How Teams Can Better Innovate

If you haven’t read Ben Lindbergh’s piece on the baseball’s ever expiring secrets, I suggest you free up 15 minutes at work (or elsewhere) today.

Lindbergh’s closing point:

Maybe that’s the lesson to take from this whole sordid story. We’ve known for some time that Correa’s crimes were illegal, unethical, and punishable by many months in prison. What we might not have known makes the story sadder still: In baseball’s current climate, it’s not even clear how much hacking helps.

If you haven’t read Dave Cameron’s related post on the devaluation of ideas, I recommend you do so, because it hits on one of the greatest market inefficiencies in the game today: communication.

Wrote Cameron:

At this point, it seems the value is less in the quality or proprietary nature of a team’s ideas, and more in the vehicles that move those ideas around…. With ideas themselves no longer conveying huge advantages, it’s the ability to turn even somewhat obvious beliefs into actual action that can give an organization a legitimate, sustainable edge.

Ideas are quickly adopted today and I agree that communication is something of a market inefficiency. After all, an idea has no value without implementation. It was a salient point in my book Big Data Baseball. And it’s not always about effective top-down communication either, a front office sending an analytically based idea to be adopted by the coaching staff and players. Effective communication must also include a bottom-up channel. For instance, it was Texas Rangers manager Jeff Banister, the Pirates bench coach from 2013 to -15, who told me in reporting for the book that it was the coaches who initiated an important, data-backed tactic in 2013. It was the assistant coaches who asked data analysts to quantify a hunch they had: they wanted to know if certain pitch sequences in certain locations could make batters more uncomfortable, leading to a greater ground-ball rate.

While ideas have shorter shelf life today, I suspect baseball isn’t doing all it could to create new ideas and practices through front-office and field-staff personnel who possess more diverse backgrounds and skill sets. While the game is trying to better communicate existing ideas, perhaps it could also be generating more breakthroughs.

While ideas move quickly and are adopted quickly from organization to organization, those first to the idea still have an advantage, especially if it’s one that takes some time in mobilizing to capture and implement. If your club was, say, the first team to identify the value of framing (Yankees in late 2000s?), you had a multi-year advantage. It wasn’t until the 2012-13 offseason that another team (the Pirates) paid a free-agent catcher (Russell Martin) for the skill: a two-year, $17 million deal. And it wasn’t until the 2014-15 offseason, that a team (Blue Jays) paid a player (Martin) significant dollars ($82 million over five years), in part, for that same skill.

While it feels like the low-hanging analytic fruit has been plucked – on-base percentage, shifts, pitch-framing – there are always going to be new ideas, some of which could be quite big (an injury-prevention breakthrough?). So, what type of teams are best situated either to create them — or, perhaps more important, identify and implement them?

When I think about idea creation and innovation I’m often reminded of Walter Isaacson’s book The Innovators, which focuses on the creative process of successful companies in the computer and tech industry. Assessed James Surowiecki in a review for Foreign Policy:

“The organizations that have done best at innovating have typically been those that have relied on strong teams made up of diverse thinkers from lots of different disciplines. These teams didn’t try to quash independent thinking; they welcomed it. As Isaacson puts it, ‘Rugged individualism and the desire to form associations were totally compatible, even complementary, especially when it involved creating things collaboratively.’”

Here’s Isaacson on the Charlie Rose Show. (Wishing Charlie Rose a speedy recovery from heart surgery.)

There are scores upon scores of brilliant people working in front offices, scores upon scores of folks who have turned down more lucrative work on Wall St. and elsewhere to pursue something they love. But ideas are not just the product of IQ and computational skills if you believe the Isaacson premise. Idea creation is tied to collaboration between a diverse group of people and backgrounds.

MLB front offices and coaching staffs are not the most diverse of groups. Many have taken the same path there, which suggests they share many similar experiences and values. As Cameron noted, if you look at the MLB job ads posted on FanGraphs many are for similar positions and seeking similar qualifications. Coaches at every level are former players, and the vast majority of front office staff hired recently entered into the industry in a similar way as Russell A. Carleton noted in a first-hand experience piece for Baseball Prospectus back in December:

Earlier this year, Kate Morrison and I found that among front office workers who had recently gotten their jobs, more than 70 percent had first been interns… So, here’s my pitch: Baseball teams want (and need) the best people they can find for the job, but they are largely using the internship system as a gate-keeping mechanism….

This cuts them off from some fraction of the workforce. It’s possible that one of those “best available” people is in that fraction. Ditching the internship system comes at a cost, but every investment has the potential for a return. The return to that investment is access to that pool of people who are now left out. I honestly don’t know how big that pool is or how many of those “best people” are in that pool, but it’s a worthwhile question to ponder.

I’m not arguing against internship programs. They’ve produced much value and talent for MLB front offices. But if baseball is relying on them to fill 70% of hires, then perhaps the industry has become too reliant on internships.

Some teams have recently made inspired hires, such as the Indians choosing James Harrison, a former college football player and NFL staffer, to head their farm system despite having never played organized baseball and having only one year of experience in professional baseball. The Pirates hired sports psychologist Chris Johnson in 2015 to join their front office. He had previously worked with the Golden State Warriors, and before that, had spent seven years at the Navy’s Operational Neuroscience Lab, working with Marines and Navy SEALs. FanGraphs alum August Fagerstrom was hired to work in the front office of a mystery team despite lacking traditional pedigree or background. (He was a journalist!)

Ideas have shorter shelf lives, there’s no doubting that. It’s a copycat industry. And while there has never been so much data, everyone has the same data from Statcast and PITCHf/x. So if everyone has the same stack of information it comes down to who asks the best questions of that data. And perhaps it will be those organizations with the most diverse, collaborative teams, that will most often ask the best questions to yield value-adding answers.