Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 918: One Word: Plastics

Episode Date: July 5, 2016

Sam and Craig talk to Russell Carleton and Kate Morrison about their recent series covering the complexion of MLB’s front offices.

Every couple years Ben goes on vacation and I sing an intro improvisation. It's Effectively Wild. Good morning and welcome to episode 918 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus. Brought to you by our Patreon supporters and by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller. Ben is not here today. We are joined by a very full house, however. We have co-hosting with me Craig Goldstein. Hello, Craig.

Hi. We also have George Bissell is doing the recording. He might hop in. George, feel free to hop in if you want to. Feel free to not hop in if you don't want to. Feel free to respond to this if you want to. What's up, Sam? And our guests are Kate Morrison and Russell Carlton, who are here to talk about their four-part barn burner that ran a little bit more than one week ago on Baseball Perspectives that took an extremely analytical and contextual look at the challenges of getting hired

by a Major League Baseball front office and the complications for the sport that those challenges introduce. So Kate and Russell, hello and welcome. Hello. So Kate and Russell, hello and welcome Hello So I wanted to ask, first of all, what was the question that kicked this off? Because I don't know if you had planned it as a four-part series originally I don't know if you had a list of a hundred questions that you wanted to answer

Or if it just ended up being that way because you were g-chatting one day And some small question spiraled into a much larger one. So how did it begin? I mean, I think, oh God, I mean, I could go back and look in Slack, but I know I was ranting about the black boxing of certain sets of data data and talking about how as we move into new eras of analysis that the closing off of certain areas might mean that it is even more difficult for people who don't go through, say, a particular college program or don't have exact background to get into a front office and what that might mean, you know, and then that kind of spiraled. Yeah, there's like

five or six different lines of thought that we had been batting around in the official Slack room and the, you know, stuff that I had had in the back of my head, stuff that Kate was thinking about. And at one point, um, it was just kind of, I think Kate said something about, she wanted to write something about internships. And I, uh, I said, Oh yeah, that's cool. And, um, we ended up, we're like, Oh, we should co-write this. And it turned into this gigantic four parterter that was 10,000-some words. After we finished writing it, I'm like, I'm never doing that again.

Yeah, internships really emerge as sort of one of the most important parts of this piece because they really are, as you guys put it, the node through which almost a huge percentage of hiring happens, a huge percentage of people in front offices get into the jobs. And because of that structure, in a way, it has trickling effects all the way through the sport of who is involved in decision making, who gets hired, what types of people get hired. So many of us had internships at some point in our lives, but probably we had internships that would be considered almost unrecognizable in the current intern format. So can you tell us what are baseball internships like? Well, I can't tell you because I've never had one.

I mean, the way baseball is kind of following something that the broader labor market has been doing, and that's they are moving much more toward an internship model, partly for cost control reasons. Interns are cheap, but partly also kind of on a try it before you hire it sort of model for hiring. And, you know, the thing about a baseball internship is that, you know, it's very competitive. The, um, some of them pay, some of them don't, some of them, um, most of the ones that do pay, um, don't pay very much. And the thing about a baseball internship is that, you know, you think about if you want to be an accountant, you could go to, you know, any, whatever city you live in, there's going to be a whole bunch of, there's going to be a whole bunch of places that need accountants.

And so you can pick one of those. You know, there's only 26 cities that have a major league team and there's only 30 teams total. And so, you know, you kind of have to go wherever it is. So there's a certain amount of geographical instability that you have. You kind of have to just wherever it is. There's a certain amount of geographical instability that you have. You kind of have to just go wherever the gig is. Not everybody can do that, and not everybody can move somewhere for whether it's a three-month thing or a ten-month thing or however they structure it. Then live on what might be minimum wage or what might be nothing. Sure. And as I was reading through it, I noticed obviously there's a theme of gatekeeping via privilege,

kind of as I saw it or as I read from it. But it also stuck out to me that this is something that, as you mentioned, is something that comes from the broader market as a whole, and that it really stems from people hiring via trust. It's, have I seen this person do something, or do I trust them to be capable to do it, as opposed to sampling kind of a broader spectrum of people and just putting their faith in the hiring process that these people will be qualified to do it. Is there anything throughout this time that

you thought there's a way to address that? Because that can also be seen as nepotism or any number of things, but it seems to me just that I've encountered both in baseball and in real life, that's a very hard thing to overcome. Kind of looking at it from the point of view, the internet has done quite a bit for democratizing at least a little bit of it, in that now there is a forum for going out and being able to say, here's a portfolio of my work, and maybe even get noticed by somebody in a front office somewhere who is reading something that links to your stuff, and that's something that's nice there. We at least have that. But the other side of it is that even for positions that don't even exist, teams get a whole bunch of applications. They get people sending them letters saying, I'd love to work for you, just on spec, that there might be a position open at some point. And there has to be some sort of filtering process that goes through there. So, I mean, there's, there, there becomes a capacity problem of how do I even begin to,

