Dissecting a Common Fallacy

In the practice of rhetoric, deductive logic makes two demands:

1. Deductive validity. 
2. Truthful premises. 

That is, an if/then arrangement requires that the "if" statements be true and that the "then" statement flow naturally and inevitably from the combination of "if" statements.

For example: 

Mike Trout is the best player in the American League this year.

Mike Trout is a rookie.

Therefore Mike Trout is the Rookie of the Year.

It's valid and true. Although true, this isn't deductively valid:

Mike Trout is a rookie.

Mike Trout has the highest batting average in the league.

Therefore Mike Trout is the Rookie of the Year.

Many sports radio talk show hosts are inadequately schooled in logic.  Consider this segment paraphrased from a recent ESPN radio broadcast:

"Who are the managers of the year in the AL and NL? How about Davey Johnson? The Washington Nationals have the best record in baseball, three great starters and a different hitting star everyday. Even if they shut down Strasburg, they're looking good."

"The Reds have won five in a row even without their star Joey Votto. Dusty Baker is a veteran manager with a World Series on his resume. How about Clint Hurdle? He has the Pirates primed for their first winning season in 20 years."

"Bruce Bochy has kept the Giants atop the West. Maybe he's the guy."

"In the American League, the Yankees will win the East despite a rash of injuries, but before you crown Joe Girardi, Ron Washington has the Rangers ahead in the West."

This segment was based on several unstated fallacies:

1. The manager of the year is the skipper of the most surprisingly good team.

2. The manager is responsible for his players' performances.
3. You can measure how good a manager is by how often his team wins.

4. That the manager has guided a team to a pennant in the past has some bearing on his performance this year.

5. No actual data, anecdotes, research, knowledge or information is necessary to determine a manager's value.

Baseball writers have singularly relied on the first fallacy to elect their Manager of the Year each season, but there isn't a shred of evidence that there's any connection. Indeed, in every other sport we measure managers/head coaches by the sustained success of their teams, not by their episodic improvement from poor performances. Bill Belichick, Bobby Bowden, Mike Krzyzewski, Phil Jackson, Scotty Bowman and their ilk are admired not because their teams have outperformed expectations but because they set the expectations high each year and met them.

Beyond that, notice that the radio host, by failing to recite a single observation to support her arguments, unintentionally acknowledged that she toils in total ignorance of the actual work these men do. For all the host knows, one or more of them is reviled or disrespected by his players. 

The unfortunate fact for those attempting to parse managing performance is that the vast majority of a manager's role eludes the public lens: managing personalities, inspiring greatness, promoting teamwork, keeping a steady hand on the till from the first buds of spring through the changing of the leaves. Team performance on the field is a woeful proxy for that.

A small function of a manager's job is the In-game tactics. What little we can see suggests neither Baker nor Washington is even adequate. (After 50 years in the business, Dusty still thinks the quintessential leadoff hitter swipes 30 bases and makes outs 70% of the time.)

It got worse. Behold this matrix of convolution:

"But how about thinking outside the box? Sure, the Angels have Albert Pujols, but they're getting production from guys you don't expect, like Mike Trout and Mark Trumbo. Mike Scioscia deserves some attention."

The cupboard is so bare of rational thought here as to boggle the mind. Primarily, the talk show host decided to abandon the core fallacy -- absolving the manager for taking  a team of loaded dice and rolling craps -- and instead credit him for coaxing performance out of unexpected places (but failing to do so out of the big stars.) That particular pretzel logic is the perfect coda on an argument that captures, in one four-minute segment, why sports talk radio is a barren desert, and why Manager of the Year votes are completely, utterly, hopelessly irrelevant.

Congratulations, You're Fired

Jim Tracy and Mike Scioscia were named Managers of the Year yesterday. Which means, of course, that they'll be fired. Nearly every manager is, eventually.

Sportswriters voting for manager of the year is like frequent fliers voting for pilot of the year. They can measure whether landings equals takeoffs, but beyond that, how can they possibly assess the work of the nominees when most of it takes place in private?

The primary job of a team manager is to be a leader, to keep his team productive and on-task over 162 games.(Or as Casey Stengel famously observed, to keep the two guys who hated him from the 23 who weren't sure.) While managers make some strategic decisions, most of them are rote. Over the course of a year, the difference between a good strategist and a bad one is probably two or three games. That means a league's best manager -- whatever "best" means -- could be hiding behind a 60-102 record.

Were Scioscia and Tracy better leaders of men this year than Bobby Cox, Joe Torre, Tony La Russa, Joe Girardi, Jim Leyland and Hugo Chavez? This award suggests that sportswriters know the answer. In fact, what they know is how managers' teams performed compared to expectations, and vote accordingly. But the correlation between managerial skill and performance versus expectation is pretty weak.

In truth, if the award were for great managing, the same guys would win every year. If Tony La Russa is a genius, he's more or less a genius every year and should be Manager of the Year as often as Albert Pujols, the best player, wins the MVP. (Actually, Pujols has 400 competitors, La Russa just 15, so the skipper should pretty much monopolize the trophy.)

There's no question that Jim Tracy made some key moves that transformed the team from rocks to rockets when he inherited the Rockies from Clint Hurdle this summer. He also had to have caught lightning in a bottle, for which he got undue credit and now sports some nifty hardware. Players say they'd run through walls for Scioscia, and he obviously handled the aftermath of Nick Adenhart's death deftly, but it doesn't hurt that Jared Weaver, John Lackey and Joe Saunders can hurl.

Three of the last six Managers of the Year have been fired, so apparently the smartest skippers turned to dolts in two years' time. Either that or sportswriters don't really know what they're voting for.
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