Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 528: David Epstein on Nature, Nurture, and Baseball

Episode Date: September 4, 2014

Ben and Sam talked to David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene, about whether women will make the majors, whether Babe Ruth could compete today, whether genetics explain injury rates, and more.

Just me and my destiny, and it shows all over me. Searching for something that I know I will find. Just me and my destiny, and it goes all over me. Searching for something Good morning and welcome to episode 528 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland.com,

joined as always by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. And today we have a guest who's the author of one of the most interesting books I read in 2013, The Sports Gene. He is a former senior writer at Sports Illustrated, a current ProPublica reporter, and his name is David Epstein. Hello, David. Hey, thanks for having me. Sure, thanks for being on. And we want to talk about a few topics. It's sort of a wide-ranging book that explores the intersection between nature and nurture and genetics and why certain people are good at certain sports.

And there are a few topics that come up on this podcast pretty often or on the baseball internet generally that are related to that. So I wanted to have you on to ask about a few of them. So the first one, the issue of women in baseball, specifically women playing baseball, has come up lately in the wake of the Monet Davis performance in the Little League World Series and some things that have been written. And of course, there's been this unofficial or technical ban on women playing organized baseball or professional baseball since the 50s, which is probably not actually enforceable if anyone were to take it to court. I think most people agree that there's no need for a ban, but what the impact of not having a ban would be. If there were no ban, would we suddenly see an influx of women playing baseball, or are there obstacles that would prevent that from happening?

And people are pretty divided on that subject, and it's one that you wrote about quite a bit, if not about baseball specifically, then about other sports. And so we wanted to get your perspective on that. I think it's something that could potentially happen, although I think it would be a very rare occurrence because the factors are sort of stacked against women. So to look at Monet Davis, for example. So Monet is already throwing about as fast as women are basically ever recorded throwing. So she's already a pretty significant outlier at age 13, partly because she's sort of held on a little longer than girls usually do. So if you look at in more easily kind of quantifiable sports, you know, track and field, things like that,

there's no reason to separate boys and girls early on. I mean, world records are like identical through age 10 in most of the events, um, particularly running events, identical. And then by about 15, they're in different universes because in that time, boys have quite literally gone on a natural steroid cycle that is puberty. Um, and, and we know that works quite well in baseball, whereas girls, as they become women, first of all, they don't get that. And that causes a number of issues. So first of all, that's one reason why men and boys usually end up larger in stature.

The proportion of their limb length to their total body size increases at that time. And that's incredibly important because you want really long arms for throwing and actually you want a longer forearm compared to your total arm, which is the brachial index. Boys develop a much larger brachial index through puberty. Their legs get longer in proportion to their body height and the size of the pitching step is a really important factor in pitch velocity. So all these sort of changes that boys are going through that give them advantages, girls don't get as they become women, and in many cases, actually have negative effects of puberty, where they're sort of fat deposited in places they don't want it. So

it takes a lot of, I think a lot of factors have to line up, both luck and skill and correct coaching and environment to have a Monet Davis at age 13. And many, many more would have to line up to have a Monet Davis at age 18 or 20. And so I just think it becomes increasingly unlikely because she won't get the same advantages as her male peers. I wouldn't even say – Monet Davis' performance was amazing. But there were a number of boys, even at this Little League World Series, throwing faster than her, and I wouldn't predict most of them to be Major League Baseball players. It really matters what they look like after they come out of puberty, and you would expect every single one of them to get a much bigger bounce from that than her. Well, so you mentioned if girls were to have the same opportunities. So let's say that they did, because this is something that you wrote about in other sports where you looked at sort of what happened after Title IX or what happened after women were given the same opportunities and advantages that men had had before that.

And you look to see what changed after that. So if hypothetically there were no difference in the socialization aspects, then what sort of pattern would you expect to see after that. So if hypothetically there were no difference in the socialization aspects, then what sort of pattern would you expect to see after that? Yeah, that's a great question. So and actually, again, to stick with throwing, because I think there's a relevant kind of study to that. So throwing turns out to be like one of the largest sex differences. So it's a three standard deviation difference. So basically, if you took a thousand men off the street, 998 of them would throw harder than the average woman. And to put that in perspective, that's twice the statistical difference of height

