One of the beautiful things about baseball is the randomness of it. Differences in skill don’t become obvious after one game, or ten, or maybe even a hundred. Anyone can have a good game, or a bad one. The significance of an individual game isn’t quite visible to human perception.

Looking into the pitching matchups going into this A’s-Angels series, I would have figured the A’s to beat Dylan Bundy, but lose to Shohei Ohtani. Of course, baseball is baseball, and precisely the opposite happened. Bundy was dominant, while Ohtani couldn’t retire a single batter.

Ohtani was pitching for the first time since returning from Tommy John surgery. It was obvious he wasn’t anywhere near his old form. His fastball was about 5mph slower than before the surgery. Worse, he couldn’t locate the pitch where he wanted to, either. He gave up some hits, and some walks, and before you know it, Ohtani had thrown 30 pitches, retired nobody, and given up five runs.

The Angels mounted a comeback, thanks to the greatest player in the game, Mike Trout, who destroyed a 3-0 fastball from Mike Fiers to cut the lead to 5-3. And speaking of unpredictability, this was the first 3-0 pitch that Trout had swung at since 2016. It was a terrible pitch by Fiers, but he probably wasn’t expecting Trout to swing at all, given his history. If that data on Trout’s tendencies didn’t exist, Fiers probably wouldn’t have grooved that pitch.

Mike Trout is the greatest player of this generation. He might end up being the greatest player of all time. But like baseball itself, his greatness is subtle. You may not notice it if you just watch a game or two. Trout is not flashy, at all. He doesn’t have a body chiseled like a statue by Michaelangelo. His swing is not an aesthetically pleasing work of art. He’s just solidly, unrelentingly, consistently difficult to pitch to. When you add up his numbers, day after day, year after year, he always comes out on top.

If the beauty and mystery of baseball lies in its ability to operate just below the threshold of human perception, the Moneyball movement was all about removing that mystery. The numbers tell a story that human eyes can’t see. They allow us perceive those inperceivable elements of the game, help us transcend our human limitations, and triumph.

It takes a leap of faith to believe in something that you can’t really see. At first, the old guard resisted the new information, railing against the “nerds” who wanted to “ruin” their game. In the end, though, Moneyball became the standard practice. Just because you can’t see something, doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

I went out on a bike ride today. For some reason, someone had found it necessary to write the following in chalk on the bike path:

It’s easy to draw the parallel here, that much of what is going on in America right now is formed from a similar resistance by human beings to believe in the existence of things that operate just below the threshold of perception, that only show up in the statistics.

If you’re not an African-American, you likely haven’t been on the receiving end of repeated and persistent distrust, haven’t been followed by security guards in a store, been pulled over while driving a car without cause, been beaten for no reason at all. They aren’t personal experiences to you. They’re just statistics. It takes a leap of faith to believe them.

If you don’t personally know anyone who has been sick, the dangers of COVID-19 aren’t visible, either. They’re just numbers in a sea of numbers. 4,000,000 infected and 150,000 dead, but you don’t know any of them. 10x deadlier than the flu, and 2.5x more contagious, but how do you find horror in a mere handful of digits. A mask can cut your risk of catching the disease by 60%, and the risk of spreading it by 90%, but if you’ve experienced zero, 90% of zero is still zero. Can you believe these mysterious numbers enough to take social distancing seriously, enough to wear a mask in public?

Human beings often have a hard time believing things until those things become visible with their own eyes. They think “corona virus is not real”, until someone they personally know gets sick with the disease. They think racial discrimination is an exaggeration, until they see undeniable evidence of the cruelty of racial violence, such as George Floyd being choked to death for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.

We baseball fans like to think that baseball, via Moneyball, now has the kind of culture that believes what the numbers tell us, without always being able to grasp with our own eyes what the numbers are telling us.

And yet here we are — here I am — watching baseball through a pandemic and racial unrest, thinking and hoping that it will work out all right, refusing to stare directly at the statistical unlikelihood that the endeavor will succeed, plowing forward instead with the good old status quo until inevitably presented with the unwanted, undeniable evidence to the contrary which falls within the threshold of human perception.

In our last exciting episode, we talked about how Matt Olson had envisioned a situation in his head. He imagined what he would do in that situation. The situation he envisioned happened. He did exactly what he imagined he would do. Everyone lived happily ever after.

It doesn’t always work out that way.

Before deciding to revive this blog to chronicle the unusual 2020 baseball season, my first idea was to dip my toes into podcasting. I had an idea that might make for an interesting format for a podcast. So in connection with the first A’s exhibition game on Tuesday against the Giants, I gave the format a rehearsal.

There’s a difference between envisioning something when you’re an expert, and envisioning something when you’re an amateur. An expert knows all the nuts and bolts from Point A to Point Z. When they envision a solution to something, their solution includes and accounts for all those nuts and bolts. When you envision a solution as an amateur, not only do you not account for all those nuts and bolts, you’re not even aware that those nuts and bolts exist.

All of which is to say, until Wednesday, I didn’t even know how little I knew about the process of editing a podcast.

Later that Wednesday, Baseball Prospectus held a roundtable discussion on Zoom about the upcoming season. It was an interesting discussion, but after spending half the day beforehand listening to and editing my own voice, I couldn’t help but feel like I was listening to a podcast being played at 1.5x speed. Everybody was talking so fast!

Of course, they were probably all just speaking at a normal speed for human beings. I’m the weird one whose everyday speech sounds like you’re listening to a podcast at 0.75x speed.

It was then I realized that even if the podcast idea was good in general, editing a podcast with me as the host would take more effort and time than I want to put into this. Information received, lesson learned, plans adjusted, blog launched.

When it comes to a pandemic, all of us are amateurs to some extent. None of us have done this before. Epidemiologists have thought about it the most, of course, but there are specifics about this particular virus that even they couldn’t have planned for. There’s going to be some learning on the fly, some adapting to do. The question is, how well and quickly do we learn and adapt to the new information that comes in?

The A’s lost to the Angels today, 4-1. And part of the reason the A’s lost is because they had never started a season with only three weeks of training leading up to it.

Sean Manaea started the game for the A’s, and he was perfect through the first three innings. His fastball was sitting at 89-90mph, and he was locating his pitches well.

Manaea gave up a solo homer to Justin Upton in the fourth inning. Then everything fell apart in the fifth. His fastball suddenly dropped a few mph in velocity, so that it was now 86-87mph. Manaea quickly went from unhittable to very hittable, and the next thing you knew, the A’s trailed by four runs.

Frankie Montas seemed to fall apart very quickly after about four innings the game before, as well. So perhaps there’s a lesson for Bob Melvin to learn and adapt to: in a season like this, he needs to have a quicker hook for his starting pitchers at the first sign of fatigue.

Meanwhile, Jesús Luzardo came on in relief and pitched three superlative innings. He looked ready for the rotation as much as anybody. Provided, of course, that Melvin is ready with the quick fatigue hook.

In a normal baseball season, in a normal year, an A’s loss would leave me feeling a little bit grumpy for the rest of the day.

To be honest, that same feeling crept into my head today. But at the same time, the pandemic is never very far from my consciousness. Being grumpy about my favorite team losing a ballgame was always a bit self-indulgent in any era. But today, recognizing in myself such a moment of grumpiness, quickly turned into a moment of guilt.

This season, being grumpy about the results of a baseball game is not just self-indulgent, but immoral. You have to have some perspective about all this. If that’s how I’m going to react to a baseball game, what the hell am I even doing? Why am I doing this? Why is anybody doing this?

I don’t know. I don’t even know what I don’t know. I’m just an ignorant amateur, among many ignorant amateurs, making up stuff on the fly, seeing what happens, hoping it works.

When I wrote the Catfish Stew blog on the Baseball Toaster network from 2005-2009, it was at the peak of both blogging and of Moneyball. It seemed like every serious baseball analyst out there, A’s fan or not, would dissect anything and everything the A’s did from a statistical point of view.

I wanted Catfish Stew, and Baseball Toaster, to be different. The Toaster was about analyzing baseball, yes, but it was also about placing baseball in a human context, about how what was happening on the field connected to our lives, and to the greater world around us. It was about the emotions we feel as baseball fans as we watch the seasons unfold.

So for Catfish Stew specifically, I wanted to be the un-Moneyball A’s blog. That’s not to say the aim was to oppose Moneyball. Instead, it was to understand it, and the effects it had not just on the results on the field, but in the emotional lives of its fans. My goal was to chronicle what it felt like to be an A’s fan.

I stopped blogging about the A’s for many reasons, but among them was that I felt like I had said everything I wanted to say. One season became another became another. One emotion became another became another. I started to repeat myself.

There’s little about the year 2020, however, that is repetitive. And anything that isn’t is remarkable because this year, normal has become unusual.

Therefore, this season, there might be something new to say. So let’s plug in this toaster, and see if there’s anything worth cooking.

For the Oakland A’s, the 2020 regular season began on Friday, July 24, at home against the Los Angeles Angels.

…

***breaks fourth wall*** When I typed that last sentence, I just stared at it for like five minutes. I got angry just looking at it. I got angry at myself for typing it.

It’s a sentence that is both factual, and completely devoid of any context whatsoever. It’s a sentence that says absolutely nothing about the feelings a normal human being ought to have in this year like no other. It’s a sentence that captures nothing of the anger and sadness and outrage and despair that I feel about what is happening in the world around us. It a sentence that doesn’t even capture the bizarreness of a baseball game being played in a stadium completely empty of fans.

This isn’t a regular season. This is an abomination of a season, in an abomination of a year.

There are so many things more important than baseball right now: the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, the creeping and expanding American fascism, continuing climate change, and the upcoming election.

MLB tried to acknowledge that context in the pre-game ceremony before the game. They had a moment of silence for people that had died. They took a knee to acknowledge Black Lives Matter. Some players on the Angels stayed on a knee during the national anthem. No A’s players did, although two, Khris Davis and Tony Kemp, raised their fists.

I’m glad they acknowledged the context. It would have been wrong if they didn’t. But acknowledgement is not a resolution.

I don’t know if they should be playing baseball right now. But I do know it still feels uncomfortable. I feel uncomfortable about enjoying the game. I feel guilty about wanting to write about it.

But the paradox of this pandemic is that while the scale of it is massive and affects everyone, most of use can contribute the most by staying home and doing nothing. It’s hard to do nothing.

Maybe baseball players feel like they can help, just a little, by doing what they do best, by giving people something to do at home to pass the time. And similarly, maybe I feel like I can help, just a little, by doing what I (used to be) good at, too.

Or maybe that’s just grasping at straws. None of us has any experience at this. We’re all just winging it as we go along.

The game started with Frankie Montas on the mound for the A’s. He seemed a bit amped up. His fastball was moving like crazy, and he was having trouble keeping the ball in the strike zone. He walked some guys. So Montas did what you’re supposed to do when that happens, he tried to throw some breaking pitches instead.

Three times that inning, Frankie Montas threw a slider that the strike zone superimposed on the screen indicated was a strike. All three times, the umpire called it a ball. The third time this happened, I yelled at my screen, “OH COME ON!”

I’m watching baseball in the middle of a global pandemic, and barely five minutes into it, I’m angry and yelling at the umpire.

Such a normal thing, in normal times. It’s not normal times. There are so many other things I should be upset about before being upset about an umpire who can’t recognize a slider properly.

But I’m a human being. And lately, there’s been a lot of evidence coming to light that human beings are idiots.

In the ninth inning, Liam Hendriks was on to try to save a 3-2 lead for the A’s. He threw a slider to Jason Castro that many other umpires would have called strike three. This umpire did not. Two pitches later, Castro hit a fastball for a home run that tied the game. The game went to extra innings.

Because of the shortened nature of the 2020 baseball season, and the limited number of players available to play during the pandemic, MLB decided to minimize the number of long, extra-inning games by starting each extra inning with a runner on second. This was the first MLB game ever played under these new rules.

So the top of the 10th began with Shohei Ohtani, who had made the last out of the ninth inning for the Angels, placed on second base. Jared Walsh led off the inning by hitting a sharp grounder to A’s first baseman Matt Olson, who scooped the ball and quickly whirled and threw the ball to Matt Chapman at third base. In most game situations, a first baseman would take a grounder like that and get the safe out at first base. Olson decided otherwise, and Ohtani was caught in a rundown, and tagged out. This effectively killed the gifted rally for the Angels, and they did not score.

In the bottom of the inning, Marcus Semien was placed on second to begin the inning. Ramon Laureano was hit by a pitch, and after Chapman struck out, Davis drew a walk to load the bases. This brought up Olson with the bases loaded and one out.

Olson bats left-handed, so Angels manager Joe Maddon brought in a lefty pitcher named Hoby Milner to face Olson. Olson is an extreme fly ball hitter, so much so that some teams have deployed four outfielders against him instead of the usual three. But that strategy would be useless in this case. A fly ball by Olson here would probably result in a sacrifice fly that would win the game. The Angels needed a ground ball double play, and so Madden actually did the opposite, moving an outfielder to the infield, resulting in five infielders and only two outfielders.

Madden’s strategy did not work. Olson did not hit a ground ball. He did what he does best, and hit Milner’s first pitch in the air, deep into right field. So deep, in fact, that it went over the fence for a walkoff grand slam home run. The A’s had won the game, 7-3.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh. That felt sweet.

After the game, Olson was interviewed about both the defensive play he made to throw out Ohtani, and about the game winning grand slam.

Regarding the Ohtani play, Olson said that he and Matt Chapman had been discussing that specific play, a runner on second with no outs in a close game, for a couple years now. They discussed it again because of the new rules. When the ball was hit directly to him, he knew exactly what he wanted to do.

On the grand slam, Olson said that he didn’t know much about Milner, so he had watched a lot of video of him, and learned that he liked to get ahead in the count by throwing sliders. He decided to go into the at-bat sitting on a slider on the first pitch, and that was exactly what he got. The rest was history.

Imagine this: a completely new and novel situations arises. Then imagine that there’s a person in a position of responsibility who had studied and thought through in advance exactly what he should do in such a new and novel situation. And imagine that this person then simply executes on his plan, and that success ensues.

What a concept. In a world full of unstable idiots who just cockily wing it in the moment, a person who is thoughtful and prepared can end up looking like a genius.

For the Oakland A’s, the 2020 regular season began on Friday, July 24, at home against the Los Angeles Angels. The A’s won the game, 7-3, in 10 innings.

Perhaps that fact is distastefully decadent and frivolous. Perhaps we should feel ashamed to have enjoyed it.

Or perhaps, a man like Matt Olson is exactly what the world needs right now.

Since this MLB season is going to be so short, I decided I would take the time to blog about the A’s again. 60 games is a much smaller commitment than 162 games.

I don’t know if there’s anyone following this blog that doesn’t already follow me on Twitter, but if so, here is the link to the 2020 Special Edition Catfish Stew blog.

Much of the rhetoric about protesting during the American national anthem assumes that the song is a statement about our country, a declaration of allegiance, an honoring of its history. That’s a natural assumption to make, because for nearly every national anthem, that assumption is true.

There are over 200 countries on Earth, each with its own national anthem. I looked up all of them, with their translations into English.

Every single one of these anthems, save one, is a series of statements about its country: I love my country, here are some nice things about my country, I would die for my country, here are the ideals of our country, I honor those before me who fought for my country, God bless our country, etc.

A small handful of these anthems (e.g. Czechia, Denmark, Iraq, Italy) don’t just make statements, but also ask a question within the song. But those questions are just a minor part of the song. The bulk of those songs are still statements.

There’s only one anthem that is not primarily a series of statements about its country. There’s only one national anthem that is structured in the form of a question: the national anthem of the United States of America.

When you stand up before a sporting event and sing The Star-Spangled Banner, you aren’t making a declaration. You’re asking this:

…does that star-spangled banner yet wave
o’er the land of the free
and the home of the brave?

In other words: Is our country a free country? And do we have the courage it takes to be free?

If there is such a thing as American Exceptionalism, something that sets us apart from all those other nations with all those other anthems, it is in those questions, in the repeated asking of them, in the dissatisfaction with the status quo, in the demand for improvement, in the insistence of staring our problems square in the eye and being brave enough to take them on.

This is where I take issue with people like Drew Brees, who claim that the national anthem is not the time for protest. For every other national anthem on earth, that’s probably true. But for ours, for the singing of the Star-Spangled Banner, resisting such rote declarations is exactly what the song itself is asking you to do.

If you want freedom, if you want to be a free country, you have to constantly ask yourself if you are free. And you also have to have the courage to answer that question honestly. You have to be brave enough to say no, we are not free, when the easy thing to do would be just to say yes and move along and not make any trouble.

Now to be accurate, the Star-Spangled Banner is not entirely a question. The longer, original poem has verses that are statements. And there is one section of the Star-Spangled Banner as sung that is not in the form of a question, either:

And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thru the night that our flag was still there.

But even that one statement in a sea of questions is a statement in favor of questioning our freedom.

Freedom is difficult. If freedom was easy, every single one of those older countries would have come up with it first. Freedom is hard because it requires us to trust other people, many of whom may do things with that freedom that we don’t like. The temptation is always there to put a stop to those things we don’t like, to prevent the things we fear. The desire to control other people is everpresent. Yes, sometimes those things we fear are truly dangerous, and ought to be stopped. But it’s not the act of stopping or not stopping those dangerous things that kills freedom. It’s the act of preventing the fight. And so the only true proof that freedom is alive is if the red glare of protest is shining against the forces of control.

Now this is not to say that every protester is right. If you have a protest and a counterprotest, one of them must be wrong. The content of each protest must be judged on its own merits. But the timing? The timing is never better than when we are engaged in the ritual questioning of our own freedom, in the singing of The Star-Spangled Banner.

If you say something wrong on the Internet, you will usually find out about it very quickly.

I’ve been making some pretty bold statements on the Internet lately, claims about human nature, about politics, about philosophy, about economics, about religion, about art, about sports, and not one person has told me I’m wrong. Very few people have said I’m right, either, but that’s not as weird as nobody telling me I’m wrong.

I’m getting crickets. Why? It’s not that nobody is reading, because I am getting some hits. It’s not that I’m *obviously* wrong, because I’d be ratioed in an instant if I were obviously wrong. It’s probably some combination of:

• I’m right
• I’m wrong, but people have their own problems right now, so they don’t have the bandwidth to bother to engage
• I’m wrong, but in an obscure way that is hard to argue against, so most people can’t tell one way or the other
• I’m wrong, but in a harmless crackpot way, so people don’t want to hurt my feelings

* * *

It’s certainly true that people have many more important things on their mind right now. And rightly so. I’m not writing to complain. I’m writing this because yesterday, I learned something, and I wanted to make a note of it.

I learned something about the third of the above points. That phenomenon, of explaining something in an obscure way, has a name: Inferential Distances.

As the link explains,

In the ancestral environment, you were unlikely to end up more than one inferential step away from anyone else. When you discover a new oasis, you don’t have to explain to your fellow tribe members what an oasis is, or why it’s a good idea to drink water, or how to walk. Only you know where the oasis lies; this is private knowledge. But everyone has the background to understand your description of the oasis, the concepts needed to think about water; this is universal knowledge. When you explain things in an ancestral environment, you almost never have to explain your concepts. At most you have to explain one new concept, not two or more simultaneously.

So if I wanted to explain to someone in the 21st century how Google Maps works, I could just knit together a bunch of steps that you already understand. But if I wanted to explain it to someone from the 13th century, there’s a whole other set of steps I’d have to explain: that the earth is round, what outer space is, how things in space move in orbits, what an artificial satellite is, what an electromagnetic wave is, how you can communicate with a satellite using electromagnetic waves, how you can use a network of satellites to triangulate your position using those electronic waves, what a computer is–wait, what electricity is, what a screen is, how a computer can store data like maps, how a computer can calculate a route from one place on another on a map, how you can give a computer instructions, and a computer can use electronics to sound like it’s talking to give you instructions in return. In other words, to a 13th century person, there are a whole host of inferential steps that have to be understood first before you can even begin to explain WTF Google Maps is. A 21st century person already understands those steps.

My explanation of Google Maps probably contains numerous errors. But a 13th century person isn’t really going to be able to poke holes in my explanation of how Google Maps works. We’re going to get stuck on some silly minor step like “is the earth really round” and not actually get to the point where we address the real, actual flaws in my explanation.

* * *

Everything I’ve been trying to blog about lately hinges on one particular inferential step: the difference in the brain between nondeclarative memories (System 1) and declarative memories (System 2). If you don’t have a good grasp on that difference, everything that follows from it is going to be vague and unclear.

To me, this difference is the single most important fact about human nature.

And therefore, to me, if you are thinking about any aspect of human endeavor, from politics to philosophy to economics to religion to art to sports, and you aren’t thinking through the implications of the difference between nondeclarative/System 1 and declarative/System 2 on those human endeavors, you aren’t think things through as clearly as you could be.

* * *

Now this doesn’t mean you can’t reach the right conclusion without understanding this particular inferential step. You can build a fire without understanding the chemical attributes of oxygen. But understanding how oxygen works opens up a whole host of other creative possibilities to (a) build a better fire, and/or (b) do other things with oxygen beyond just building a fire.

This is what I’m trying to get across. The difference in the brain between nondeclarative memories (System 1) and declarative memories (System 2) is a key that unlocks many doors. There are all sorts of creative ideas that probably wouldn’t come to you if you don’t have that key.

I’m trying, with my recent writing, to apply that key to various areas of contemporary relevance, and see what kind of new rooms open up. I may be applying that key incorrectly, and reaching the wrong conclusions. If so, so be it. I’ll continue to do so, in the hopes that at some point, I’ll reduce the inferential distances enough for people to be able to tell me why I’m wrong.

One of my most widely read essays was written in 2012, called MLB’s Customer Alignment Problem. In that article, I explained how increasingly, MLB’s revenues and franchise values were strongly tied to cable and satellite network fees. That was a problem because:

• cord cutting was shrinking the cable and satellite TV network industry
• live sports like MLB was the only thing propping up the cable and satellite TV network industry
• this indirect income stream disconnected the industry from direct feedback from their real customers, the fans
• without direct feedback, MLB would likely be slow to react to needed change, both positively and negatively

It seemed like a Ponzi scheme to me, or a house of cards, or a Jenga tower, pick your favorite metaphor. Every cord cutter takes a block out of that Jenga tower with them when they go. You never know when the tower is going to fall over, you just know that eventually it will.

That was eight years ago. Cord cutting has continued apace. It’s not so much that old fans cut the cord. It’s that they die, and aren’t replaced by young fans. Young people simply don’t buy cable TV. The average age of a baseball fan in 2007 was 53. In 2017, it was 57.

So now you’re starting to see articles asking things like Are Millenials Killing Baseball? The answer, of course, is NO, THEY’RE NOT. MLB simply isn’t reaching them, because MLB’s incentive structure stops them from meeting Millenials where they are.

Of course, last we checked, baseball isn’t dead. Last year, MLB’s revenues were fine, ratings were fine, attendance was fine, everyone was making money. And over the last eight years, most of those regional TV networks who had such a wobbly mutual dependence with MLB have gotten themselves folded into much larger corporate conglomerates.

But what happens if we pull some really big blocks out of that Jenga stack?

In the time of the pandemic, the trend has become clear — cord-cutting is happening faster. While widespread stay-at-home orders have catapulted the growth of streaming, the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated a parallel trend: a sharp decline in subscriptions to the cable bundle. Pay-TV providers are coming off their worst quarter ever, shedding more than 2 million subscribers in the first three months of 2020, or around 3% of the customer base. That’s equal to roughly 40% of the total losses pay-TV providers suffered all of last year.

Ouch.

None of us know the inner financial workings of any MLB teams. Nor do we know any of the inner workings of any of the Pay-TV providers. It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and say as many people do on Twitter, “You’re billionaires, suck it up.” But I think that attitude is based on an outdated idea of some sole Scrooge McDuck owner who sits on a pile of gold coins in his vault somewhere, where the price of a ballteam is a pittance for them. But nowadays, most MLB teams are so expensive that there are very few Scrooge McDucks who can own a team by themselves and pay for it with cash. Most teams are owned by an assembled group of people who pay for it using loans secured with collateral. These ownership groups really don’t want their collateral touched. That’s especially true if it’s some large publicly owned conglomerate on the stock market. Covering losses is not anywhere near as simple as asking McDuck to pull another coin out of his vault. Instead, getting any sort of decision made is a big giant mess of regulations and internal politics.

All of which is to say, this pandemic is creating a lot of pressure on MLB teams from a lot of different directions. And the first sign of that pressure is when the weakest link in the MLB value chain starts to break. And that weakest link is…drumroll please…the minor leagues.

Minor league teams and minor league players have a strongly dependent relationship with MLB, with absolutely no leverage at all. They are a source of cost for MLB, with very little direct revenue coming back to MLB. So when MLB revenues start to get squeezed, where do you think they’re going to look first to cut costs? The place with the least resistance to those cost cuts and the least effect on revenues, of course.

So now all of a sudden, the minor leagues are going to be reduced from 160 teams to 120. The draft is going to be reduced from 40 rounds to 5. What could the minor leagues and the new potential minor leaguers do about it? Nothing. They’re the weakest links in the chain. It was inevitable that they would be the first to crack.

You wonder, then, if this pandemic drags on for another year or two, what are the next-weakest links in the chain? Who will be the next group of people that MLB’s structural issues will collapse on top of?

* * *

Nobody could foresee this particular pandemic coming at this particular time. But the fact that some negative externality could lead to financial problems within MLB: that was entirely foreseeable. It’s been built into MLB’s business model for over a decade now.

One thing this pandemic has made clear: we are terrible as a society, and perhaps as a species, at dealing with slow-motion disasters. There are so many problems we can see coming from a long ways away, but we don’t do much about them because they’re a long ways away.

Until they’re not, and then it’s too late.

There are many slow-motion disasters that we aren’t doing anything about. Pandemic preparedness, in hindsight, was an obvious one. Climate change is another, of course.

Interestingly, the Republican Party has the *exact* same slow-motion disaster happening to them as MLB. Their whole business model, like MLB’s, depends on cable TV networks keeping old white people attached to what they’re selling. Their problem, like MLB’s, is that their demographic keeps getting older and dying off, and the young people don’t have Cable TV, don’t watch their schtick, and so they don’t buy into what they’re selling fast enough to replace the old ones who die off. It’s a slow demographic train wreck happening for them, and you can see it coming. The Republicans *know* it’s coming, that’s why they keep trying to hold that demographic train wreck at bay on the backs of America’s politically weakest links by restricting minority voting access and cutting immigration. That may work for awhile, but at some point in the next decade or so, demographic shifts will cause some big states like Georgia and/or Texas and/or Florida to flip, and then it’s game over. Their only advantage over MLB is that they only have one incompetent competitor to worry about, while MLB not only has to fend off their rival sports to stay afloat, it also has to fight new innovators like Netflix and video games and social media for attention.

The pandemic has added urgency to Republican dilemma, too, because if the economy doesn’t recover by November, that demographic train wreck might happen this year instead of 10-20 years down the line. So you’re seeing Republicans putting a lot of pressure on decision makers to “open up the economy” as soon as possible. But that, in itself, is another slow-motion disaster about to happen. The shelter-in-place orders have lowered the R0 of the disease from 2.5 to about 1.0 or even below 1.0, but as soon as it opens up again, the R0 will jump back up again. It probably won’t jump all the way back up to 2.5, because many people will be cautious and avoid high-risk activities, but it will probably jump back up to something like 1.5. And that means the death rate will look like it’s holding steady for a month or three, but then the exponential growth will start to take effect, and we’ll get a surge of illness and deaths in August or September or October that will be as bad or worse than the first one. But this time, the fall guys won’t be the politically weakest links as much as the physically weakest ones, who just happen to be the kind of old, sedentary people who spend a lot of time watching baseball and Fox News.

And then what?

I was once an ally of Marc Andreessen, author of the recent much-descussed essay It’s Time to Build.

Back in 1996, there was an Epic Battle for the Future of the World between Netscape (founded by Andreesen) and Microsoft (founded by Bill Gates), for who was going to dominate the Internet. That battle is largely forgotten now, because it turned out that neither company ended up dominating the Internet. But at the time it was the Biggest Thing Ever. Or maybe it just seemed like the Biggest Thing Ever to me because I ended up in the middle of it.

At the beginning of 1996, I was a software engineer working for a business-to-business PC reseller called Dataflex, when it got bought out by a larger B2B PC reseller called Vanstar. Bill Gates owned something like 8% of Vanstar, if I recall correctly.

Back then, Gates was viewed as the Greedy Monopolist. More recently, because of his philanthropy focused on global disease reduction, Gates has flipped that image to become The Good Billionaire. But here’s a thing that hasn’t changed about Bill Gates: when he sees something as an existential threat, he will fight that threat in a thoroughly focused, organized, systematic, comprehensive, and relentless manner. Back then, Netscape was the existential threat. Netscape got crushed. The coronavirus has no idea what it’s in for.

Back in 1996, Netscape wanted to sell its software to businesses, because that’s where the big money is. But in order to do that, it needed resellers like Vanstar to leverage their relationships with businesses to sell them Netscape products. But there weren’t any resellers who would touch Netscape with a 10-foot pole. Either they were, like Vanstar, partially owned by Microsoft or Bill Gates, or they knew how much they were entirely dependent on Microsoft for their existence, and didn’t want to cross them. Netscape couldn’t get its foot in the door to businesses anywhere.

So a handful of we Dataflex/Vanstar veterans got wind of this, and decided to launch a B2B reselling business called Intraware to sell the software like Netscape that Microsoft didn’t want sold. That worked pretty well for a while, until the dot-com crash dealt a big blow to the idea. Then the fact that the Internet basically destroyed the concept of middlemen finished it off.

Still, we had a good run for a while there, and much of the material comforts I enjoy now are thanks to that titanic Netscape-Microsoft clash of the late 1990s. That fact that I can sit at home during this pandemic and not have to worry about where my next meal is coming from is in large part thanks to Marc Andreessen. So believe me, after all that, it does not give me much joy here to kind of bite the hand that fed me.

* * *

In my essay, “Quick Start Guide to Human Society™, I ran through some various approaches to political philosophies, and the problems with each of them. I claimed that each political philosophy has at its foundation a particular model of human nature.

I made one exception to that, which was Pragmatism:

Pragmatic models make no claim whatsoever about human nature. Instead, pragmatic strategies simply aim to function through trial and error to see what works and what doesn’t. They keep what works and throw out what doesn’t. Why something works or doesn’t isn’t considered an important question.

The problem with pragmatic models is that without a theory of human nature behind them, they lack a moral foundation. Without a good moral story to tell, it is difficult for pragmatists to establish and maintain trust within their Human Society™.

Andreessen in his essay is not promoting any particular political model. He goes out of his way to avoid doing so, pointing out the weaknesses and strengths of both sides of the two-party system. Instead, he advocates for tossing all that aside and just start focusing on getting stuff built, doing what works.

That’s basically Pragmatism.

* * *

America is a two-party system, so you don’t ever get a Pragmatist Party promoting Pragmatist ideas as a viable party. But even in multi-party parliamentary systems, there aren’t any Pragmatist parties that win elections anywhere. Why is that?

There’s an aphorism goes, “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.” Pragmatists don’t want to take sides on questions of human nature, they just want to Get Things Built. They prefer to remain neutral in the questions of morality that pervade political discourse. They prefer a skeptical distance from the moral certainty that emanates from each side of the political divide.

You know that phrase “if you can’t afford an attorney, one will be provided for you”? Pragmatism is like that. If you don’t have a view of human nature of your own, you’ll get one assigned to you.

Pragmatists want to stay amoral. But by not choosing, moral decisions get taken out of their hands, and they thereby abdicate their political power. The practical result is that pragmatism gets co-opted by other philosophies.

Sometimes those other philosophies that pragmatism gets attached to are immoral. Which is exactly what happened to them throughout a large portion of American history.

* * *

Two party systems are inherently unstable. The average two-party presidential system lasts about 20 years before falling apart because the two parties drift so far apart that they can’t agree on anything long enough to Get Things Built. (Parliamentary systems last about 4x longer, on average.) America’s two-party system is no exception to that instability. The Civil War was basically that instability coming home to roost. The only thing that kept it from breaking up again after the Civil War was that for the next 100 years, America wasn’t really a two-party system as much as it was a three-party system: the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Southern Democrats.

Nobody wanted another Civil War. That gave Southern Democrats the leverage to make a deal: they would be a source of pragmatism and compromise to Get Things Built, as long as they got to keep their racist institutions intact.

So American Pragmatists, lacking a view of human nature of their own, found themselves assigned one: that white human beings were superior to other races of human beings, and should therefore rule over them.

Racism is America’s great sin. It is also American Pragmatism’s great sin. America used to Get Things Built, but it wasn’t because it Wanted To Build more than it does today. It did so because America, and in particular American Pragmatists, in their unwillingness to commit to a model of human nature, were also unwilling to commit to saying that the model of human nature promoted by white supremacists, and the political philosophy that follows from it, is wrong. It was willing to trade the welfare of African Americans in order bridge the necessary gaps between left and right in order to Get Things Built.

This is how Pragmatists, time and time again, in their efforts to remain amoral, let immoral things happen.

* * *

The Civil Rights Act blew up the deal with the Southern Democrats. And for the next 30 years or so, the pragmatists and the racists drifted around without a clear home. Both left and right tried to attract the racists to their side in indirect and subtle ways, by being “tough on crime” or launching a “war on drugs”. Both sides tried to appeal to pragmatists by trying to solve social problems with market mechanisms.

A funny thing happened in the 1990s. The pragmatists and the racists began to realize they held the leverage in this power struggle. The Pragmatists, under the Clintons, took over the Democrats. And increasingly, as the pragmatists shifted towards the Democrats, the racists began to co-opt the Republicans, leading in the end to Donald Trump’s victory.

In the election of 2016, Americans were given a choice between an amoral philosophy and and immoral one. Because Pragmatists have trouble morally justifying their positions, people could and did ascribe all sorts of immoral motivations to those choices, whether true or not. It’s not hard to make a Pragmatist look immoral. The choice between amorality and immorality often doesn’t look like a choice at all.

* * *

In the end of his essay, Marc Andreessen asks, “What do you think we should build?”

My answer to that is: a moral center.

It’s a pipe dream, I know. But you’re asking, so I’m answering.

America’s great flaw is that its political center has always been occupied by amoral and immoral philosophies. So in order to Get Things Built, America has always had to do things that are morally reprehensible.

In the long run, that leads to distrust, which leads to roadblocks.

It doesn’t need to be that way. I believe that America can Get Things Built again, if it had a good moral story for the center of American politics.

A primary reason I wrote my essay “Quick Start Guide to Human Society is to provide an example of such a moral center.

It’s a morality that differs from the right, which is focused on liberty, and from the left, which is focused on equality. This centrist philosophy that I’m advocating is focused on trust. It is not a branch of either the left or the right, but philosophically distinct from either one. It can tell a story about why being in the center, as opposed to either the left or the right, is the morally correct place to be. And as such, it can provide a bridge where the distrust of the left for the right, and vice versa, leads each party to spend most of its energy and resources on stopping the other side.

With a third clear morality to choose from, there is no excuse for people who want to Get Things Built to take the Pragmatic path and avoid moral choices. Make a choice, and then get to work.

America’s potential is still there, waiting to be unlocked. The key we need to unlock it is a morally sound mechanism for compromise. If we build that, then our country’s true potential can be fulfilled. America can finally Get Things Built the way we all believe it can.

I wouldn’t say I never swear, but I don’t swear much, in real life, or in writing. I’ve been blogging for almost two decades now, and I just checked the stats, I average about one swear word every two years. I’ve only used three of George Carlin’s seven dirty words. I’ve used the word “shit” five times, four of which are in the form of the word “bullshit”. I’ve used the word “piss” twice, both times in the form of “pissed off”. And I’ve used the word “fuck” three times, but each time I was quoting someone else. My Twitter rate stats are similar.

The word “asshole” is not one of Carlin’s seven words, but up until now, I’ve only used it while blogging once. I have used it on Twitter a bit more, but still, only in five different conversations over the years.

All of which is to say, I don’t take swearing lightly. When I use one of these words, I usually use it because it’s the precisely the word that needs to be used.

* * *

I’ve read a lot of essays trying to explain Trumpism. They talk about economic displacement, demographic shifts, the perverse incentives of our political structure–you know, explanations using all the usual sorts of social science academic jargon. But sometimes, you just gotta go, fuck the academic jargon, here’s the best model that explains things:

The Democrats have become the “You’re Not Allowed To Be An Asshole” Party.

The Republicans have become the “I Have The Right To Be An Asshole” Party.

This is one of the major questions of our times. Should people be allowed to be assholes?

* * *

For the academic jargony types out there, let’s define what we mean by an asshole. An asshole is a selfish person, but not just any kind of selfish person. It’s a particular kind of selfishness that defines an asshole.

An asshole is a selfish person whose selfishness causes foreseeable indirect collateral damage to the people around them.

So an asshole isn’t someone who, for example, goes into a gas station and robs it. The robbery causes direct damage. A robber is a bad person, but not necessarily an asshole, at least not in this case.

And an asshole isn’t someone who, for example, takes a job just for the money. They don’t like the job, they don’t enjoy the job, they’re just doing it for the selfish reward of the money. That’s selfish, but it causes no real damage to anyone else. So that’s not an asshole, either.

Nor is an asshole someone who causes collateral damage but wasn’t behaving selfishly. An asshole isn’t someone who slips on some unseen ice and then knocks over and injures someone else while falling. That was just an unforeseeable accident.

An asshole is someone who is late for work and therefore drives fast and weaves in and out of the various lanes, cutting people off, and causing them to brake suddenly, which causes a cascade of braking behind them, which triggers a traffic jam. The asshole didn’t get into an accident, they didn’t directly harm anyone, but they left a wake of collateral indirect harm behind them. And they should have known, if they had any kind of common sense, that that’s a likely consequence of that behavior.

Assholes take risks that provide upside to themselves, but transfer the downsides of those risks to other people.

* * *

When academic jargony types talk about the limits of freedom, they usually talk about the robbers. Obviously, you can’t let people just rob and kill and rape each other, so obviously you have to have some limits on freedom.

But the true test case for the limits of freedom is the asshole. Philosophically speaking, assholes walk the line between intentions and consequences. Assholes form the boundary between freedom and control.

Assholes don’t intend to do direct harm. They just don’t think about, and/or care about, and/or believe, and/or comprehend, that their actions can or will have negative consequences for other people beyond their direct intentions.

Patient 31 in South Korea, who went to church despite knowing that she was sick with coronavirus, didn’t intend to pass on her illness. She just wanted to go to church. It wasn’t her intention to trigger a cascade of illness that, traced directly back to her, killed several hundred people and made several thousand more sick. But any reasonable non-asshole could have told her that was a risk of her going to church. She was an asshole.

How do you judge an asshole like Patient 31? On her intentions, or on her consequences?

If you judge her only on her intentions, she’s completely innocent. If you judge her only on her consequences, she’s a mass murderer.

The consequences of being an asshole are usually not so catastrophic. Usually, societies can tolerate a certain amount of assholes and be fine. But this pandemic has changed that calculation. One asshole doing the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time could kill millions.

This is a very serious question that free societies have to answer. What the fuck do you do about assholes?

* * *

Assholes have a very clever trick that allows them to keep being assholes.

If you try to stop them from being an asshole, they will declare you to be an asshole who, although perhaps intending to prevent some bad thing from happening, causes harm by denying some very fine people, who have no intention of harming anyone, their freedom. So who’s the real asshole here, anyway?

See, I told you it was a very clever trick.

That very clever trick works because the boundaries on the map of freedom and control are formed and defined by assholes. Some things clearly need to be controlled, and some things clearly should be free to do. But assholes do things that are both and neither at the same time. They can step onto either side of their line to suit their selfish needs whenever and however they want.

This is why assholes are such a dilemma for free societies. If you value freedom as a right, assholes will test you to find out exactly how much you hold that value. Obviously no one should be free to intentionally kill someone. But should an asshole be free to do something that unintentionally but foreseeably kills one person? Ten? A hundred? A thousand? A million? A billion?

But what if it’s not killing, but causing economic harm? What if an asshole unintentionally but foreseeably causes $100 in economic harm? $100,000? $100,000,000? $100,000,000,000?

Where do you draw the line to stop the asshole? Draw that line anywhere, and now you’re an asshole, too.

* * *

This is why in my essay The Quick Start Guide to Human Society, I argued that freedom isn’t an absolute. The key to a prosperous society is to “give people freedom in an environment of trust.” You want to give people as much freedom as possible while preserving trust. Therefore, freedom is an optimization problem, always and everywhere.

When people don’t trust each other, they aren’t willing to give each other freedom. When people are given freedom, but do untrustworthy things with that freedom, that freedom will inevitably be curtailed. The more trustworthy the people in a society are, the less temptation there is to put limits on their freedom.

This gives us an angle to approach issues that differ from the “not allowed to be an asshole” view. America needs to break out of this binary mode of thought that dominates our political discussions. From this third point of view, when you’re limiting the freedom of assholes, you’re not doing it to prevent harm, you’re doing it to preserve trust and optimize freedom.

You may think that preventing harm and preserving trust are the same thing, but they’re not. 38,000 people die every year in traffic accidents in the US. That’s harm. But those statistics haven’t destroyed our trust in driving, so we let people drive. Now maybe, those numbers should destroy our trust in driving, but that’s a different issue. The point here is that while preventing harm and increasing trust may be correlated, they are not the same thing.

Looking at it through the lens of trust, we can talk coherently about the difference between the physical harm of the coronavirus pandemic, and the economic harm. Our tolerance for physical harm is much lower than our tolerance for economic harm. If people are dying, we’re going to lose trust much faster than if people are losing money.

So you judge people not on their intentions, or their consequences, but rather on the effect they have on the environment of trust. That effect contains intentions and consequences as part of the function we’re calculating, but they’re not the same thing.

When we talk about “reopening our economy” after we’ve turned the growth curve of the pandemic downward, if you talk about it from the angle of avoiding harm, you’re not going to open it at all until there’s a cure or a vaccine. If you talk about it from the angle of preserving the freedom of assholes to keep being assholes, you’re going to open things up too fast and far more people are going to die than necessary.

But if you look at it from the angle of optimizing trust, you’re going to start thinking about how and when you can open things up in a slow and controlled and limited way. You ask, how can we interact with each other in a trustworthy way, given the current rates of infection? You’ll come up with different ideas that perhaps aren’t risk-free or harm-free, but manageable. You’ll move towards that optimal balance of freedom and trust, where our low tolerance for physical harm comes in balance with our higher tolerance for economic harm.

* * *

Assholes exploit their freedom in a way that reduces trust. Assholes think they are promoting freedom by exercising their right to be an asshole, but actually, by reducing trust, they ruin freedom for everyone else. You don’t need rules to stop assholes if people are kind and thoughtful instead of assholes. If you really love freedom, and want to preserve it and grow it and spread it, be trustworthy. Don’t be an asshole.

Up until now, I have avoided writing too much about politics on Twitter and on my blog. This isn’t because I don’t have political views. It’s because (1) I believe that if you don’t have anything original to say, you shouldn’t add to all the noise, and (2) I hadn’t organized my original thoughts into a coherent philosophy I could effectively defend.

That has changed, now that I have written the Quick Start Guide to Human Society™. That document lays out my views on human nature, and hints at what those views on human nature imply about politics.

Now, I’m just a dude, not some tenured professor, nor some celebrity performer, nor some big-shot billionaire who launches cars into orbit around the sun. I don’t have the credentials to get anyone to take my ideas seriously. I understand that. All this is probably just shouting into the wind. At this point, I don’t care. I think I have something to say that is original and better than anything you hear in the echo chambers of modern politics, so I’m going to say it anyway, even if it’s pointless and futile. This is my sponge dip for the American soul.

* * *

Even before this coronavirus pandemic happened, I felt that global politics was in desperate need of a new paradigm. The political ideas of the 1980s (Reagan/Thatcherism) and 1990s (Clinton/Blairism) had both run their course, but no new real ideas had emerged to replace them. Without any new ideas, people seemed to be trying to reinvent some old ideas (like Fascism or Socialism, only this time it’s better in this shiny new box somehow!).

Computerization and globalism are new phenomena, that have caused huge fundamental changes to human societies. The old ideas, primarily formed out of the industrial revolution, are not designed to handle this new 21st century landscape.

Now that’s an argument that I just pulled out of my ass, and without proper credentials, you’re not just going to take my word for it. So here are some credentials to support my argument:

A tenured history professor named Yuval Noah Harari was once interviewed by another tenured professor and Nobel Prize winner named Daniel Kahneman on Edge.org, where Harari said this:

When the Industrial Revolution begins, you see the emergence of new classes of people. You see the emergence of a new class of the urban proletariat, which is a new social and political phenomenon. Nobody knows what to do with it. There are immense problems. And it took a century and more of revolutions and wars for people to even start coming up with ideas what to do with the new classes of people.

What is certain is that the old answers were irrelevant.

[…]

And looking from the perspective of 2015, I don’t think we now have the knowledge to solve the social problems of 2050, or the problems that will emerge as a result of all these new developments. We should be looking for new knowledge and new solutions, and starting with the realization that in all probability, nothing that exists at present offers a solution to these problems.

Harari goes on to say that he thinks that looking to the Bible or the Quran for answers to these issues is a mistake. The new religion should come out of Silicon Valley, instead of the Middle East. That’s where I’m going to disagree with him, in part.

The ancient religious texts provide, in part, a set of rules to follow to make your human society run smoothly. I agree with Harari to the extent that those rules don’t really apply to the new situation. The Ten Commandments won’t tell you anything useful for, say, managing the economics of infinite digital supply. Where I disagree is that those religious texts are also our most reliable source for information about human nature, if you know how to look at it properly.

So I’d say what you want to do is to first get a solid understanding of human nature, from both the ancient texts and from modern science. Then look at the new phenomena that are emerging out of Silicon Valley, and apply both the ancient and modern wisdom to build a new paradigm for the modern world.

* * *

This pandemic has made the need for a new paradigm even more acute. The old paradigms are being exposed as woefully inadequate every day.

I don’t have all the answers, nor do I pretend to. A new paradigm isn’t a new set of rules that provide a new set of solutions. A new paradigm is a new model, that opens up a new way of thinking, which produce new types of ideas, from which a new set of rules with a new set of solutions can emerge.

So I hope now, using the Best Practice Model from the Quick Start Guide to Human Society™, to start using this new model to think a little differently, to come up with new 21st century ideas that can address the problems of the 21st century. I invite everyone to join along with me in this exercise. But if no one wants to, that’s fine. I intend to be here anyway, shouting into the wind, until the Grim Coronareaper comes to take me away.

It is hard to know what to do in times like these, when the world depends on most of us doing nothing. I have little to offer beyond nothing itself.

But little is not nothing. So as a small gift to anyone who happens to stumble upon this place, lest it disappear when the Grim Coronavirus comes knocking at my door, I have written down what limited wisdom I have come to possess in my brief span upon this earth, in the form of a thing called the Quick Start Guide to Human Society™.

The human brain is amazing. It can take a very limited amount of information, and turn around and give you an instant decision based on that limited information. Computers, on the other hand, are really bad at that. With a computer, all the variables must be filled in, or the program won’t run.

The Oakland A’s are trying to build a new baseball park. There are questions in the Oaklandsphere whether they should build it at the Coliseum or at Howard Terminal. Much of the debate around those questions takes place in a foggy, muddled soup of barely identifiable information about (a) how much the ballpark would cost, and (b) how much money it would make if they built it.

But hey, we’re human beings! Our lives aren’t math problems in a textbook. We go through our lives dealing with incomplete information almost all of the time, no big deal. Just because we have almost no idea at all about any of the money involved with this doesn’t mean we can’t end up deciding with conviction that we prefer one site or the other.

So we end up ignoring the information we don’t have and focus on information we do have. Or, we make wild guesses at the information we don’t have, and go with that. Or, most likely of all, because we’re human beings and building a ballpark is really not our job, we’re not going to spend any energy to think it through at all, so we’ll just stick with our gut reactions to the idea, and that’s good enough.

And therefore: messy, muddled ballpark debates.

Not really any different from any other debate in human affairs. It’s all cool.

EXCEPT.

Except: this is the Oakland Athletics we’re talking about.

The Oakland A’s. Team Moneyball. The organization out of all human organizations in all human societies in all of human history that is most famous for turning life into a math problem.

Back when statistical analysis in baseball started to become a thing, a lot of old school types tried to argue against it. And they kept getting their asses handed to them, because they didn’t understand sabermetrics. Their arguments (“Batting average and RBIs are good enough! Watch a game, not the computer!”) were utter crap. This is a point I’ve made before, but the best arguments against sabermetrics are made by the people who actually understand sabermetrics, who know what its true flaws and blind spots are.

Sure, the math in ballpark building is different from the math in baseball games. But sabermetrics is not just about the math. It’s about how you think about the game.

Remember this conversation in Moneyball?

People who run ballclubs think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs.

What is the ballpark equivalent of that conversation?

What do most people think the goal of building a ballpark is? What should that goal really be?

Let’s try to be creative. We may not have any of the numbers, but we can figure out how we would approach them if we did. Let’s try to move past muddled conversations, and think about how the A’s might be thinking about this ballpark. What would Jonah Hill tell Brad Pitt if they were building a baseball ballpark instead of a baseball team?

Let’s try to understand why the A’s might be making the choices they’re making. Let’s Moneyball a ballpark.

Investing and growth

Let’s begin by talking about investing. Why does anyone invest in any particular thing?

I think the most common (muddled) answer to that is, “to make a profit.” But that doesn’t answer the question. Because the question was, why does anyone invest in any particular thing? Lots of things make a profit. You could invest in a 1-year US Treasury bond today and make a profit of about 1.6% in that year. Or, you could invest in a 30-year US Treasury bond today and make a profit of about 2.3% a year over 30 years. Or–and here’s the rule of thumb to keep in your head–you could invest that money in a boring stock market fund and make a profit of (historically, on average) about 7%-10% a year. So why are you investing in that particular thing and not some other thing, like a Treasury bond or a stock market fund?

If we think of mere profitability as the goal–that as long as we don’t lose money, it’s fine–we don’t have a Moneyball mindset. We’re more likely to continue doing what we did before, because we didn’t lose money. This kind of thinking tends to lead people to prefer the Coliseum site, because hey, the Coliseum worked for 50 years, didn’t it? We can probably build a nice, cheap stadium on that site and make our money back in the end, so if it’s not broke, why fix it?

But if mere profitability is the end goal, the A’s ownership team probably shouldn’t invest in a ballpark at all. They should sell the team, and put the money in the stock market and make their 7-10% a year.

But when you start to think that an investment in a ballpark needs to grow at a rate greater than 10% a year, well, now we have a much more complicated question with a much more unclear answer. We should be asking, “What rate of growth are we trying to achieve with our investment?”

Volatility of outcomes

OK, suppose we get the growth idea. But there’s another kind of muddled thinking that comes with that, and that’s to make a single estimate of growth, and make a choice based on that. Suppose we estimate that the Coliseum site will grow at 15% and Howard Terminal at 30%. We should choose Howard Terminal, right? Not so fast.

Those single numbers are just estimates. In reality, there’s a whole range of possible outcomes. I think most people would guess that the range of possible outcomes at the Coliseum is smaller than at Howard Terminal. Suppose (pulling numbers out of the air) the Coliseum could grow somewhere between +10% and +20%, while Howard Terminal could grow somewhere between -20% and +50%. Are we willing to risk a big loss for a chance at spectacular growth? Or do we want a safe bet with a smaller upside?

There’s no obvious answer to that question. I can understand preferring the choice with the lowest downside or the choice with the biggest upside, but insisting that one or the other is obvious and clear is, well, obviously and clearly wrong.

So we shouldn’t be asking, “Will this make a profit or not?” We should be asking, “What is the range and distribution of possible outcomes, and how comfortable are we with those possible outcomes? What are our minimum acceptable and target growth rates for our investment?”

Ways to grow

That brings us to our third source of muddlement. When we say “grow”, what do we actually mean by that? How do we actually grow a business?

The ballpark translation of that first Jonah Hill sentence is probably something like, “people think if you build a nice ballpark, you’ll sell more seats.” Which, like “buying players” is both true and at the same time muddled. It’s not a Moneyball way of thinking about it.

The Moneyball way to think about it this is to start breaking it down like Jonah Hill does. In sabermetrics, you want to buy wins. In order to buy wins, you need to buy runs. Where do runs come from? Lots of different places: batting, running, catching, throwing, pitching, all of which have their subcomponents, each of which has its different price in the marketplace. What’s the most cost-effective way to purchase those subcomponents to assemble the runs and wins you need?

The Moneyball ballpark question then becomes: what’s the most cost-effective way to assemble the subcomponents of a ballpark that we need, in order to achieve the growth that we want?

Big Things and Little Things

On the baseball field, there are many statistical subcomponents you can try to improve on. Some of them, however, will have a bigger impact than others.

There is a statistic called the “Beane Count“. It was invented by writer Rob Neyer shortly after Moneyball came out, and is named for A’s executive Billy Beane. It tracks two main statistics, on each side of the ball. Those are:

• Walks
  • Taking walks
  • Not yielding walks
• Home runs
  • Hitting home runs
  • Not yielding home runs

If you look at Beane Count for 2019, the top 6 teams in Beane Count in the American League were the six teams that made the playoffs. In the National League, five of the top 6 teams in Beane Count were playoff teams, and the one that wasn’t, the Milwaukee Brewers, was 7th. So the stat correlates with the primary goal of winning.

But there’s another key feature of the Beane Count that is significant for our purposes here: these particular stats kind of give you something for free. On both walks and home runs, the ball is not in play. You don’t have to participate in defense and baserunning. So you win the game, in a way, by avoiding having to play the game.

If we want to translate this piece of Moneyball to ballparks, there’s an analogous game we want to avoid playing if we can. Making a profit selling things is a difficult game to play, and achieving growth is even harder. In the normal game, you make a product for [$X]. The supply/demand curve directs you to sell it for [$Y], and so you end up with a margin of [$Y – $X].

Can you sell enough volume at that margin to reach your growth target? If that seems hard, is there a way you can get something for nothing out of $X or $Y to make it work?

Let’s make a business equivalent of the Beane Count. Call it the Kaval Count, after A’s President Dave Kaval. It tracks the things you can do that help you avoid playing the straightforward business game. Like the Beane Count, the Kaval Count has two main ideas, each split into two sub-ideas:

• Covering costs externally
  • Subsidies
  • Arbitrage
• Breaking the laws of supply and demand
  • Become a tech company
  • Become a monopoly

Subsidies

For decades, direct subsidies from local governments have been by far the #1 method for professional sports teams to reach their target growth numbers. Tell a city, “Help us pay for the cost of building our sports facility, or we will find another city who will.” In some parts of the country, cities have figured out that this is a bad deal. But as long as other parts of the country haven’t figured this out, it will continue being used.

So the Texas Rangers are constructing a new ballpark. How did they make the numbers work? They got someone else to pay for much of it. The Atlanta Braves also recently built a new ballpark. How did they make the numbers work? They got someone else to pay for much of it. The Oakland Raiders are building a new stadium in Las Vegas. Why? They got someone else to pay for it.

Oakland and Alameda County fell for this scheme in the 1990s, when they built Mount Davis to lure back the Raiders from Los Angeles. That plan did not work out at all, and the city and county are still deeply in debt from it. They won’t fall for that scheme again.

So direct subsidies for the A’s to build in Oakland are out of the question. However, there are certain infrastructural costs of construction that fall under the category of the normal activity of a city: building roads and transportation hubs and electrical grids and storm drains and sewers, etc. So while they may not get help subsidizing the building itself, it may still be politically feasible to get some of the surrounding infrastructure paid for. That alone is unlikely to get the A’s to their growth targets, but it may help some.

Arbitrage

Construction costs are not the only costs of building a ballpark. There is also the cost of the land we are building on top of.

In some cities, there is land which is zoned for one kind of use, but would be more valuable if it were zoned for some other kind of use. There is also the idea that the demand for land near a ballpark becomes more in demand simply because it’s near a ballpark.

In these cases, we’re not actually reducing the cost of building the ballpark. But we can arbitrage the difference between the value of the land without a ballpark, and the value of the land with a ballpark, and use that difference in value to finance the construction of the ballpark.

This is what the A’s are trying to do in Oakland.

Howard Terminal and the Coliseum are zoned somewhat differently, but most of the land for both sites is currently being used as parking lots. At Howard Terminal, it’s being used to park trucks while they wait for shipments at the Port of Oakland. At the Coliseum, it’s used to park cars for a bunch of sporting events that, because the Raiders and Warriors are moving, aren’t going to happen there any more.

So the question becomes, can the A’s acquire these land parcels at the value of a parking lot, and make them more valuable than a parking lot?

The government agencies who control these parcels have to try to figure out, how much is this land worth if they did nothing with it, or if they sold it to someone besides the A’s? The A’s have to figure out, how much could they make either parcel (or both parcels) worth if they built (or didn’t build) a ballpark on top of it? And somehow, those numbers have to work for both sides of the negotiations on the land.

This is where the arbitrage becomes a math problem. And we’re not the A’s, so we don’t have the numbers. We’re not doing the math. We don’t know if the numbers will work to meet the A’s growth minimums and targets or not. Best we can do from the outside is understand how the math would work on the arbitrage, if we did have the numbers.

And if the math works, it’s a more ethical way to finance a ballpark, because you’re not taking someone else’s money with no promise of returns or ownership in order to finance your own growth. You’re taking the inherent surplus value of a Major League Baseball team, and turning that, indirectly, into the money to build the ballpark.

Becoming a Tech Company

This is the Kaval Count element least likely to apply to a ballpark. But I want to bring it up, because it seems like the A’s under Kaval and COO Chris Giles have been trying to think like a tech company, even if the nature of their business doesn’t let them technically become one. Even if a ballpark can’t have the unique economics-busting properties of software, there are advantages to be gained by a tech-company approach.

I’m going to use Ben Thompson’s definition of a tech company from his blog, Stratechery:

Note the centrality of software in all of these characteristics:

• Software creates ecosystems.
• Software has zero marginal costs.
• Software improves over time.
• Software offers infinite leverage.
• Software enables zero transaction costs.

The question of whether companies are tech companies, then, depends on how much of their business is governed by software’s unique characteristics, and how much is limited by real world factors.

Software is a compelling thing to invest in, because it can break the laws of supply and demand. Usually, when you sell a unit of something, whether a product or a service, there is a cost to producing and distributing each unit. But with software, the cost is practically the same whether you sell one unit or one billion units. Your growth rate is never limited by supply, only by demand.

A ballpark is a physical asset, not a digital one. So it’s supply is necessarily going to be finite. The fire marshal will only allow a certain number of people into your space. You’re going to have a finite number of seats. You’re going to be limited by geographical distances; it’s hard to sell access to a ballpark in Oakland to someone in Oregon or Nevada, let alone Australia or Japan. So a ballpark can’t have the potential infinite reach that software can have. (Although, you never know, maybe some future AR/VR software may change that…)

But just because you’re too physical to have infinite reach doesn’t mean you can’t increase your reach by significant amounts, or even orders of magnitude. So let’s go through Thompson’s points, one by one:

Creating an ecosystem

The most valuable software platforms enable other people to find and create value on top of the software. This creates network effects, where the more people who are on a platform, the more useful the platform gets, which entices more people to join, and so on. Cyberspace ecosystems can grow exponentially into a winner-take-all status in a way that normal economic activity historically hasn’t.

The most successful ballparks do often create an ecosystem of other businesses around them. Bars, restaurants, parking lots and so forth all thrive when placed in proximity to a ballpark. Their loyal customers can become the ballpark’s loyal customers, and vice versa. Urban ballparks can have desirable network effects. But because this ecosystem is limited by geography, it won’t grow exponentially like software can.

Zero marginal costs

Software breaks the laws of supply and demand by having essentially an infinite supply. The cost of making the first unit of software sold is fixed, but any additional units adds almost zero additional costs.

A seat in a ballpark can only be sold a finite number of times over the lifetime of that seat. In addition, for every X number of seats you sell, you need to hire Y number of ushers and ticket takers and so forth. And there’s also the minor detail that in every professional sport, roughly half of all revenues end up going to the players on the field.

But if you start to think like a tech company instead of a traditional sports team, you can come up with innovations that look more like a zero-marginal cost product than a seat at at ballgame. The A’s Access program, introduced by the A’s in 2019, is a subscription of access to the ballpark instead of seat tickets. A’s Access may not be a zero-marginal cost product, but it has a lower marginal cost than a seat does. It allows the finite geography of a ballpark to be filled more fluidly over the course of a game and a season. That fluidity can enable a team to build a smaller ballpark, because you don’t need to hold as much inventory on hand to accommodate the same number of customers.

Improves over time

Subscriptions are attractive to both software companies and software customers. Software companies like them because they create a more steady and predictable stream of income. Customers (especially business customers) like them because they allow them to use the software flexibly with their needs without having to make any big up-front commitments.

The thing that makes the software subscription engine run is the fact that software keeps improving over time. A new version comes out regularly, and if you’re subscribed, you’ll automatically get the new and improved version. If it didn’t improve, people would probably prefer to just buy the software up-front and hold on to it as long as possible.

Traditionally, it is hard to say that a ballpark improves over time. It is a large building, and once built, changing it significantly is usually very difficult and expensive. In addition, the ballpark is designed to host a baseball team. Baseball is a zero-sum game. It is impossible to keep improving a baseball team forever. It’s going to cycle between good years and worse years.

Still, if you were committed to it, you could probably design a ballpark to be much more modular than they’ve been historically. You could plan to have different sections of the park be replaced by something new far more often than they have in the past. This would allow for more experimentation with various products, and allow the ballpark over time to keep evolving into something more attractive to subscribers and more profitable for the business.

I don’t see any evidence that the A’s have planned any modularity with their Howard Terminal renderings, which look rather monolithic. I find that a bit surprising, since the A’s under Kaval and Giles have been quite willing to shoehorn various sections of the old Coliseum into modular experiments.

Software offers infinite leverage

Basically, this means you can take the software you’ve built and move into any market in the world immediately and sell it.

Obviously, that’s impossible with a ballpark. You’re bounded by geography. But that doesn’t mean you don’t want to expand those boundaries, so you can reach as large an audience as possible. This is where the exact location of the ballpark and the ease of getting there matters.

Zero transaction costs

Of the five criteria for a tech company, this is probably the one where baseball fits most closely. To achieve zero transaction costs, you want purchasing your product to be entirely self-service. With individual tickets, you still have ticket booths, but many tickets are now sold online. Traditional season tickets tend to still be handled with salespeople, but there’s no reason the A’s Access subscription can’t be entirely self-service, as well.

Become a Monopoly

Growing a business profitably is really hard when there’s a lot of competition. Competition makes you have to fight for the available demand, downward pressure on your prices, and hence, profits. The only way to avoid that is to become a monopoly, and have no competition.

A totally pure monopoly is not really a thing that exists very often in the wild. A coffee shop may be the only coffee shop in a certain neighborhood, but it’s still competing with the coffee shops in the next neighborhood over, plus with the coffee you can buy in a grocery store and make at home. But even a small monopoly of some sort lets you keeps prices higher than you otherwise would without the competition, so it helps your profit margins.

Most professional sports teams have monopolies in their local markets in their sports. If you want to see Major League baseball in Denver, the Rockies are your only choice. But the Rockies compete with the Nuggets and the Avs and the Broncos for sports dollars, and with TV and film and theater and music for entertainment revenues.

Up until now, the A’s have probably held one of the weakest monopolies of any professional sports franchise. They share the Bay Area baseball market with the Giants. And up through the 2019 season, they’ve shared the relatively small Oakland sports market with the Warriors and the Raiders.

But that’s about to change. With the Warriors and Raiders leaving, the A’s are going to be the only major sports team in the East Bay. Their “Rooted in Oakland” campaign is designed to promote that fact. The A’s have an opportunity here to grab hold of a monopoly in the East Bay on the one hand, and then start competing harder in the adjacent markets if they can.

This is where the design of the new ballpark really matters. If the A’s build a ballpark that looks like every other sports facility, then they’re competing with every other sports facility. But if they can build something unique, that provides an experience that nobody else in the region or the world, can provide, then they would be creating another kind of monopoly that no one else can compete with. That’s why the A’s looked outside the box to find an architect who could bring something different to the table.

Of course, there are other ways to generate wins besides the statistics in the Beane Count, and there are other ways to generate profitable growth besides the elements of the Kaval Count. You can win baseball games by hitting single and doubles, and by playing great defense and baserunning. You can also win the traditional business game by selling a higher volume of a better product made at a lower cost than the competition’s.

The point is we want to think about the ballpark in a Moneyball fashion. In building a new baseball team, we’re not just replacing one player with another. In building a new ballpark, we’re not just replacing a bunch of seats around a baseball field with some other seats around a baseball field. We’re assembling a bunch of subcomponents as cost effectively as possible. Can we assemble those subcomponents in a way that they add up to reach our targets?

So why would the A’s choose Howard Terminal with its political and physical hurdles over the Coliseum? Well, maybe the math of those subcomponents tell them so. Maybe the math says there’s a bigger opportunity for arbitrage at Howard Terminal than the Coliseum. Maybe the math says an ecosystem in Downtown Oakland will create bigger network effects than an ecosystem in East Oakland. Maybe the math says they can leverage the location of Howard Terminal into a wider market, particularly of those coming off work both in Downtown Oakland and Downtown San Francisco, than they can at the Coliseum location. Maybe the math says can hold a bigger monopoly with a unique waterfront ballpark with a rooftop park with views over the bay than they can with some sort of ordinary ballpark at the Coliseum site.

And maybe there are reasons beyond the math for making some of these decisions. Maybe the A’s have goals for this ballpark beyond just economic growth. Maybe they really do want to make a cultural impact on the East Bay community with this ballpark, and they think they can do that better at Howard Terminal, numbers or not.

We can’t know for sure, of course. We don’t have the numbers, the A’s aren’t sharing them, so we can’t do the calculations ourselves. But we can take the time, especially when it’s our jobs to do so, to try to understand the way the A’s would think things through.

Every good story is, at its core, a story about human nature. Who are we? What are we really like?

In order to answer these questions about ourselves, we tell stories that put human beings to test. What happens if the various aspects of human nature get pitted against each other? What happens when we test our human nature against its limits? What happens if you change or remove some vital part of human nature?

Then once we have concluded a story about human nature, we then are left with a question. what does this story say about how we should behave and organize ourselves?

I recently found myself unintentionally but simultaneously binge-watching two stories that tested human nature in a very similar way, but drew completely different conclusions. Those stories were a web serial called 17776 by Jon Bois’, and the HBO television drama Westworld.

