Abbreviated tonight, since I have to get some press releases out for the SSNCT.
"The day you say you have to do something, you're screwed. Because you will always make a bad deal. You can always recover from the player you didn't sign, you may never recover from the player you signed at the wrong price." -- Billy Beane, Moneyball 193-4
This was the actual quote that I was looking for weeks ago when I stumbled upon my copy of Moneyball. I was correct that I hadn't finished the book last time I read it, as this quote was about 30 pages ahead of where I stopped last time. I was incorrect in thinking it had a direct applicability to quiz bowl. There's an indirect connection though, and my rereading of the book did bring out a couple of quotes which do have relevance to what we are discussing.
Moneyball is fundamentally about the idea that if you are at a disadvantage in a scarce resource, there are ways to work around that scarcity. In Moneyball that's where the term "market inefficiency" comes into play. A market inefficiency is a point where something is incorrectly priced relative to its return value. There were two ways for this to work: either the Oakland A's management found something that could be had for cheap, which was predicted to create an increase in wins, or they found something that was valued by the conventional wisdom, didn't lead to an increase in wins, and stayed away from pursuing that. It was necessary to do this for the A's as they were cash poor compared to their rivals in the American League, but the ideas were such that any team could have applied them, and produced a more efficient outcome.
Quiz bowl is not precisely Moneyball because we aren't about money. The resource that quiz bowl that actually measures things out by is time. What money buys you in quiz bowl is the ability to travel farther, and the ability to attend more events with more players. What it doesn't affect is your ability to practice, the time you have to practice, or the sources you can draw from to practice and study. Those are how you spend time, and I've told Catie, "everybody gets the same 24 hours to work with."
That quote above hints at one Moneyball idea, that having money to spend on the team allows mistakes to be less damaging. Our mistakes are wasted time, and they are critical mistakes in our scenario because there is so little time allotted to us and correcting wasted time costs even more time.
Experience, for the teams we may face, is time accrued. It is not necessarily time well spent. Our book's goal is to spend that week as efficiently as possible. We can't compensate for the experience they may have prior to when we start, but the book can certainly guide to match them or exceed them in the week.
So rephrasing the quote for our purposes:
"The day you say you have to learn or teach something, you're screwed. Because you will always do it suboptimally the first time. You can always recover from the thing you didn't teach, you may never recover from the thing you overemphasized or spent too much time on."
Two other quotes which got me thinking:
"Managers tend to pick a strategy that is least likely to fail rather than pick a strategy that is most efficient."
Pete Palmer, Moneyball, page 80
I'm not convinced that the first part of this is true for quiz bowl, because it presupposes that all "managers(coaches)" go into quiz bowl with a pre-game strategy.
"The entire basis of professional sports is the public's interest in what is going on. To deny the public access to information that it cares about is the logical equivalent of locking the stadiums and playing the games in private so that no one will find out what is happening."
Bill James, Moneyball, page 83
This quote which covered efforts by press services to prevent free exchange of statistical data (in the 1980's) caught me at about the same time I wrote the letter on statistics (Week 106). Quiz bowl statkeeping is not nearly to the level of detail which baseball has almost always had, and quiz bowl statkeeping is really a matter of the details being recorded only for the latter two-thirds of player's development. The most useful data would come from a player's early practices, and the lowest levels of competitions, which for various reasons have the spottiest record-keeping, and are where having records are both not valued and understaffed with people dedicated to and trained to keep full records.
The fundamental problem here is it will always be more important to have more teams than it is to have more staff. You can't professionalize and standardize readers and scorekeepers without also restricting the supply of those same people. We're not close to being able to get enough data to draw larger conclusions.
After completing my notes on Moneyball, I bounced into another Michael Lewis work, his podcast Against the Rules. I had absorbed a couple of ideas from the second season of the podcast on coaching, and I had not realized that season three had begun, onthe subject of experts. The first episode touched on the issue of medical billing, and how one needed an expert to be able to navigate insurance claims.
Medical billing is a collection of exceptions to a set of rules, and you need to maintain all the knowledge and apply it to get paid by insurance. The common pattern established in the podcast was that someone who did medical billing had to learn a number of single case rules and exceptions, which led to having to retain singular pieces of information which applied in only one case or a few cases. This usually led to a series of post-it notes attached to the biller's screen, and an immense amount of situational knowledge internalized. This leads to a level of expertise which is only learned over time by working with the billing systems, and difficult to propagate to additional people who could benefit from the knowledge.
Televised quiz bowl mostly uses large sets of orderly data to form the answers to the questions posed. The circuit tends to focus on finding an answer that fits the interesting information that the writer finds, resulting in answers that usually don't often fit into orderly data sets. The circuit tends towards exceptions because the circuit writers want to bring new information to the players' attention. That information, known the narrowest possible section of the field of competitors, and designed to surprise and inform the rest, is usually placed as the first clue. The circuit starts with exceptions, and may wander into an answer among the orderly data.
The problem with this for a new coach is orderly information can show you part of the pattern and you can realize the pattern leads you to more information. That makes it a lot easier to teach televised quiz bowl. An exception based system is one that can't teach you except by learning it in steps and repeatedly learning what has to go on each post-it note.
There's also a name for that disordered data and the rules to maintain it, and I was surprised to see that it hadn't changed in thirty-five years since I first heard it. The programmers in the podcast referred to it as "spaghetti code" and I instantly flashed back to when my father's company was broght in to fix the programming of a factory's control systems. That was the first time I had heard someone who had to maintain complex code as "Chef Boyardee."
Being good at quiz bowl as the circuit plays it means being good at maintaining spaghetti code in your mind, knowing how all the pieces of information go together and can appear in a question. The problem is the circuit's spaghetti code requires much longer to internalize, memorize, and utilize. if we asked someone to play circuit questions in a week, it wouldn't end well. But that is not the task we set out to solve.