between men and women. So it's a massive, massive difference. A group of researchers wanted to find out how much of that is sort of environmentally influenced, opportunities for boys to throw when they're younger. And so they went and studied Aboriginal populations in Australia where both boys and girls are taught equally to throw for hunting purposes as they're growing up. And it turned out that it did indeed cut the throwing differences about in half to about one and a half standard deviation difference, but it was still quite large. And even though they were using 13 year olds where the girls were actually taller and heavier by virtue of having matured a little earlier. So there's pretty strong evidence

that there's some kind of persistent biological differences in that, that throwing is really a major one of those. If you look at, again, easily quantifiable sports, like the difference between men and women, elite men and women in running sports is about 11%. If it's the 100 meters or the 10,000 meters, it's about 11%. In throwing, it's more than 30% in sort of Olympic throwing sports, even though women are using lighter implements usually. So I think if opportunities were equal, and I think there's no reason to separate boys and girls early on, you should let all the girls

play with the boys and continue as long as they want to. And I think you'd see more Monet Davises if that happened, although I still think it'd be a very, very rare, vanishingly small occurrence to see a woman continuing to play with men when everyone's gone through puberty? So I think that pretty much every question I ask you is going to be some variation on this, so get used to it. Because this is the question I have any time I read what you're writing. The feeling I have when I hear this stuff is sort of ambivalent about whether I should be feeling guilty about rooting for a sport that is essentially out of play to an entire gender. Is there any reason that we should hear these facts and think, well, this is wrong, this is inappropriate? I mean,

I think it's fair to say that you, me, Ben and probably most of our friends would love to see a female major leaguer. We would love to see one who had the opportunity to do that. We wouldn't want anything to be closed off to a player who could play well enough. But on the other hand, at least Ben and I devote a huge amount of our time to a sport that in its very kind of structure discriminates against half of the world. Is this a problem? Well, you know, that's a great question. I mean, to me, you know, sports are kind of the ultimate contrivances, right? Take agreed upon rules and add meaning.

And if we wanted to see the fastest athletes on the track, we'd have cheetahs instead of people because we're pitiful at sprinting. And so it's just sort of how we set things up. Right. And, and, and, you know, I'm a fan of a lot of, of women's sports and it's interesting that some sports like women's tennis and things like that gets as devoted a following as men's tennis. Um, but, but baseball really doesn't, I don't, I don't know if I'd call it a problem. I just think, uh, you know, we should also pay attention to, to women's sports and, and treat elite women's athletes like the elite athletes they are and not sort of anomalies or only looking at them, you know, and assessing

their physical attractiveness instead of their athletic prowess. So I don't know there's necessarily a problem. And I happen to be, you know, I love watching like the women's college softball World Series and I loved watching professional softball when I've had a chance in softball at the Olympics, and I don't find it to be a lesser version of baseball or anything like that. So this is a totally different situation, but it's sort of the same kind of idea. Brady Aiken, the top pick in this year's draft, he wasn't signed by the Astros because they were worried about the length of his tendon in his elbow. And that's obviously something that he's born with,

that you can't really strengthen. And more and more, it seems like teams are going to be trying to figure out how to assess 15 and 16-year-olds based on things that are intrinsic to their tendon strength. And obviously, 15 and 16-year-old high school athletes are not a protected class the same way that females are. But do you think that this is ultimately a good or a bad thing, that we're this sort of focused on the genetics of high school players as well and the things that they can't really control and that don't have anything to do with how hard they work or how much they want it? Yeah, that's a really difficult question. I mean, but the fact is teams have been,

you know, since scouting attempting to measure genetics, whether they say so or not, you know, they're looking at injury histories, they're looking at body measurements and things like that. So I think the only difference now is that they're getting into more specific measurements, whereas they've just been guessing at those things in the past. So I'm not sure that kind of philosophically it's really that much of a difference in some ways. What I think is a difference is that it's being pushed younger and younger. And that, I think, is problematic for a number of reasons, not only psychologically, right, is, you know, we don't want to tell people. Sports performance is multifactorial. And I think any time kind of scouts or people who are assessing talent get something they can measure, they tend to over-attribute importance to that measure because there's a number, because they can measure it, right? And not look at it as part of a, you know, a holistic athlete. The other problem, I think, is the earlier it gets pushed, the more likely you make the wrong decisions, right? I like to sometimes in a talk I give to show this picture of two 13-year-old rugby captains, you know, standing on either side of a ref before a coin toss, and one of them's like 6'2", and one of