I have 500, you know, resumes on my desk. How do I even begin to, uh, to filter through these? And, you know, how do I, um, how do I tell the good ones from the bad ones? And then, you know, world where there's, yeah, there's a whole bunch, yeah. I was just saying that after you've gone through that first set of, you know, are these people even remotely qualified, then you have the business decision side come in, where it makes sense from a business standpoint, as Russell said, you know, cost control to hire interns, because if you hire somebody who wants to change careers and they have two law degrees and something like that, they're obviously going to command a lot more money than someone

who's just graduated from a sports management degree at Rice, just to provide an example. Cost control is such an interesting thing whenever it comes to baseball because these are businesses where we think of them primarily as employing Josh Hamiltons and they're willing to spend $25 million on a single person

even though there's enormous uncertainty about how well that person is going to perform. They're willing to go from $80 million to $90 million in a contract negotiation in two minutes. And yet we see them in all sorts of other ways run like a very, very tight business. And so you see that, you know, I think, Russell, you've written about minor league nutrition where the investment in something better than white bread and peanut butter would be relatively like almost. Well, I guess it would literally be peanuts because I just said peanut butter. But and yet they don't. This seems to be something that they the teams kind of took a long time to realize.

You see it, I think, to some degree in the Dominican academies, although more investment has gone there. And you see it in minor league player salaries, where the entire farm system makes basically what a middle reliever gets over the course of a season. gets over the course of a season. And so I always wonder whether there is something that they see as a benefit of this beyond simply cost control. If they think that, for instance, with the internships, that this is part of the trial, that they're testing their entry-level workers by putting them into almost like a hazing situation.

And that at the end of this, they will see who was willing to work the 18-hour days, who was really willing to emerge and motivate themselves. And I am probably, well, I was going to say maybe I'm giving them too much credit for this. But maybe even if that is the strategy still maybe it's cruel and and inhumane i'm not sure well it's a it's something that you see a lot and you you know it's not just in baseball but it's the it's this mentality of if you really want it you'll sacrifice which is one of my like least favorite things in the world is this oh well if you really really want this and you'll give 110 and you'll you'll sacrifice everything well that philosophy neglects to understand that

sacrificing the same percentage for one person means going from a oh well my buddy could could i could have taken this uh you know 50 00050,000 a year out of college, you know, something or other, because my dad or my friend or my, you know, mentor or something. But instead I took this internship while ignoring the fact that a sacrifice of that same magnitude would send someone else who might be just as smart, might be just as qualified coming out of college, but send them from being moderately in debt to a college to being incredibly in debt with credit cards.

I think that is a very smart way of putting it. It almost seems like they want to take the model of minor league players where you have to prove your will, your hashtag want, your makeup through – There is a Goldstein on this podcast. What? There is a Goldstein on this podcast. Always the wrong one. Always the wrong one.

So, Kate, you did some math and looked at the cost of living in various cities and demonstrated just what you do give up. So can you put in perspective what the cost of living in a major league city is relative to what the actual compensation is for one of these internships? Well, per our research, we found that most of these internships, if they're paid, so most of the unpaid ones are going to be for college credit. So those are open to students still who haven't completed their degree yet. So in those cases, you're usually getting, you know, you might have to rent an apartment, but you're usually getting some help from your parents still or there's's scholarships available, because if it's for college credit, then you can apply, you know, you can apply for and then apply certain scholarships. So there's sometimes financial aid, or you can take out that money under a student loan umbrella, which sucks,

but is, you know, different than taking it out under a credit card. After you've graduated, a lot the internships that that we were able to kind of scrape together were they pay from minimum wage to about 15 an hour and um let me let me pull my numbers up so that i'm not misquoting myself here um but they're you know 15 an hour is what's being currently discussed in the political world as a, as a quote unquote living wage rather than just a minimum wage. Um, on that in the cheapest minor league city. So somewhere like Arlington, you could rent, you know, if you're making 15 an hour and you're getting a full 40 hours a week, which is one thing that some people know that hasn't,

you know, we didn't, I don't think we actually discussed, but some internships, you don't get a full 40 hours, they work you for 30, which, okay, 30 hours, not a full fit, not a full time job. But also, is there enough time for you to get a second job to actually make, you know, all of our numbers are predicated on the idea that you're working a full 40, no more less and getting paid as such so basically if you want to live in arlington which is where the rangers are you know and there are a couple other um i think that we found that kansas city is kind of in this this range too um you know you could you could rent an apartment by yourself you'd be fine if you're making the 15 you know if you're making the 15 an hour you know if you're making 40 hours a week, $15 an hour, you could live there.

You wouldn't really be able to put aside any savings, but you wouldn't be going any further into debt. Of course, if you don't live in Arlington already, then you have to move there. And if you're not making the full $15, if you're making $ $725, then it suddenly starts looking a lot more difficult. So you get roommates, but that only really cuts your rent in half. You get this. You cut corners. And it's possible to cut those corners. It's one of those things where if you're living in one of the cheaper cities, it's absolutely possible to make it work.

But sometimes you end up sacrificing things that you probably shouldn't you have to pay for healthcare you're not going to go out and get yourself decent insurance, you're going to go out and get yourself the I'm legally covered don't fine me government insurance

so what happens if you have a medical emergency then that's more money out of pocket out of a pocket that's not exactly deep to begin with. In fact, you brought up some internships are 30 hours a week. And part of the reason they do that is so that they do not have to cover your insurance. So it's a little more cost-cutting and controlling on the team side is part of why. And as I went through an interview process for an internship, that was explained to me.

So that definitely does happen and it definitely is the case. That's something that also skews the hiring process towards younger people because younger people are more like, if you're under 25, then you can still be on your parents' insurance. So you're more likely to look at an internship like this

and say, oh, I can afford this because my parents are paying my insurance, not me. Absolutely. Says someone who was on her parents insurance until about a year ago. So I know what I'm talking about here. Yeah. So one of the other things that the article touched on in terms of, you know, again, touching on gatekeeping is the rise of Ivy, as it seems like Jack Moore put it. Can you guys, one of you, speak to basically what you found in terms of the representation of, or perhaps over-representation of Ivies in Major League front office, specifically baseball operations? Yeah, I mean, when I was at it, what did we have?

I know the numbers in front of it, I think it was like 16%, which is one in six of the people that we looked at. And we just looked at the American League because we just needed an easy way to chop our work in half. But of the people that we were looking at, about one in six had an Ivy League diploma on the wall. And, I mean, the Ivies are, they're really, when you get down to it, eight little schools in the Northeast, and that's really all there. I think we put in there some point of comparison that if it was about 10 or 11% went to Big Ten schools. And if you look at it just from probability standpoint, you know, Ohio State, just one of the Big Ten, probably graduates more people than the entirety of the Ivy Leagues do

on a yearly basis. And yet, you know, you see so many more from the Ivy Leagues. And now, I mean, that then gets into, okay, well, you know, are people who go to Ivy League schools necessarily smarter or better workers or whatever, however you want to say that? Better prepared or... Yeah. Or do they have more connections? schools necessarily smarter or better workers or whatever however you want to say that or yeah and or do they have pre-filtered yeah pre-filtered for you for your convenience that's yeah so i mean but then you start getting into some of those questions around okay well what you know what how do people really get into the ivy league and that gets into some of the social dynamics of again kind of a broader social question uh around access and privilege and things like that.

You know, I mean, it's not to say that, you know, everybody in a major league front office has an Ivy League degree, but at the same time, you know, it's more than we would just randomly expect by chance. And, you know, let's take a look and see, okay, well, what's really driving that? So I'll play, I don't even know if this is devil's advocate. I mean, this is the natural response to this is that, yes, generally speaking, your odds are pretty good with a Harvard grad. He or she is going to be somebody who is well-trained, has a history of success, and will probably be a pretty good worker for you. And you also talked about college majors, and they tend to come from certain college majors.

And those are skills that are desired by front offices. that if you were a team, you would choose a Harvard graduate from one of those fields of study. And going to the sort of way that they leverage the competitiveness of these internships to lower costs, that makes sense. It's perfectly business appropriate. And it made me think a little bit of the story of Dan Evans, how Dan Evans got into the game, friend of the podcast. Dan Evans, who, as I recall, happened to pick up the phone one day at his school newspaper's offices. They asked if there was anybody there who wanted to be an intern for the White Sox. Dan Evans said, sure, I will. And then he went and worked 18-hour days for no pay while he was still a full-time student for a number of years before he finally got a job.

And Dan Evans turned out to be a great baseball mind, front office executive, brought a lot of great things to teams. And so you could say, well, that model works pretty well at filtering out the Dan Evanses or filtering out everybody but the Dan Evanses. So you have the super dedicated, super hard workers who are willing to give you a lot for not that much. So that's all a fine argument from a team's perspective. If you were a middle manager,

then all of those things would make sense to you. So why shouldn't a team do this? Putting aside any social implications, why did you guys ultimately conclude that this is a threat, or maybe that's too strong, but a threat to baseball teams' actual competitiveness? The same reason that sabermetrics was a revolution. the people from the same sources before sabermetrics before this whatever we're calling it you know front offices were run i think no one would argue by baseball people so by former players by people who've been around the game for a very very long time you know by by by people who who had this one understanding of the game and for better or for worse we're sure that their understanding or had

never been challenged on their understanding that their understanding of the game was correct then you have a wave of new thinkers come in and you get all of the people and you get new ideas and baseball gets more i mean it gets more interesting first off which is good for the game when the game's more interesting, more people pay attention. But you also have competitive advantages discovered, and for a while there you have some upheaval, and it gets interesting, and it's because you have new thinkers. The problem now is that almost every team, save, like, one,

has very much bought into this idea that was the original revolution. And now everybody's starting to look the same again. Instead of having all baseball people, you now have all economics majors, or all business majors, you know, all people from this one little narrow chunk of the pie, which already tends to be a narrow chunk of the pie of any university or of any set of people. And so they've gone from broadening their pool of ideas to narrowing it again. And so it's, you know, if I were to put it as simply as possible, it's that you're losing it. You're losing an advantage by

only bringing in people from this. Yeah, sure, you may have an idea of how they're going to perform, but isn't it better to sometimes bring in new ideas? Even if it's not like, you know, it's that whole, it goes back to prospects. You have a guy who has a high floor, you know, high floor, low ceiling. You know what he's going to be. He's always going to give you this. But then you have this other guy who, let's call him Goey Jallow or something like that for fun times, who has this really high ceiling and can be really exciting, but he also has a pretty low floor. There's a reason that the top 50 has guys with those high ceilings

above guys with those high floors. It's because the guys with the high ceilings, if they succeed, when they succeed, can change the game more than the guys with the high floors. So you just have to bring that style of thinking into a front office. I was very interested by

one of your later conclusions that the amount of, I don't know, the amount of benefit of having the world's greatest big data scientists in baseball seems kind of low at this point. That if you look at all the work that's been done to improve projection systems over the course of 15 years years for instance, there really isn't that much better that we can do and it's unlikely that you're going to find some big separating strategy from big data at this point. Sure you invest in it but thinking that it's going to- There's refinements that are still occurring. I mean, there's still refinements that are occurring. You're seeing that

even at BP. But there's only so many times you can refine something until it turns to dust. Right. What happened with the A's in Moneyball is not likely to happen right now with big data, that you're unlikely to find

something that so separates you from the rest of the league that you can basically print money for a few years off of it. Is that fair? Yeah. I mean, the thing about big data is big data is a tool. And I think that people have mistaken the tool for the idea itself. And if you think of the idea that the idea is the most valuable currency in the game of baseball, and if you think about that, you know, what happened was that, you know, people came in with ideas that said, if we look at this from a broader context and we use the tools of big data to look at it, we might get a different answer than we had previously thought we had. And I think that we may get something out of big data. You never know what's around the corner.

But what that is, is that big data is a mathematical way of formulating and expressing an idea and that without the idea first that you can have supercomputers you can have people with degrees and all this stuff you can know all the programming languages you can have stat cast have all stuff and doesn't make a damn bit of difference because frankly if you don't have an idea that that powers that that query then you know you're just kind of calculating batting average again you know i mean that's that's fine um i think that what we're seeing is that you know as kate said we're tilting back toward where everybody kind of looks the same again, and they come at the world from a very, from a same, the same point of view.

And, you know, whether that's, and we talked about demographics and of, of race and class and gender and, and things like that. We talked about college majors, we talked about worldview. And if everybody kind of comes at the questions or at least the problem the same way, how they look at things, how they identify what's a problem or even what's a reasonable question to ask starts to get really stale. And what you need is people who are going to be there to challenge the assumption that's going on. the assumption that's going on. You know, I don't think that we should advocate, oh, we should get rid of all the quants. No, you need that capacity.

