said. “Yet our mind still is attracted quite loudly to the stereotypical and prototypical.”
Kahneman, a professor emeritus at Princeton University and a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, later wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” a book that has become essential among many of baseball’s front offices and coaching staffs.
There aren’t many explicit references to baseball in “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” yet many executives swear by it. It has circulated heavily in the front offices of the Oakland Athletics, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Baltimore Orioles and the Astros, among others. But there is no more ardent a disciple of the tome than Mejdal, a former biomathematician at NASA who earned master’s degrees in both cognitive psychology and operations research.
“Pretty much wherever I go, I’m bothering people, ‘Have you read this?’” said Mejdal, now an assistant general manager with the Baltimore Orioles. “From coaches to front office people, some get back to me and say this has changed their life. They never look at decisions the same way. But others have said, ‘Sig, thanks, but please don’t recommend another book to me.’”
A few, though, swear by it. Andrew Friedman, the president of baseball operations for the Dodgers, recently cited the book as having “a real profound impact,” and said he reflects back on it when evaluating organizational processes. Keith Law, a former executive for the Toronto Blue Jays, wrote the book “Inside Game” — an examination of bias and decision-making in baseball — that was inspired by “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” Law said he found it through a suggestion by Mejdal.
John Mozeliak, the president of baseball operations for the St. Louis Cardinals, sees the book as illustrative.
“As the decision tree in baseball has changed over time, this helps all of us better understand why it needed to change,” Mozeliak wrote in an email. He said that was especially true when “working in a business that many decisions are based on what we see, what we remember, and what is intuitive to our thinking.”
Sam Fuld, the new Philadelphia Phillies general manager, said reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” was a good reminder to be aware of one’s 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 by making the majors after being a 12th-round pick, is now the pitching coordinator for the Chicago White Sox. He recommends that his coaches read Kahneman’s book even though he was initially skeptical of Mejdal’s suggestion, saying, “Can a guy who didn’t totally graduate from Georgia Southern comprehend this book that Mr. NASA was talking about?”
The central thesis of Kahneman’s book is the interplay between each mind’s System 1 and System 2, which he described as a “psychodrama with two characters.” System 1 is a person’s instinctual response — one that can be enhanced by expertise but is automatic and rapid. It seeks coherence and will apply relevant memories to explain events. System 2, meanwhile, is invoked for more complex, thoughtful reasoning — it is characterized by slower, more rational analysis but is prone to laziness and fatigue.
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Joe Lemire is a senior writer who chronicles how innovation is shifting from X’s and O’s to 1’s and 0’s, with data points and technology replacing traditional tactics in modern sports.