(WARNING: some mild spoilers follow.)

Both of these stories imagine a near-future where human beings find themselves in an environment where the intrinsic physical vulnerability of human nature has been removed. In the case of 17776, there are some mysterious nano-bots which automatically fix things anytime someone gets sick or hurt. In Westworld, humans interact with robots who they are free to treat however well or badly they like with no repercussions. People can kill the robots, but the robots can’t kill humans. If a robot is killed, they are removed, fixed, and returned to service good as new.

That’s pretty much where the similarity between these two stories end. The two stories reach very different conclusions about what humans would do if they suddenly became physically invulnerable. Bois imagines that people would spend their days playing and watching increasingly elaborate games of football. Westworld, on the other hand, thinks that people would primarily indulge themselves with sex and violence.

17776 is optimistic about human nature, and the conclusion you could draw from it is that our vulnerability essentially causes us to indulge in behaviors that harm other people. Human nature is essentially good, and if you removed the external sources of our vulnerabilities, there would be no point in bothering to harm anyone else, so we wouldn’t. Westworld, more pessimistically, implies that it is our vulnerability that prevents us from harming others, because we are afraid of reciprocal harm. If you remove that fear, we will all become psychopaths and indulge in orgies of harm. We are by nature essentially wild, dangerous animals that need to be restrained.

Which model of human nature is more correct? It’s hard to know for sure. These are fictional stories. In real life, you cannot simply devise a scientific experiment where you remove vulnerability from human nature and see what happens. Every aspect of human nature, our emotions and intellect capacity and built-in heuristics are evolutionary responses to all the various sorts of vulnerabilities that all our ancestors faced since the creation of the earth. Human nature consists of a complex jumble of behaviors that are not easy to reduce down with a simple two-dimensional A/B test.

But speaking of simple, two-dimensional A/B tests, I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to draw the parallel between these two views of human nature, and the views of human nature that underlie the policies of our two American political parties.

After the A’s traded Sonny Gray on Monday, I saw a lot of people declaring that the A’s are just doing the same old thing for the same old cheapskate reasons blah blah blah. That’s an easy thing to think if you’re just looking at the surface of things, but if you dig deeper and study it, you find it’s a bit more complex than that.

One of the themes I addressed in the A’s team essay I wrote for the 2014 Baseball Prospectus Annual was that whenever you see the A’s changing their behavior, you should look at whether there have been any changes in the rules of the game (on the field and ESPECIALLY off) that motivates that change in behavior. Because the A’s have been a poorly financed club from their very founding, all of the major innovations in baseball have had a bigger effect on the A’s than any other team.

The successes and failures that the A’s franchise has had over the years have largely depended on whether the A’s have been ahead of these changes or behind. There’s really only been one major innovation in the sport where the A’s weren’t either way ahead or way behind the curve on a major change: the breaking of the color line in the 40s and 50s, where the A’s were somewhat in the middle of the pack amongst teams that integrated.

The first major shock to the sport happened in 1914, when a new league, the Federal League, challenged the American and National Leagues. The Federal League did not adhere to the reserve clause which limited player movement and kept salaries down. This hit the A’s harder than most other teams for these reasons:

1. The A’s were more poorly financed than other teams. They were not owned by wealthy industrialists, but by people who were baseball industry lifers, including manager and part-owner Connie Mack. As such, they could not absorb financial shocks very easily.
2. The A’s were the best team in baseball, winning four of five AL pennants between 1910 and 1914, with three World Series wins. The A’s had better players who could be lured to the Federal League with market-value salaries. The A’s could no longer afford to keep their team together. Some were traded and some jumped to the other league
3. Much of their talent pipeline ran through the minor league Baltimore Orioles, which Mack was also a part-owner of. A new Federal League team in Baltimore, the Terrapins, drastically hurt Orioles attendance and revenues. The Orioles were forced to move to Richmond, VA, and to sell their players to other major league teams other than the now financially-strapped A’s. This sell-off included the sale to the Boston Red Sox of one promising young pitcher named Babe Ruth. It is likely that if the Federal League had not come along, Ruth would have ended up on the A’s.
4. The Baltimore Federal League team even hurt the A’s 100 years later, when the city of San Jose sued MLB to let them move to their city. San Jose lost that case, because of the anti-trust exemption the MLB was awarded when the Baltimore Terrapins sued MLB for the deal which disbanded the Federal League and left the Terrapins without a league to play in. The Supreme Court ruled against the Terrapins, and that same ruling was applied to San Jose.

So the A’s 1910-1914 dynasty broke up, and the A’s were a bad team for over a decade. Connie Mack assembled another juggernaut at the end of the 1920s, though, winning three straight pennants from 1929-31, and two World Series. But the Great Depression hit the A’s revenues hard, and Mack was forced to disband his dynasty again because of external economic forces.

Around that time, the A’s completely missed on another innovation that revolutionized baseball: the farm system. Connie Mack simply did not believe in it. The A’s were by far the last team to develop a farm system, and the lack of a quality system to sign and develop players through kept the A’s among the worst teams in baseball for over three decades.

The A’s dynasty in the 1970s was primarily a function of owner Charlie Finley beating the other teams to another innovation, the amateur draft. Finley went out the year before the draft was set to begin and spent a record amount of money on amateur players before they could be subject to the draft the following year. From this haul, he got a nucleus of players that formed that dynasty: Catfish Hunter, Rollie Fingers, Blue Moon Odom, and Joe Rudi.

In the 1970s, Finley tried again to ahead of the next big change to baseball’s rules: free agency. He traded Reggie Jackson and Ken Holtzman. Then tried to sell off Fingers, Rudi and Vida Blue before their free agency, but commissioner Bowie Kuhn rejected the deals in the “best interests of baseball.” The next year, the arbitration system was agreed to in the collective bargaining agreement, but it was too late for Finley. This system placed value in minor leaguers because they were controllable for six years. Had he known that was coming, Finley might have tried to trade off his assets for younger players. Of the core players of his dynasty, only Vida Blue was traded for a haul of young assets. The rest left via free agency, and the team once again fell to the basement of the league.

One could argue that part of the A’s success in the late 80s/early 90s was because the A’s beat the competition to the innovation of steroid use, but I’m (Canseco cough cough) not going to go there.

Since then, the A’s fortunes have primarily been shaped by two major innovations, one of which the A’s hit and the other of which they completely missed.

The missed one: the construction of Mount Davis to lure the Oakland Raiders back to the Coliseum. It was a disaster for the A’s, especially since it happened just as the retro-ballpark innovation began. Suddenly, the Coliseum became a much inferior product compared to other ballparks around the league. And when AT&T Park opened across the bay, it became obviously inferior to another ballpark in the same market. This had a huge effect on the team’s revenues relative to other teams in baseball.

The hit: the A’s were ahead of every other team on the statistical analysis innovation. Of course, you know all about Moneyball by now.

* * *

The point of this history lesson is this: innovations and rule changes matter. If you don’t adjust your behavior quickly in response to these innovations and rule changes, you can find yourselves decades behind the competition.

So if you’re going to write about what a team is doing (especially if you are getting paid to do so), it would help if you had a good grasp on the rules of the game that the team is playing. And if a team changes its behavior, look if there are any underlying innovations or rule changes that may be motivating this change.

So here’s the frustrating thing to me about this Sonny Gray trade: I read a bunch of analysis of the trade, and some of it said it was “same old same old”, some of it mentioned trying to align the team’s age with the possible opening of a new ballpark, but I did not once read anywhere (maybe it existed but I didn’t see it) any mention of a BIG GIANT RULE CHANGE that affected the A’s and ONLY THE A’S.

Here’s the rule change in question: in the latest collective bargaining agreement, the A’s portion of revenue sharing from the league is phasing down to 0, starting THIS YEAR. This is a rule change that applies ONLY TO THE A’S, and to no other team.

Here’s why: in previous CBAs, teams shared 20-34% of local revenues with each other equally. In the 2011, CBA, they decided to only distribute revenue sharing to the smallest 15 markets. But an exception was made for the A’s, because Oakland is actually one of the 15 largest markets. The 2011 CBA lets the A’s to collect revenue sharing as long as they were still in the Coliseum. In the latest CBA in 2016, they decided to phase this out for the A’s over four years.

The A’s were receiving $30-$35M per year from revenue sharing, according to various sources. Let’s call it $32M to make the math easy. That means the A’s revenue sharing income looks like this:

2016: $32M
2017: $24M
2018: $16M
2019: $8M
2020-onward: $0

If you take all of this information together, it explains several things about the A’s behavior:

• Why, despite their low revenue, they would occasionally sign mid-range free agents like Ben Sheets, Esteban Loaiza and Billy Butler. They were afraid that if they did not spend this money, the other owners would get mad at them for taking revenue sharing without spending it, and take their revenue sharing away from them.
• Why they never tried to pull off a full tank-and-rebuild scheme where you let the team be awful for a few years to collect top draft picks. They tried every year, with varying degrees of success, to assemble a roster that had at least some reasonable chance if everything worked out right to make the playoffs. Same reason, really: it would look bad for a big-market team to take revenue sharing and not use it.
• Why they suddenly this year decided that they would pick a spot in Oakland and build a stadium. They need to get something built soon, because they don’t have $32M in revenue sharing to prop them up.
• And finally, why the A’s are finally now saying that they are willing to go through a full tank-and-rebuild process. It’s not simply because they expect a new stadium. It’s also because the motivation they had in the past to avoid the tank-and-rebuild process is no longer applicable because of the new CBA.

So this means that the timing of this mattered to the A’s. Gray will be getting more expensive each year just at the same time as the A’s revenues will be falling. And so the A’s have a huge motivation now to avoid free agents and expensive arbitration eligible players until they can increase their revenues again with a new stadium. And that decreased the A’s leverage in trade negotiations, because keeping Gray would hurt them more than it did before.

So, once again, the A’s sold off a successful player, just as they have had to do many many times in their 116-year history. But it’s lazy to just claim that nothing is different about this one. Yes, it’s a similar outcome, but it has behind it a very different motivation from the previous ones. And isn’t that an interesting story to ponder?

Three years ago, I wrote an article called “10 Things I Believe About Baseball Without Evidence“, in which I hypothesized that it ought to be possible to develop some sort of theory of pitch sequencing. To me, pitch sequencing is the very heart of the sport, the chess match between batter and pitcher which makes the sport compelling. But for all our progress in sports analytics in recent years, a theory of pitch sequencing — what it is, how it works, which pitchers are good at it, which batters can be fooled by it — seems as distant as ever.

In this article, I hypothesized (without evidence, as the title suggests) that such a theory would involve somehow understanding that the brain of the batter makes predictions for the next pitch based on previous pitches:

I believe that before any given pitch, the batter is in some sort of Prediction State for the next pitch. After each pitch, the batter then moves into a different Prediction State.

One year after I wrote this evidence-free idea, a piece of evidence came in which supported my hypothesis.

Jeff Hawkins and Subutai Ahmad, who work for a company called Numenta which is trying to reverse engineer the brain with computers, published in October of 2015 a paper called “Why Neurons Have Thousands of Synapses, A Theory of Sequence Memory in Neocortex”.

You can read a nice layperson’s summary of the paper here. But I’ll summarize the summary even further.

