Everett Tifford remembers the executive’s curious look across the room. Teaford, a former major league pitcher, had joined the Houston Astros as a pro scout in early 2016, and in an organizational meeting, new colleague Sig Mejdal kept checking him out.
When the team broke, Mejdal, then the Astros’ top executive, approached Teaford and explained his interest. A decade earlier, when Mejdal was an analyst with the St. Louis Cardinals. Louis, his pre-draft statistical model had offered a bullish projection for Teaford’s professional future. Teaford, then a Georgia Southern left-hander, had a sparkling statistical resume – he 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 is 6 feet tall, but he was unforgiving for a pro, weighing 160 pounds “on my heaviest day,” he recalls. As Mejdal told the story to Teaford, he explained, “Well, one of the biggest problems was that the cross-examiner thought you were working on the grounds crew,” referring to the area’s supervising scout who saw Teaford hitting the mound without the uniform of. on.
Baseball is full of examples of different body types – Astros second baseman Jose Altuve, who is 6-foot-5, and Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge, who is 6-7, went 1-2 in voting for the 2017 American League MVP award — but cognitive bias can also cloud judgment. In Teaford’s case, scouting was predisposed to a mental shortcut called the representativeness heuristic, first defined by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In such cases, an assessment is heavily influenced by what is believed to be the standard or ideal.
“When we look at the players who stand for the national anthem, it’s hard not to realize that quite a few of these guys are far from stereotypical or original,” Mejdal said. “Yet our minds are still very strongly drawn to stereotypes and archetypes.”
Kahneman, professor emeritus at Princeton University and winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics, later wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” a book that has become a must-have in many of baseball’s front offices and coaching staffs.
There aren’t many overt baseball references in “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” yet many executives swear by it. He has been around the front offices of the Oakland Athletics, Los Angeles Dodgers, Baltimore Orioles and Astros, among others. But there is no more ardent disciple of Tome than Mejdal, a former NASA biomathematician who earned graduate degrees in both cognitive psychology and operations research.
“Almost everywhere I go, I pester people, ‘have you read this?’ said Mejdal, now an assistant general manager with the Baltimore Orioles. “From coaches to people in the front office, some people come back to me and say this has changed their lives. They never see decisions the same way. But others said, “Sigh, thanks, but please don’t recommend another book.”
Few, however, swear by it. Andrew Friedman, president of baseball operations for the Dodgers, recently said the book had a “real deep impact” and said he is considering it when evaluating organizational processes. Keith Law, a former Toronto Blue Jays executive, wrote the book “Inside Game” — an examination of bias and decision-making in baseball — which was inspired by “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” Lo said he found it through a suggestion from Mejdal.
John Mozeliak, the president of baseball operations for the St. Louis Cardinals, sees the book as telling.
“As the decision tree in baseball has changed over time, this helps us all better understand why it had to change,” Mozeliak wrote in an email. He said this is especially true when “working in a business that a lot of decisions are based on what we see, what we remember, and what is intuitive in our thinking.”
Sam Fuld, the new general manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, said reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” was a good reminder to be aware of one’s basic human flaws. He plans to start a book club in the front office in Philadelphia that could include Kahneman’s work, as well as titles by Adam Grant, Carol Dweck and others.
Teaford, who proved his doubters wrong by going to the majors as 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 hasn’t fully graduated from Georgia Southern understand this book that Mr. NASA was talking about? ?”
Central to Kahneman’s book is the interplay between each mind’s System 1 and System 2, which he described as a “two-character psychodrama.” System 1 is a person’s instinctive response — which can be improved by expertise but is automatic and fast. Seeks coherence and will apply relevant memories to explain events. System 2, meanwhile, invokes more complex, deliberative reasoning — characterized by slower, more rational analysis, but prone to laziness and fatigue.
During his time as a college coach, Joe Haumacher, a minor league pitching coach for the Orioles, used to have a policy of not meeting a player until he gave him his undivided attention. He wondered if that was fair, but reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” helped Haumacher see his reasoning.
Kahneman wrote that when System 2 is overloaded, System 1 could make an impulsive decision, often at the expense of self-control. In one experiment, subjects were asked to complete a task that required cognitive effort—remembering a seven-digit number—and were then given a choice of chocolate cake or fruit salad for dessert. The majority chose the cake.
“I don’t want to get into a situation where my mind is halfway through a topic, and then I talk to a player and give them the chocolate cake answer they might be looking for, versus the fruit salad answer they probably need Haumacher said.
No area of baseball is more prone to bias than scouting, in which organizations gather information from a variety of sources: statistical models, subjective evaluations, mental makeup ratings and more. Kahneman emphasized the importance of maintaining independence of judgments to dissociate errors—that is, separating inputs so that one does not affect the other.
“The independent opinion aspect is critical to avoiding groupthink and being aware of the dynamics,” said Josh Burns, Dodgers senior vice president. “There’s some clarity to how the information is collected and then ultimately how it’s weighed.”
Matt Blood, the director of player development for the Orioles, first read “Thinking, Fast and Slow” as a Cardinals scout nine years ago and said he still consults it regularly. He worked with a Cardinals analyst to develop his own tightrope detection algorithm to mitigate bias. He also urges caution about the common practice of issuing “knots” – language-seeking comparisons – of a young player to an established professional.
“We have this tendency to compare a player to what we’ve seen in the past or to a player who is in the big leagues, and suddenly, everything about that amateur player starts to look and feel like that big leaguer. player,” Blood said. “And that’s dangerous.”
Mejdal himself fell victim to the representativeness heuristic trap when he started with the Cardinals in 2005. His first draft model projected Stanford’s Jed Lowrie as the top player available. Mejdal lived nearby and went to see this “fantasy Paul Bunyan of a second baseman,” he recalls, only to find a player who looked too small even for a college.
Mejdal had just resigned from a job at NASA and was questioning his analysis, causing a panic attack in the Stanford bleachers. “I remember that disconnect that Kahneman describes,” he said, adding that it took a few hours to catch his mental error, as Lowrie’s size didn’t change the fact that he won the Pac-10 Conference triple crown as a sophomore .
But despite baseball people’s interest in it, the book contains only one notable reference to the sport: a paragraph explaining the premise of Michael Lewis’ best-seller “Moneyball.”
Lewis later wrote “The Undoing Project,” about the work of Kahneman and Tversky (who died in 1996), as a direct result of a book review of “Moneyball” in which two academics observed that market inefficiency in baseball could be explained from the cognitive psychology research of the two psychologists. Lewis later wrote in Vanity Fair, “It didn’t take me long to realize that, in a not-so-circular way, Kahneman and Tversky had made my baseball story possible.”
Kahneman, now 86, declined an interview for this article. He said he didn’t know enough about baseball. Baseball, however, knows a lot about him.
