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One of my favorite posts ever on this app.
Yes it's a joke. An obnoxious parody even. Yet at the heart of it is exactly the way so many modern baseball front offices really do think. (Or are perceived to think, which, in a real sense, what's the difference?)
It's almost never about getting the absolute most out of every player on the 40-man roster and winning as much as possible right now. More like an endless, McKinsey-esque process optimization quest. A refuge from raw result-getting.
Now I definitely see a kernel of truth in the IDEA of "trusting the process." So often though, as I was once told, the process becomes less something we trust, and more somewhere we hide.
BRESLOW BABBLE™
“Obviously, postseason elimination is disappointing, but I think it’s important that we resist evaluating the outcome through a binary success-failure framework.
What we experienced was really a high-leverage competitive information event.
October gave us an opportunity to collect actionable data within a compressed performance environment, and that’s incredibly valuable as we begin constructing our offseason decision architecture.
Did we accomplish the objective of winning the World Series?
No.
But I’m not sure that’s the only appropriate measurement of organizational advancement.
When you isolate our process-based indicators, normalize for roster volatility, and remove the inherent randomness associated with small-sample postseason sequencing, there are underlying developmental efficiencies that I think are extremely encouraging.
We learned things.
And learning things creates knowledge.
And knowledge, when properly contextualized within a scalable baseball-operations infrastructure, creates optionality.
That’s really what this is about.
Optionality.
Now we go back to the drawing board — although I’d probably characterize it less as a drawing board and more as a multidimensional roster-optimization matrix.
We’ll examine our run-production ecosystem, pitching sustainability, defensive conversion architecture, biomechanical availability patterns, and the intersection between player acquisition cost and projected marginal win efficiency.
We’ll ask difficult questions.
Then we’ll develop even more difficult questions about those questions.
Then we’ll build models to determine whether we were asking the correct questions in the first place.
That process takes time.
I understand fans want answers.
But answers without sufficient probabilistic context are really just conclusions, and conclusions can become dangerous when they interfere with process.
So am I disappointed?
Of course.
But I’m also energized.
Because sometimes elimination isn’t an ending.
Sometimes it’s simply an additional data point.
And if you zoom out far enough, remove emotion, adjust for variance, calculate the underlying expected organizational trajectory and squint really hard at the spreadsheet…
We’re actually undefeated.”
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Screw it, since I'm shooting for the stars today...
If Mark Hoppus can get MCR back together, maybe I can get @ThePoliceBand to do a few shows. Also, I want to know what Sting says to Andy around 3:52!
youtube.com/watch?v=yh4PJPGn…
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I mean every word @MLBPA. Let's go.
Hello @MLBPA today is your lucky day 😎
Read the post I made above. Then hear me carefully.
I am an elite comms professional with smash successes at popular consumer brands like Kettle & Fire, Fortune 100 companies like Allstate, and international economic justice organizations like Fair Trade USA.
DM me Bruce Meyer's contact information. Email is fine.
I will hand him, in two or three conversations, the exact winning moves to sink MLB's salary cap push forever.
It'll actually strengthen many of the arguments you're already making. As well as equip you with unique and powerful new ones you aren't using yet. Ones the owners will never see coming. And wont know how to respond to until it's already eroded their position.
What you see in my post above is just the tip of the iceberg. We will make the league look so silly that no owner brings a salary cap up ever again.
Oh, and that whole "68% of fans want a cap" thing? Gone. We'll win the PR war too. That will actually be the easy part.
Don't need any credit once we succeed. (Happy to delete this post later.)
You don't have to pay me a dime. I'll do it for free. In fact, I would pay YOU to LET me assist with this.
I will tell you with complete sincerity that if someone drove me 100 miles away, shattered both knees with a bat, and left me for dead...
I would crawl back to my desk to make the salary cap fail. It would be an honor.
Dead serious. DM me. Let's finish this once and for all.
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Throwback to my decades-ago Ayn Rand phase. Still a classic.
youtu.be/urBpdyFCZmo?is=QnLo…
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Everyone loves hearing they're right. Hearing it from one of the most clutch pitchers of modern baseball history (who's been totally screwed out of rightful Hall of Fame induction for non-baseball reasons) is just wonderful.
No comparison. Playoff innings are some quantum leap in physical and mental effort. If you’re good anyway.
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Biology Doesn't Just OBEY Mathematics. Biology CREATES Mathematics.
Dynamite new (short) talk from @PerryMarshall at the American Science Affiliation in Boston this July.
The Big Idea: "Physics always obeys equations. Biology does not. Sometimes...but not always! There is scarcely ANY formula in biology that is 100% true. In biology, there is no precise definition of: life, species, individual, gene, allele, inheritance, intelligence, sentience, function, or fitness. This isn't simply because biology is complex. It's because biology has agency and the ability to make choices. These choices are not an illusion. It's the only reason life can flourish. This simple fact, backed by formal mathematical proofs, has vast implications for the very definition of science itself."
Also in this talk: the most rigorous definition of inductive reasoning offered by a working scientist.
Major implications for origin of life, evolution, cancer, strong AI, and consciousness.
youtube.com/watch?v=LXSZFOaB…
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"There is never going to be a perfect mathematical formula that's going to tell us how cancer works, or how economics works, or how marketing works, or how psychology or sociology works. There are not exact answers. There are heuristics and models. And the judgement and wisdom of choosing which data to focus on and which data to throw away. Because you can't use all of the data."
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I'm sure there's music theory reasons (key changes, etc.) WHY this is so sonically satisfying. I don't even care what they are. It's the perfect country rock song.
youtube.com/watch?v=cNs8CfGO…
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Jay Cross retweeted
All escapes are unintelligent as they inevitably bring about conflict.
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On perceptions of the @Mets, parallels between advertising and trading, and why "the civilian mentality" one that no serious person can afford.
This post was partially inspired by a GREAT interview from May 2021 that @StevenACohen2 did with @jsmian that I listened to yesterday on a long, rainy drive.
I loved it so much that I'll be writing more about it soon.
Listen, here's what you're not understanding, and I want to explain this, because I think the fact that I've worked in a ruthlessly results-oriented profession for over 15 years gives me a unique ability to see it. (Or at least parts of it that are less seen by others.)
When you're running a business. Or, like I was, writing breakthrough advertising for a business. You don't get to cry to the Universe when you fail because of all the alleged reasons it's "not the company's fault."
You're going to fail sometimes. Outside factors will affect the outcome. You need to study what those are and try to figure out what affected what to the best of your ability. NONE OF THAT changes THE OUTCOME though. Or your responsibility for it.
When a promo bombs, nobody cares about your elegant theory of why it was still good. Or what the customer "should" have done. No, it's about what really happened, and when the next swing is going out the door, and why you believe that's the one that will win, and with how much money behind it. And if it in fact wins!
Copywriting is a lot like trading in some ways. Not entirely but quite a bit. It strips away your excuses. It punishes a lack of self-honesty. You can't survive in that world as an excuse-maker. Not if you're going to be any good.
I would never expect a copywriter who's had any success and hung around for a sustained period of time to say, about Stearns' press conference, "well, that just doesn't matter because people are dumb."
That kind of reaction is a luxury of what John Carlton called "civilians." People who don't need to know how reality works, because they really aren't accountable for knowing it.
I internalized that greatly. This topic is a great example of it. Only a civilian could say that perceptions of Stearns don't matter because [LIST OF EXCUSES HERE.]
It's an immature, spectator's outlook on life. The mature view is to say: "Whether fans are right or not, this looks bad, and it looking bad affects this business."
For the record, I think the anti-intellectualism in sports is also unfortunate. "Uncapped downside scenario" isn't some Einstein-level concept.
Guess what though? It doesn't really matter what I think.
It matters what the customers hear and what them hearing it makes them do. (Or not do.)
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The interview: tinyurl.com/3zjktyuf
Tip of the cap to @jsmian who asked some very insightful questions.
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Jay Cross retweeted
The seeker finds what he wants, and the comfort he derives from it is the morality of his own fears.
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The Intellectual, The Scientist, And The Spiritualist Can Never Realize The Truth
tinyurl.com/9c5n96u6
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"This evolutionary theorem makes a clean prediction in physics: No physical object has definite values of its physical properties (like position, momentum, and spin) when it's not observed.
The claim is, technically, something called local realism and non-contextual realism have to be false according to evolution by natural selection.
And it turns out, when physicists do the experiments, local realism and non-contextual realism are false.
In fact spacetime itself is doomed. It's not just the objects. It's spacetime that's not there. So right now, I would say the smart money is NOT on neurobiological reductionist theories of consciousness.
We need to go deeper, because our best science is telling us that reductionism is dead. That's evolution by natural selection and physics. Both."
Donald Hoffman
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"A man hires, associates with, and recruits precisely those activities and humans that support his disingenuousness, and thrive within his set of insecurities."
Kapil Gupta
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