them's like 5 feet, and they're both 13 years years old and if you had to make a team tomorrow you'd pick the man child but you actually have no idea which one of those players is going to be better and so you're really just turning it into a hormone contest not not a real assessment of talent and the earlier the earlier we push any kind of selection the more likely you just mistake biological maturation for talent. And if you're assessing someone in their mid-teen years, you don't even know what they're going to look like in a couple of years. Okay. So to pivot to a topic that is very popular with our listeners who I guess like to imagine that they could still potentially be professional baseball players without any experience in that field. We get a lot of nature versus nurture questions. So this is a representative example

from a listener named Doug, who says, I'm 26, haven't played competitive baseball since high school and live in New York City. If I were magically given the true talent level of Mike Trout right now, how soon before I'd be starting in the major leagues? Presumably meaning magically if you were given sort of the raw athleticism of Mike Trout. Right, but not his experience. And that's an interesting question because I think the oldest example that I can think of of someone sort of transitioning to elite level baseball is Jim Thorpe, who I think he started to play baseball seriously in 1913, when he was 26, actually, and was okay, not as good as he was in some of the other sports he dominated. And the fact is, it's very, very unlikely in baseball particularly.

And the neurologist Harold Clowens has done some great writing about this. One in a book he called Why Michael Jordan Couldn't Hit, right? Michael Jordan had transcendent athletic skill, no doubt about it, but he had probably missed a critical neurological period to learn the kind of skills that baseball players need. So in the first chapter of the sports gene, I talk about why Jenny Finch, the great softball pitcher, can strike out Major League Baseball hitters. And it's basically because, you know, to my surprise, I thought baseball hitters rely on superhuman reflexes, but actually they've learned through a certain type of practice how to interpret body movements of a pitcher and, you know, shifts of the torso, rotation of the

shoulder, the flicker of a pitch, the flashing pattern the seams make when the ball's released, to right out of the pitcher's hand predict where the ball is going in the future because actually our biology is too slow to react otherwise like that that advice to keep your eye on the ball it's it's nonsense so you you actually can't track an object whose angular position is changing that rapidly as it gets close to your head you could you could close your eyes when the ball were halfway and if it weren't psychologically upsetting so these these anticipate what sports scientists call anticipatory skills. The ability to read bodies has to be learned or else you're completely useless no matter your athletic skill.

And there's suggestive data that there are critical periods for this. And if you're first starting it after adolescence, as I guess Michael I guess Michael Jordan did, at least in a serious way, you're not going to pick it up. It's more like language in that way, where we all have the genes to pick it up. But in examples of kids who aren't exposed to human language by age 12, they will never pick it up. You're done. You've missed a critical window. The neurons that you needed to preserve have been pruned by that time and leaving only other things that you use. Music looks like a similar critical window.

If serious music study hasn't started before age 13, it doesn't seem to necessarily matter how early before 13, but if it hasn't started before 13, there are certain skills you'll probably never develop. Same for chess players who also rely on this kind of anticipatory skill in some ways similar to baseball players. If they haven't started by 13, their chance of ever becoming grandmaster decreases by 50-fold.

And so there's a lot of evidence that these critical periods for neurological skills like hitting a baseball and that after adolescence it would be too late. So I would say to your listener, baseball is not the sport that you want to it would be too late. So I would say to your listener, baseball is not the sport that you want to try to pick up late. And are even the anticipatory skills that you mentioned, I think if I recall what you wrote, even those are to some extent genetically determined. The number of hours that it might take for someone to practice to get to a certain level of proficiency might be completely different from the number of hours another person might take for someone to practice to get to a certain level of proficiency might be completely different from the number of hours another person might take, right?

That's right. That's why I kind of cheekily subtitled that one chapter 10,000 hours plus or minus 10,000 hours. But in some cases, it's unknown why that is. There seem to be, and again, I just added an afterword and mentioned one gene that's showing up as potentially involved in sort of muscle memory. It codes for a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is a chemical messenger in the brain. And people with a certain version seem to be able to more quickly encode some of those anticipatory skills. I didn't put it in until the afterword because I'd like to see more work on it, but there's starting to be some proof of concept there. And in some cases, they're sort of very simple measures that we know matter. Like people who have poor depth perception simply do not gain the kind of anticipatory skills over practice they need for training. So they look the same as

people with good depth perception early on, but as training proceeds, they just don't progress. And we know that table tennis players, like special Olympians in table tennis who have certain mental impairments will never learn those anticipatory skills, no matter how hard they try. But you're absolutely right. There's this tremendous individual variation in the rate of learning of anticipatory skills. So you wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about hyper-specialization in youth sports. You wrote a chapter about specialization in youth sports in the paperback version of the sports gene. It seems like if, that in fact if your kind of early exposure to sports dictates so much of your neurological development regarding those sports, it seems like maybe the natural thing to conclude is that you should hyper-specialize early on, that you should not waste a single second when your brain is still

developing and when you're young and moldable. So where's the contradiction there, or how does it get squared? Yeah, that's kind of what I thought when I was first seeing this study that you should specialize early on, but actually it turns out to be the vast exception. So if we look at adult elite athletes, they train more than sub-elite athletes, but in both individual and team sports, if you track that back to early childhood, the pattern actually is the future elites are actually practicing less in their eventual sport than the future people who peak at near elite, basically. And they sort of cross over in the mid-teen years. It's like the Steve Nash is the norm who didn't donate basketball until he was 13, but played a variety of other

sports. He was eight years behind me. Or Roger Federer, whose parents forced him to keep playing badminton, basketball, soccer through at least age 12. And it looks like you definitely want this early exposure, but that some of the emphasis on basically specialized and professionalized adult style training for for kids is doing a number of things. One, it eliminates what sports scientists call a sampling period where kids try a variety of sports. They gain sort of general athletic skills or sometimes sports scientists call physical literacy. And also they have a chance to find out where they might excel instead of just guessing, you know, taking the first sport that comes to you. If you assume that, that physiology doesn't matter at all, I guess that's what you should do. But the, the evidence completely belies that, that elite athletes usually have this sampling period where they find the best fit for them psychologically and physically. And some countries like Australia have actually systematized that, which is why they win like 10 times as many Olympic medals as we do by helping athletes sort of sample and find their best niche. But also, there's some really,

really interesting data from a researcher named Jean Cote in Canada, who has shown that as we've proceeded with early hyper specialization, and adult style coaching for kids, which means very explicitly telling them what they have to do. The cities that do that are big cities that have lots of resources and access to technically proficient coaches. And the consequence has been that those cities now basically don't produce elite athletes anymore. So in his data, he looks at the odds ratios for a kid born in a town of a certain size becoming a professional athlete in a range of sports. And it's basically bottomed out in big cities. and it's like 10 to 30 times average odds ratio for kids from the smallest size towns he looks at, which are 50,000 to 100,000. the way that a coach who coaches adult professionals is, they take advantage of this early period of implicit learning

where you learn like a baby, the way that kids learn language by being tossed in immersing themselves and having to kind of learn implicitly. And that seems to be a really important component of athletic development. And it might put you behind in a particular sport in the early years, but once it's gone, it's gone and can't be made up. It seems that this period of implicit learning where skill development is athlete-driven, not coach-driven, is important for really encoding in a very natural way some of the skills that athletes eventually need. If coaching is done too explicitly early on by telling athletes what to do exactly, that they won't take advantage of that learning like a baby period. Okay, so pivoting one more time, you gave a TED talk called Are Athletes Really Getting Faster, Better, Stronger? And this is something that we talk about too.

It's possible to compare statistics across eras and adjust for certain things, but it's difficult to adjust for how much different the pool of potential players is or the training methods or just genetic differences in human beings over time. So there's, of course, the question of if you took Babe Ruth or whatever star of yesteryear and plopped him down in today's game, would he be a star? Would he even be able to hold his own? Would he be a star? Would he even be able to hold his own? Would he have a roster spot? And you didn't talk much about baseball specifically in that speech, but I wonder how you think that compares to, say, other sports where you can sort of measure objectively how much more talented the participants have gotten over time. And so asking how I think that would play out in baseball, sort of what I talked about in some of those more easily measurable sports. Um, yeah, it's a good question. And I, I think,

I think quite obviously there were, you know, to some degree, I think you have to compare athletes in their era, but quite obviously there were a lot of potential, um, phenomenal players who were not competing when Babe Ruth was right? A lot of people were not allowed to compete at that point. And in every single sport, in that aspect of the talk in the book that you mentioned, I call the big bang of body types, where you see how the gene pool of professional sports changes once this idea that, you know, that came out of sort of agenda-driven German sports science that the average body type was the best for all athletic endeavors. Once that went away and sports opened up to the world and financial incentives increased for professional athletes, it radically changed every sport as the talent pool changed. And so I think it's, you know, I think any player who came before that was playing in an era with very limited talent input in the first place.

Not to be unfair to them, but I don't think they would be as good, or I think they would have had to work harder to be as good as they did in the past. It appears to me that it changed every single sport from elite female gymnasts shrinking from 5'3 to 4'9 over the last 30 years because there's a greater input of smaller and higher power to weight ratio athletes to forearms of pitchers have gotten longer compared to their total arm. Again, that higher brachial index, same thing has happened in water polo because it makes for a more forceful throwing whip. So you're seeing physically different athletes than you did in the past. And so I don't think Babe Ruth played in as competitive an era. I think with his skills, he absolutely could have still been a good player,

but at the least, I don't think he could have accommodated some of his lifestyle and been as good a player as he was. And final question, you talk about the importance of tailoring training techniques based on actual physical makeup, tissue types, and things that we don't often think about. Maybe some teams are thinking about them, but how big a part of the perception that a player is injury prone could have something to do with the fact that his his tissue is different than other players and maybe his training techniques are not adapted to that tissue could that be part of what we see with certain players whether it be Troy Tulewitzki or you know any of these guys who get hurt over and over again in some cases the same injury repeated

in other cases different injuries is this a factor that we don't talk about enough? Absolutely. You know, some of being injury prone is bad luck, but some of it absolutely is attributable to physiological differences that we don't put enough importance on. Some sports now are starting to put importance on this. So soccer being one that I wrote about in the book where some countries have now started on and some sports now are starting to put importance on this. So, um, soccer, um, being one that I wrote about in the book where some countries have now started doing things like muscle biopsies to see, well, which of our guys have, uh, incredibly explosive muscle fibers

and really can't tolerate the training load that some of the other guys do. Not only not, can they not tolerate it, but it will change their physiology for the worse in terms of wanting them to be explosive. And so some – I think Denmark was the one I specifically wrote about, but there are other countries doing that. They're saying, hey, well, this guy we're calling injury-prone, maybe we're doing something wrong to him. We prize explosiveness in someone's physiology and yet then in many cases train it away or put these incredibly explosive athletes on training programs that will have them injured all the time you know again i always go back to these sort of sports that have been really highly studied for physiology but um a guy like usain bolt you know maybe the most explosive human being on earth was a great he was as good a junior

runner as he is now you just you. Those aren't as famous times. And then people saw that he had a lot of talent and said, boy, if we really trained this guy a lot harder, think of how great he could be. And then he was injured for five straight years because they started training him like everyone else. And you've got a coach who realizes that he needs less training than the next guy or he'll be injured all the time. And he exploded and he dominated and never looked back and that's an extreme example but there's no question

there's no question i mean we know some of the genes that impact uh the collagen the genes are responsible for coding for collagen that that the so-called bodies glue and tendons and ligaments some versions of which predispose some people um to to tearing tendons and ligaments more easily. And so now some athletes actually work with that information and do what exercise geneticists are starting to call prehabilitation, like strengthening exercises in areas where they might be predisposed to weakness. So I think looking at individualized training, it's really, really important in this respect. But the major problem, to go on a little aside you know we now have a third of major league pitchers basically have had tommy john surgery and major

league pitchers are basically pitching less than they ever have that's an injury that's set up in the youth arm by micro tears in the ligament that there's nothing they can do about it once they get to the major so that that's something that's totally occurring because of these youth showcase leagues where kids are pitching in multiple leagues at once and kind of not left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing and they end up with too many pitches. Cricket Australia has had this has kind of helped solve this problem partly by developing an app where they keep track of all their their their bowlers pitch loads basically

all across the world. And they've they've analyzed that data a lot and they've now gotten quite good at predicting injuries. I think we need something for youth pitchers like that. All right, so the book, again, is called The Sports Gene, Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance. It is both bigger and lighter than it was last year, taking advantage of the latest in paperback book technology, as well as Kindle and Notebook and Audible

and all the other ways that you can consume books these days. Thanks for coming on and talking to us about it, David. It's my pleasure. And you can find David on Twitter, at David Epstein. Thanks for listening. Please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference, by going to baseballreference.com, subscribing to the Play Index using the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on one

year subscription. And we'll be back with another show tomorrow.