Readings: Outliers: The Story of Success

This past weekend, I made a case for a way of discussing books in a manner conducive to NotGraphs. You can read those exact words, if you want. Alternatively, you can just believe me when I say that the basic idea is to share lightly annotated passages and ideas from interesting baseball-related books.

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Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

Notes
Readers of FanGraphs will very likely be acquainted with the statistical concept of the outlier — that is, the data point that resides unusually far from the cluster of other data points in a given set. In this book, Gladwell attempts to examine the conditions that surround people who become outliers in terms of success within their chosen fields.

In an early example, Gladwell looks at a Canadian junior hockey team. Seventeen of the team’s 25 players are born within the first four months of the year. Nor is this phenomenon isolated merely to the one hockey team; Gladwell provides a number of other cases in which team rosters are skewed bizarrely towards January, February, and March.

On this matter he writes:

The explanation for this is quite simple. It has nothing to do with astrology, nor is there anything magical about the first three months of the year. It’s simply that in Canada the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is January 1. A boy who turns ten on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn’t turn ten until the end of the year — and at that age, in preadolscence, a twelve-month gap in age represents an enormous difference in physical maturity.

This being Canada, the most hockey-crazed country on earth, coaches start to select players for the traveling “rep” squad — the all-star teams — at the age of nine or ten, and of course they are more likely to view as talented the bigger and more coordinated players, who have had the benefit of critical extra months of maturity.

And what happens when a player gets chosen for a rep squad? He gets better coaching, and his teammates are better, and he plays fifty or seventy-five games a season instead of twenty games a season like those left behind in the “house” league, and he practices twice as much as, or even three times more than, he would have otherwise. In the beginning, his advantage isn’t so much that he is inherently better but only that he is a little older. But by the age of thirteen or fourteen, with the benefit of better coaching and all that extra practic under his belt, he really is better, so he’s the one more likely to make it to the Major Junior A league, and from there into the big leagues.

[Canadian psychologist Roger] Barnsley argues that these kinds of skewed age distributions exist whenever three things happen: selection, streaming, and differentiated experience. If you make a decision about who is good and who is not good at an early age; if you separate the “talented” from the “untalented”; and if you provide the “talented” with a superior experience, then you’re going to end up giving a huge advantage to that small group of people born closest to the cutoff date (24-25).

The numbers for baseball players, while not skewed to the same degree, are still striking. After noting that the cutoff for many American baseball leagues in the United States is July 31, Gladwell writes that “in 2005, among Americans playing major league baseball 505 were born August versus 313 born in July.”

Though Gladwell doesn’t mention it, I’d imagine that this process of selection, streaming, and differentiated experience applies to baseball at older ages, too. We might consider, for example, the degree to which a player’s draft pedigree earns him extra attention within an organiztion — or, additionally, how many opportunities he might receive with other clubs despite repeated poor performances.

Consider the case of Matt Bush, for example, who was drafted first overall by San Diego in the 2004 Draft. Poor performances and off-the-field incidents have defined Bush’s baseball career, but he’s continually been offered chances. As of now, he’s on the 40-man roster of the Rays as a relief pitcher and has, by all appearances, matured; however, one wonders both (a) if the same opportunities would have been given to a 17th-round talent or (b) to what degree Bush has benefited from the high-level instruction that wouldn’t have otherwise been made available to him.