Mgt. 110 Business of Baseball Jordan Core 1. Baseball is full of decisions; every single last pitch is a decision, whether to pitch it high, low, inside, outside. The coach must make the decision of which players to play on certain nights and whether or not to take a pitcher out of the game. I think baseball has the most decisions to be made out of all the “big four” sports. Most decisions in baseball are structured problems, they are easily definable. If a slugger keeps hitting the fastball, it’s time to make the decision of pitching him curveballs away from his hotspot in the strike zone. There is a standardized way of handling almost every type of player and situation. Granted, there may be certain decisions that are unstructured problems and are not faced everyday by the manager such as a star player going down with an injury. The manager must make the decision of how to fill the void left by the injury. If you believe in it, luck can be an unstructured problem as well. In baseball all decision makers are faced with either risk or uncertainty. I don’t believe there is any certainty in any sport. Even the best pitchers have games where they falter so nothing is to be expected. To be the best manger you can be in baseball you have to have as much risk as you can and as little uncertainty as possible. Knowing you will never have total certainty you have to make the most accurate decision you can and it seems now the more stats you put into making your decision the better off you are going to be. 2. If you have results to back up your decisions and statistics then I absolutely think it is appropriate to evaluate players based on quantitative criteria. The Oakland A’s and the “Money ball” story is the result you need. Billy Bean took the struggling Athletics and with lots of statistical research helped make the decisions that lead to their success. Purely adding super star caliber players is proven not to work anymore; it’s all about the “right” stats, sabermetrics, and having good relations amongst players in the clubhouse. 3. Sabermetrics is a statistical analysis of baseball that measures in-game activity. It helps mangers be effective decision makers based on the stats used by sabermetricians. Sabermetrics isn’t based on the stats normally looked at in the game. Instead of looking at batting average and RBI’s like most managers do to judge a players performance, sabermetrics looks at runs and how the player helped the team score runs that lead to victory. A player is worth an amount of offensive runs not batting average or how many hits he achieved. Sabermetrics looks at many rigorous statistics, algorithms, and equations to determine a players worth and to help managers make decisions. It’s a mathematical way of decision making instead of gut instinct. 4. Front office executives wish they could use rational decision making for every decision because it is meant to maximize value and take the logical approach. This doesn’t always happen though because sometimes the front office doesn’t get all the information they need to make the rational decision due to time constraints like in the MLB draft. If a college coach was too use bounded rationality decision making, he could make logical decisions but will be hindered by his inability to process information. Most college coaches use intuition when calling out pitches or steal signs because they usually only have their past knowledge and feelings to go off of. If a player is fast and steals a lot of bases then the coach is more likely to send him because past experiences shows that he has a good chance to steal the base. With evidence based decision making the executive or coach has little to go off of, just the best available evidence. A coach would put in his best available hitter to pinch hit in a crucial situation because he only has the best available evidence telling him to do so. 5. I don’t believe there can be too much information in the business of baseball. Sabermetrics uses over 30 different statistical categories to help in the decision making process and that is proven to work. The more information to you have to help out in the decision making the better. You want to turn that uncertainty into risk and that risk into the closest thing to certainty as you can.