Okay, so this morning, I read a fun little article in the New York Times, which describes a statistical model designed to rank baseball players across eras. Barry Bonds came out on top, which seems right. The man literally broke baseball during an era of widespread performance-enhancing drug use. (He hit .362 with a .609 on-base percentage in 2004— .609!! How, you ask. The dude was intentionally walked 120 times.) You don’t have to take it from me. Take it from Chipper Jones. Or the statistical modeling crew. Barry Bonds was different.
Anyway, here’s the Extinct connection:
The talent-based methodology, known as Full House Modeling, is based on the title of a book by Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist and a baseball enthusiast. In his book “Full House,” Dr. Gould explains how batting averages above .400 vanished because of the evolution of talent [um, wut] and convergence of achievement, making unconventional standouts less likely.
By “the evolution of talent,” what the author presumably means is the standardization of elite performance— all the best hitters now are doing basically the same thing at the plate, especially the power hitters. The distribution of weight. The transfer of energy from the lower part of the body to the arms and wrists. The bat path. It’s all very optimized. By contrast, in 1920, the art of hitting was jankier. Kids weren’t going to weekend camps taught by professional instructors and getting regular notes on swing mechanics from an early age. It was just a bunch of milkmen and factory workers hacking away for part of the year. Also, pitching was worse— less optimized. A good hitter in 1920 could expect to encounter a lot more bad pitchers than a good hitter a hundred years later. So elite performances back then resulted in better statistical outputs, but not because the game was better. Actually, because it was worse.
I won’t prattle on about this, but if you want to hear it from the mouth of Gould himself, here you go: