Larry Nance, Jr. on being an NBA legacy and living with Crohn’s disease
January 8, 2016Looking back at the 1998 dream team Indians front office
January 8, 2016There have been many people weighing in on what the Cleveland Browns hiring of Paul DePodesta means. What could a guy who spent the majority of his career in baseball actually contribute to a football team? SI’s Tom Verducci had some fantastic insights into how Browns owner Jimmy Haslam went about the process of finding him and some of what it might mean. But how much of it is what Paul DePodesta actually believes? And what might DePodesta actually do for the Browns? Well, thanks to WFNY’s own Craig Lyndall, who through an electron enema scraped the bowels of the internet, we were able to find actual words written by Paul DePodesta about his baseball career written back in 2003.
However, while reading, it was easy to realize everything he was saying was applicable to his leap into the National Football League. Instead of jumping from the Cleveland Indians to the Oakland Athletics, he’s making an even bigger move from the New York Mets to the Cleveland Browns. Philosophically, it was merely a matter of application.
So, here are the words from Paul DePodesta. I have only included the portions I thought most applicable and added my commentary in italics. If you want to read his original transcript in its entirety, it is available here.
Paul DePodesta: When I joined the Cleveland Indians in 1996, the baseball world was really rich for reform. Fans were still holding a grudge from the strike, salaries were exploding and small market teams were disappearing from the competitive landscape. In short, crisis was emerging and the existing operating paradigm in baseball was totally incapable of solving these new problems.
Michael Bode: The question fans need to ask themselves is if the current landscape of the NFL is also ripe for reform. Between concussions and other injury issues, college quarterbacking, the huge influx of money with a skyrocketing salary cap, and many other assorted items, I would argue it is.
PD: I had a distinct advantage over everybody else in the industry at the time in that I knew absolutely nothing. I’d played baseball in college but that was about it. Because I knew nothing I observed everything critically and took nothing for granted. I spent my first few years with the Indians analyzing all of their systems, from contracts to player development and scouting. Because I had no preconceived notions over how an organization ought to be run, this was an education for me.
MB: DePodesta will have the same advantage with the Cleveland Browns except he now has more knowledge about how good organizations are run (whether they be baseball or medical from his direct experience).
Oakland was the perfect opportunity because losing had become the expectation. If we tried something really innovative and it didn’t work, all we’d be doing is fulfilling expectations. To use a scout’s term, there was a lot of upside
Oakland was the perfect opportunity because losing had become the expectation. If we tried something really innovative and it didn’t work, all we’d be doing is fulfilling expectations. To use a scout’s term, there was a lot of upside
PD: Evaluation is really at the core of decision-making whether the field of endeavor is baseball or picking stocks. It was clear to me that using clearly subjective evaluation was shoddy at best. The psychological biases I mentioned1 , and more, were all in play. Imagine if you made a huge investment in a company after just meeting the management and never even glancing at a financial report. Your entire evaluation would be something like, “the CEO seems smart; he’s got a good body on him; and I’m still really angry with that last company that lost all of our money so I’m going to do something and I’m going to do it now.”
MB: Determining the important factors in evaluating draft picks, free agents, and other players remains conceptually the same in any sport. Also, other decisions throughout the organization can also benefit from a critical eye (I’m looking at the hyped up non-event of the uniform alteration). Having someone intelligent asking questions is a good thing.
PD: The problem itself wasn’t the people. Our scouts were very loyal, passionate, industrious people. The problem was the operating system. The industrial inertia was leading them further and further away from the truth. The operating system at the time, which I’ll refer to as Subjective 1.0, was incapable of providing solutions to all the new problems the game was facing.
MB: Huge understanding right here. Do not blame the people for just operating within the constructs of the job given to them. If you tell a scout what to look for and he gives you a report within those parameters, then he is not the one in the wrong if you were looking at the wrong things.
PD: Despite this situation, I was grappling with a significant issue: the Indians were very successful at this time. We kept winning the division year after year, selling out every game in our stadium and the owner took the team public at one point and was making more money than any other owner.
…
How was I supposed to innovate a supposedly smooth running machine? There was, however, a crisis underlying our success. Our lofty expectations had stifled our innovative spirit. Everything we had done to be successful, we stopped doing. We were hanging on instead of trying to move forward. We signed veteran, big name players who everybody knew. Our team got a lot more expensive and started growing older. Though I was seeing all this, I didn’t have much of an audience in Cleveland.
Then the Oakland A’s called and offered me the assistant GM job. At the time the Indians had one of the top payrolls in the game, about $71 million. The A’s were near the bottom at $20 million. The A’s were really in full crisis mode. In the past six seasons the A’s had finished 161 games under .500. Attendance was in a freefall. To add insult to injury, about a year and a half earlier, the A’s had traded Mark McGwire, the greatest power hitter of our generation. Then the next year they watched McGwire chase and break the single season home run record. They were at rock bottom.
MB: So, DePodesta is like a firefighter or the National Guard. While everyone else runs from a crisis, he runs toward it. He realizes desperate situations require the most innovative solutions. It appears he welcomes the challenge. Why else would he come to the Cleveland Browns?
PD: This was the perfect opportunity because losing had become the expectation in Oakland. If we tried something really innovative and it didn’t work, all we’d be doing is fulfilling expectations. To use a scout’s term, there was a lot of upside. If somehow we figured out how to put a playoff caliber team on the field for pennies on the dollar, the baseball world would have to take notice.
It wouldn’t be easy for us. First of all, no small market team had ever made the playoffs in the post-strike era. The A’s like everybody else in baseball had ceased to do one very critical thing—to ask the naïve question: “If we weren’t already doing it this way, is this the way we would start?”
…
So once I got to the A’s I began a subtle, under-the-radar mission to ask the naïve question all over the A’s organization. As you can imagine, some people didn’t like it.
Dictating thought process doesn’t really work. We needed people to truly believe that they were going to use this new knowledge to develop our players and help us find new ones
Dictating thought process doesn’t really work. We needed people to truly believe that they were going to use this new knowledge to develop our players and help us find new ones
MB: Again, the Cleveland Browns sure have some upside, no? And given the scarce success, having someone ask that naïve question throughout the organization sounds like a good idea to me.
PD: Opinions are great—don’t get me wrong. They’re great for starting research projects. Then you go study and see if you can prove the opinion or not. But when placing multi-million dollar bets on future outcomes, opinions are wholly unsatisfactory. Opinions as conversation starters are fine. Opinions as conclusions are very bad. I started research projects to discern the objective “why.” I wanted to know why certain teams won and why other teams lost; why certain drafts produced big stars and others didn’t. This was the naïve question at work.
MB: (Nodding.)
PD: I was on a quest to find relevant relationships. Usually it wasn’t as simple as “if X then Y.” I was looking for probabilistic relationships. I christened the new model in the front office: “be the house.” Every season we play 162 games. Individual players amass over 600 plate appearances. Starting pitchers face 1,000 hitters. We have plenty of sample size. I encouraged everyone to think of the house advantage in everything we did. We may not always be right but we’d be right a lot more often than we’d be wrong. In baseball, if you win about 60% of your games, you’re probably in the playoffs.
One of the other problems is that the traditional metrics and stats used in baseball are muddied with so much noise that just didn’t matter that I was having a tough time distilling all the information. I decided to throw it all out and start all over with no assumptions.
MB: One of the fundamental issues with football is the sample size problem. What sample size is big enough? Another issue is the complexity of the team. Rather than individualized acts of baseball, football is based on teamwork. If the center blocks the linebacker, the right guard blocks the defensive end, but the defensive tackle is unblocked, then who messed up? It will be interesting to see how DePodesta plans to attack these issues.
Then again, the Browns already have Ken Kovash, a top NFL analyst, on staff. So, maybe DePodesta will merely serve the role of pushing everyone to innovate and be there as a resource for how the team might use the vast amounts of data to turn it into something useful. Again, interesting to see where this leads.
PD: Once the research was complete, debated and stress-tested (which took years) we had considerable new knowledge, and a lot of it was pretty startling. Now remember that we hadn’t really invented anything. We had only discovered relationships that were already there. Fortunately for us, most of them were contrary to popular opinion.
MB: Fans probably do not want to read the process might take years, but innovation rarely happens overnight. It is usually overnight success as a result of years of work.
PD: Once the system was in place, we needed to manage it. We implemented incentive systems and salary structures that were built upon our philosophies. We started a guerrilla education program for our players, our coaches and our staffs. We knew that we couldn’t just tell people they were going to start thinking a different way. Dictating thought process doesn’t really work. We needed them to truly believe that they were going to use this new knowledge to develop our players and help us find new ones. It took time. We continually refined and retooled our systems.
MB: Again, DePodesta mentions these things take time. Time to ask the questions, time to figure out the solutions, time to implement. Then, continual refinement. I do not know if his hiring will help the Browns become a stable, winning organization. But I do feel better about the organizational structure as a whole with a person of his background on staff.
- From another section: “The incredible thing is that in subjectivity there are a lot of biases that come into play—emotional opinions or focusing just on outcomes, or even worse, focusing on the most recent outcomes. In baseball it can even take into account the player’s physical appearance or worrying about what the press is saying all the time.” [↩]
30 Comments
good read MG … so what was it like to be “in the presence” of the guru himself ?
Please note, it was a non-interview. It was an article DePodesta wrote himself about his move from the Indians to the A’s. It happened to correlate to his move from Mets to Browns, so my commentary is describing how I think it does.
I’d love to interview DePodesta in the future. We’ll see if I’m ever blessed enough to get that opportunity.
i know … *smile*
“Again, Depodesta mentions these things take time…”
Question is will Jimmy give Depodesta, and Brown enough time to figure things out?
http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/awesome-avalanche.gif
Kudos to Mr. Bode!
Bigger question: who exactly will be making decisions? who will make the final decision? and will we ever know either? This is my fundamental problem with the way Haslam described his latest reincarnation for the workings of his football team.
1st +1 pun of the new year to Mr. Bode
The more I read things like this and hear hard-headed NFL “experts” nay-say what the Browns are doing, the more in I am. Good stuff, as usual, Bode.
As much as the criminal charges brought his reputation down, I think he is likely a very good businessman. I think he understands the data and analysis landscape and that changes don’t happen immediately. I would be willing to bet that as long as there is some proof of success, that Jimmy will have a hard time getting off this train.
Yes- if it was the typical indifference, or sarcastic humor, I’d take it more seriously.
This is going to be fascinating.
MGB, this was a really interesting article.
Is there some kind of, like, internet award thingy that a piece like this, or Craig’s Causey article, could be submitted to?
it sounds like they’ll all be working together & sashi brown will have the final say on personnel matters.
Color me skeptical to say the least. I just saw a Tweet from Kenny Roda and it reaffirmed my belief that Haslam is his worst enemy when it comes to a HC search as well as GM. It’s like I said to someone else here Haslam had one opportunity to make a first impression and he blew it. To make matters worse he’s blown his second and third opportunities as well.
one big difference this time … MRS. dee haslam is on the search committee this time … she probably said : “look honey , you’ve already screwed this up a couple of times … you will sit back , say nothing & watch how it’s done … are we clear?” … or something like that.
I just wish I could be the waiter at one of these prospective interviews for a head coach. Then again they probably will order in anyways.
meet the new boss …
Umm, not sure taking the word of a talk show guy who heard something from a player’s agent is the most reliable thing here.
thank you sir.
The only good puns are bad puns.
Haha, thanks. This one is just some commentary on an old article. Definitely not award-worthy. Jacob/Causey’s Q&A though, sure is. Not sure if there’s one for analytics. SABR handles the baseball awards still, but haven’t seen any for football. Good point about finding it though and nominating Jacob for one.
You’re supposed to be punny there. Doesn’t bode well.
I’ve heard/read other people say the same thing.
We’ll see. Jimmy has made it his show now. All the main players report directly to him (much like Kraft on Patriots). To be successful in that model, he needs to be prudent but not meddle. Again, we’ll see.
Holy Toledo that is a fantastic statement despite the negative usage of bode. You see, I do all my work pro-bode.
You said bad puns, dude. Houston, we have…etc.
Somtimes, that’s the way the cookie crumbles
Now you’re just straying. Was it you I tried to convince we nickname Kobayashi “Cup of Coffee” and didnt?
I’m not 100% sure it wasn’t his show all along but just like the last 17 years we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
Ugh, no. I’d have been calling him CoC to this day if that were the case.
I have pushed Truffles and Diversity after all (bonus points if you can name those baseball players).
Yeah, I think it was Castrovince I pawned it off on, and he said he liked it, but he went with something else. You know the ref, of course. And I fully endorsed Truffles. Don’t know Diversity, tho; been off the comments for 6 mos. or so.
It is OK. I think I’m the only one who ever used it. Jeff “Diversity” Manship. Because all men know diversity is an old wooden ship.