A Qualitative Response

Former major-leaguer Doug Glanville talks about his career and the value of statistical correlations to models of behavior

Information Management Special Reports, August 5, 2008

This column is in answer to our last column on Chris Anderson’s thesis supporting massive data correlation over the scientific method. For an informed background, please read that column or Anderson’s Wired article.

I received quite a lot of feedback from my last DM Review column. Most of the comments dealt either with causation versus correlation or argued that statistics are but one tool in the scientific workshop, not an alternative. I’d say the net reaction was even overall; several readers were taken with Anderson’s thinking, others were not impressed and a few were genuinely upset. (Anderson has taken a lot of heat on the Web, some of it reasoned and the rest a digest of angry flaming.)

You’ll find many such arguments on the Web. To take a slightly different tack I turned primarily to an individual, neither a statistician nor a scientists, who has his own take on both sides of the argument.

Doug Glanville spent nine successful years in major-league baseball and made a good deal of money playing mostly for the Chicago Cubs and Philadelphia Phillies. Doug is writing a fascinating series of columns in the New York Times this summer dealing with life pre and post-baseball. (Glanville was doubly gifted to the point of being doubted by scouts who worried that he cared too much about academics while playing ball at the University of Pennsylvania; today he works as a property developer, writer and baseball consultant and will appear in an upcoming Ken Burns series. I encourage you to read his columns.)

I couldn’t find a more human response to Anderson’s number-centric world and his fixation on the statistical methods of Google. I sent Glanville references about the debate and asked about his latest column in The Times, “Doubleday and Darwin,” in which he examined the combination of athletic tools that brought him a big signing bonus and made him a first round draft pick in 1991.

There were parallels: both Anderson and Glanville had referenced Charles Darwin and the power of observation without having met. I thought it was a fascinating coincidence for two “observers” with largely polar points of view.

Where they diverge, Anderson looks at the future value of statistical correlations while Glanville spent a career mostly subject to such observations. (Anyone who follows the game or has read "Moneyball" will understand baseball’s obsession with statistics and how they are used to pick out “can’t miss” prospects.)

“Some of what I think about are the rules, or perceived rules, of the game,” Glanville told me. Gifted with blazing speed and the hand-eye coordination of a contact hitter, Glanville pointed out that, had the outfield walls been eliminated or the distance between bases shortened, he’d be a sure bet for baseball’s Hall of Fame.

“But the rules aren’t supposed to change, right?” Glanville told me. “In fact, they change very quickly and all the time.” As he pointed out, there was the lowering of the pitcher’s mound when star pitchers such as Bob Gibson were consistently dominant in the 1960’s; there was a simple pitching adjustment called the “slide step” that put an end to a long era of base stealers stretching from Lou Brock to Ricky Henderson; there was a decision in recent years to expand the strike zone when home-run hitters were setting new records season after season that were out of skew with the game’s history.

The last change was made even without knowledge about what would become the steroids controversy and yet another rules change. “Today, the PGA is trying to “Tiger-proof” golf courses and there’s a reason that’s a term,” Glanville continued. “It skews the statistical comfort zone of the inventors and that’s generally unacceptable. Tiger Woods comes along and raises the bar and adds new value to the game but in the long term your statistics are all thrown out of whack.”

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