You need that in your tool belt. But at the same time, if your questioning process is going stale, then you have a big problem. So, and this is along the lines of somewhat playing devil's advocate, I guess my question would be that if you have some revolution in terms of diversity of thought, people approaching the game differently, but they are coming from Ivy League students or interns, and the way things are always done, but there is a diversity of thought, would that satisfy you?

Would that make you... I don't think you're going to get a true diversity of thought without changing at least something about the way the engineering process is done. But that's just, you know... Sure, sure. It's a hypothetical, but for example, if you changed kind of the majors that you drew your talent pool from as opposed to the locations or the schools or

something like that, you could potentially get a different angle on ideas and things like that. Would that be satisfying to people, do you think? Or does it need to be more of an overhaul? I think that, I mean, the question of, you know, whether if we talk about diversity in the names that are on the diplomas on the walls, or diversity in race and gender, things like that. And I think in the business case, the question of whether or not that's a good unto itself to have that diversity, that's a political question that I think people are going to have different views on and some are going to agree and some are not going to agree. Realistically. I mean, you're talking about teams that are businesses and that,

um, you know, may or may not be interested in making, um, you know, social policy or, or, uh,

or breaking social ground. I have, uh, just one last question to put a bow on all this, and maybe it'll just be you, Kate, because maybe Russell's gone. I don't know. If you were put in charge of a team's hiring, sort of entry-level hiring, what would you do? Give me your three or four steps that you would do to fix this and to, i don't know

maybe not fix this but to put your team in the best position to win and to put yourself in the best position to sleep at night are you saying that there's like is this an expansion team or is this a already you know form team that has something of a analytics department that maybe is looking to expand? Neither. It is a team that exists. It's a theoretical question that I just got specific on. No, it's a team that exists. It's the Rangers, and you're not intended to expand anything. You're just in charge of hiring the next group of entry-level front office workers.

How do you do it? I'm sorry. This is going to be some extremely entertaining silence while I think for a minute. Well, thinking for a minute should be the first step for whoever has this job. Yeah. If it meant hiring fewer people but being able to pay them more, I think that people who are You know not worrying about whether or not

They're going to make rent are going to be able to provide You with better ideas and with better You know With a Higher quality of work So that would be the first consideration I think that it would be Good if people were able

To go look at you know expanding those resources so going to the people you know and not just saying well give me your like two brightest students but saying who are the people that you have or who are the people that you would trust to be new thinkers um obviously you want to hire somebody who has an interest in baseball, but maybe you look outside the box because it's not just your, you know, there are people out there who love baseball. I mean, I think that the people that write for BP are an example of this, like, no, you know, there are people out here who love baseball and think deeply about baseball and complexly about baseball, but don't major in, you know,

sports management or don't necessarily have been major in economics or in business. So you have to kind of get outside the business school a little bit, if possible. I mean, and all of this is like pie in the sky because I, I understand how incredibly difficult it is when you're trying to hire and you,

you know, and it's really, it's a, it is a really, really complicated question. And I hope that Russell and I didn't make it's really it's it is a really, really complicated question. And I hope that Russell and I didn't make it seem like it was something that would be easily fixed because it's not. There's a lot of moving parts and there's a lot of checks and, you know, a lot of there's a lot of weights that you have to balance against each other. But I do think that there is room to go out there and find people who think complexly and people who think differently and

people who think interestingly and then you can train them to have the specific sets of skills that you want. So like,

you know, there may be someone out there who doesn't know R, but they have interesting new thoughts about baseball.

Okay, let's end it there. Thank you guys. Thank you, Kate. Thank you, Russell. Thank you,

George. Thank you, Craig. And thank you to Ben for returning tomorrow for a new episode. And I think that's it. There will probably be no extra reading done at the end of this episode. I think we're just going to end. It's just going to be like the ending right now. You don't want to plug Patreon? Do you want to plug your book? No. Well, be sure to go to patreon.com slash effectively wild

and pledge your undying support to Effectively Wild. Five people whose names I'm going to completely make up on the spot are the five people from Voltron, I guess. And let's see here. Their book, the only rule is it has to work. Their wild experiment in, I forget what the subtitle is.

Something or other. Something doing with baseball. Teams with a baseball book. It's, you know, it's the 4th of July, right? And yeah, for everybody on the phone, this has been Effectively Wild.