Memory in the brain consists of cells called neurons. These neurons have different parts, and one of these parts is called “distal synapses”. Up until this point, nobody really had a good idea what these distal synapses were for, because they didn’t seem to do anything while a particular memory was firing. Hawkins and Ahmad theorize that this is because the distal synapses don’t cause the neuron to fire immediately. Instead, they electrically prepare the cell to fire quickly if a signal comes in from a certain direction. And it is this preparation which allows the brain to make predictions about sequences of events. Relevant quote from the paper:

“Each neuron learns to recognize hundreds of patterns that often precede
the cell becoming active. The recognition of any one of these
learned patterns acts as a prediction by depolarizing the cell
without directly causing an action potential. Finally, we show
how a network of neurons with this property will learn and
recall sequences of patterns. The network model relies on
depolarized neurons firing quickly and inhibiting other
nearby neurons, thus biasing the network’s activation
towards its predictions.”

And herein lies the physical foundation of a theory of pitch sequencing. For if Hawkins and Ahmad are correct about sequential learning, it means that there is indeed some sort of Prediction State that the brain is in before each pitch.

Once the brain has seen some sort of sequence of inputs, it prepares itself to recognize that sequence again, and to recognize and react to it more quickly the next time it appears, by being electrically primed to react through this neuronal depolarization.

At this point, it’s important to understand that we’re not just talking about sequences of individual pitches here (a curve followed by a fastball followed by a changeup). It can be that, too, but not only that.

A single pitch in and of itself is a sequence of patterns happening that the brain needs to recognize. It’s a windup, and then a release, and then a ball movement out of the hand, and then a spin which one can perhaps recognize, and then a speed and a directional movement of the ball in one way or another.

Each of these patterns and sub-patterns and sub-sub-patterns that compose a pitch are represented in the brain at the neuronal level. As a batter observes sequences of (sub-)(sub-)patterns, the brain automatically prepares itself to see those sequences again by depolarizing the neurons to make them respond faster to these patterns. Thus, from the pitches it has seen in the past, the brain moves into a sort of Prediction State about the pitches it anticipates seeing in the future.

This has the effect, as Hawkins and Ahmad put it, of “biasing the network’s activation towards its predictions”. The batter’s Prediction State has a bias, and pitchers can exploit this bias. The brain is ready to react to some patterns, which it will react quickly to, but at the expense of inhibiting a reaction to other other patterns, which it will be slower to react towards.

So if you throw three fastballs with the same speed and the same location in a row, the batter’s brain will become more and more prepared/biased to predict that pitch accurately with each subsequent pitch, and the batter becomes more likely to hit the ball hard.

But if pitchers understand what the batter’s brain is biased towards, they can fool the batter by defying that prediction. Throw a changeup to the same location, but with a different speed, and you can make the batter swing too early. The wrong neurons get fired, and the ones that should have fired to hit the ball properly are instead inhibited by the bias, and the batter does the wrong thing.

They say that pitching is an art, and perhaps at this time it is, but there is potential in this information that it could eventually be turned into a science.

* * *

This information doesn’t explain everything about how the brain processes sequencing, obviously. It’s just a initial framework for understanding how the brain learns to understand sequences of events and to predict them. And since we don’t really understand exactly it works in that general case in the brain, we therefore also don’t understand how it works for the specific case of pitch sequencing.

So if we have unanswered questions about the brain like, “how long does this cell depolarization last?” we also have corresponding unanswered questions about pitch sequencing, like, “how long does a batter remain biased towards a kind of pitch once he has seen it?”

The good news is, we can probably answer the second question without necessarily answering the first. There is data that will tell us how much better a batter gets when he sees the same pitch multiple times, either in a row, or in close proximity. Understanding the basic framework of how the brain works can help us ask better questions about pitch sequencing, and to develop useful theories about how it works, even before the neuroscientists figure out precisely how it works in the brain.

Good luck, baseball analysts.

As I was writing a letter to my third-grade daughter’s principal in support of a change in homework policy (a letter which I’ve posted here), it occurred to me I was making a point about a phenomenon that isn’t unique to education at all, but happens in a lot of other fields, too: baseball, business, economics, and politics.

I don’t know if this phenomenon has a name. It probably does, because you’re very rarely the first person to think of an idea. If it does, I’m sure someone will soon enlighten me. The phenomenon goes like this:

* * *

Suppose you suck at something. Doesn’t matter what it is. You’re bad at this thing, and you know it. You don’t really understand why you’re so bad, but you know you could be so much better. One day, you get tired of sucking, and you decide it’s time to commit yourself to a program of systematic improvement, to try to be good at the thing you want to be good at.

So you decide to collect data on what you are doing, and then study that data to learn where exactly things are going so wrong. Then you’ll try some experiments to see what effect those experiments have on your results. Then you keep the good stuff, and throw out the bad stuff, and pretty soon you find yourself getting better and better at this thing you used to suck at.

So far so good, eh? But there’s a problem. You don’t really notice there’s a problem, because things are getting better and better. But the problem is there, and it has been there the whole time. The problem is this: the thing your data is measuring is not *exactly* the thing you’re trying to accomplish.

Why is this a problem? Let’s make a simplified graph of this issue, so I can explain.

Let’s call the place you started at, the point where you really sucked, “Point A”.
Let’s call the goal you’re trying to reach “Point G”.
And let’s call the best place the data can lead you to “Point D”.

Note that Point D is near Point G, but it’s not exactly the same point. Doesn’t matter why they’re not the same point. Perhaps some part of your goal is not a thing that can be measured easily with data. Maybe you have more than one goal at a time, or your goals change over time. Whatever, doesn’t matter why, it just matters they’re just not exactly the same point.

Now here’s what happens:

You start out very far from your goal. You likely don’t even know exactly what or where your goal is, precisely, but (a) you’ll know it when you see it, and (b) know it’s sorta in the Point D direction. So, off you go. You embark on your data-driven journey. As a simplified example, we’ll graph your journey like this:

On this particular graph, your starting point, Point A, is 14.8 units away from your goal at Point G. Then you start following the path that the data leads you. You gather data, test, experiment, study the results, and repeat.

After a period of time, you reach Point B on the graph. You are now 10.8 units away from your goal. Wow, you think, this data-driven system is great! Look how much better you are than you were before!

So you keep going. You eventually reach Point C. You’re even closer now: only 6.0 units away from your goal!

And so you invest even more into your data-driven approach, because you’ve had nothing but success with it so far. You organize everything you do around this process. The process, and changes that you’ve made because of it, actually begin to become your new identity.

In time, you reach Point D. Amazing! You’re only 4.2 units away from your goal now! Everything is awesome! You believe in this process wholeheartedly now. The lessons you’ve learned permeate your entire worldview now. To deviate from the process would be insane, a betrayal of your values, a rejection of the very ideas you stand for. You can’t even imagine that the path you’ve chosen will not get any better than right here, now, at Point D.

Full speed ahead!

And then you reach Point E.

Eek!

Egads, you’re 6.00 units away from your goal now. You’ve followed the data like you always have, and suddenly, for no apparent reason, things have suddenly gotten worse.

And you go, what on Earth is going on? Why are you having problems now? You never had problems before.

And you’re human, and you’ve locked into this process and weaved it into your identity. You loved Points C & D so much that you can’t stand to see them discredited, so your Cognitive Dissonance kicks in, and you start looking for Excuses. You go looking for someone or something External to blame, so you can mentally wave off this little blip in the road. It’s not you, it’s them, those Evil people over there!

But it’s not a blip in the road. It’s the road itself. The road you chose doesn’t take you all the way to your destination. It gets close, but then it zooms on by.

But you won’t accept this, not now, not after the small sample size of just one little blip. So you continue on your same trajectory, until you reach Point F.

You stop, and look around, and realize you’re now 10.8 units away from your goal. What the F? Things are still getting worse, not better! You’re having more and more problems. You’re really, really F’ed up. What do you do now?

Can you let go of your Cognitive Dissonance, of your Excuse seeking, and step off the trajectory you’ve been on for so long?

F is a really F’ing dangerous point. Because you’re really F’ing confused now. Your belief system, your identity, is being called into question. You need to change direction, but how? How do you know where to aim next if you can’t trust your data to lead you in the right direction? You could head off in a completely wrong direction, and F things up even worse than they were before. And when that happens, it becomes easy for you to say, F this, and blow the whole process up. And then you’re right back to Point A Again. All your effort and all the lessons you learned will be for nothing.

WTF do you do now?

F’ing hell!

* * *

That’s the generic version of this phenomenon. Now let’s talk about some real-world examples. Of course, in the real world, things aren’t as simple as I projected above. The real world isn’t two-dimensional, and the data doesn’t lead you in a straight line. But the phenomenon does, I believe, exist in the wild. And it’s becoming more and more common as computers make data-driven processes easy for organizations and industries to implement and follow.

Education

As I said, homework policy is what got me thinking about this phenomenon. I have no doubt whatsoever that the schools my kids are going to now are better than the ones I went to 30-40 years ago. The kids learn more information at a faster rate than my generation ever did. And that improvement, I am confident, is in many ways a result of the data-driven processes that have arisen in the education system over the last few decades. Test scores are how school districts are judged by home buyers, they’re how administrators are judged by school boards, they’re how principals are judged by administrators, and they’re how teachers are judged by principals. The numbers allow education workers to be held accountable for their performance, and provide information about what is working and what needs fixing so that schools have a process that leads to continual improvement.

From my perspective, it’s fairly obvious that my kids’ generation is smarter than mine. But: I’m also pretty sure they’re more stressed out than we were. Way more stressed out, especially when they get to high school. I feel like by the time our kids get to high school, they have internalized a pressure-to-perform ethic that has built up over years. They hear stories about how you need such and such on your SATs and this many AP classes with these particular exam scores to get into the college of their dreams. And the pressure builds as some (otherwise excellent) teachers think nothing of giving hours and hours of homework every day.

Depression, anxiety, panic attacks, psychological breakdowns that require hospitalization: I’m sure those things existed when I went to school, too, but I never heard about it, and now they seem routine. When clusters of kids who should have everything going for them end up committing suicide, something has gone wrong. That’s your Point F moment: perhaps we’ve gone too far down this data-driven path.

Whatever we decide our goal of education is, I’m pretty sure that our Point G will not feature stressed-out kids who spend every waking hour studying. That’s not the exact spot we’re trying to get to. I’m not suggesting we throw out testing or stop giving homework. I am arguing that there exists a Point D, a sweet spot with just the right amount of testing, and just the right amount of homework, that challenges kids the right amount without stressing them out, and leaves the kids with the time they deserve to just be kids. Whatever gap between Point D and Point G that remains should be closed not with data, but with wisdom.

Baseball

The first and most popular story of an industry that transforms itself with data-driven processes is probably Michael Lewis’s Moneyball. It’s the story of how the revenue-challenged Oakland A’s baseball team used statistical analysis to compete with economic powerhouses like the New York Yankees.

I’ve been an A’s fan my whole life, and I covered them closely as an A’s blogger for several years. So I can appreciate the value that the A’s emphasis on statistical analysis has produced. But as an A’s fan, there’s also a certain frustration that comes with the A’s assumption that there is no difference between Point D and Point G. The A’s assume that the best way to win is to be excruciatingly logical in their decisions, and that if you win, everyone will be happy.

But many A’s fans, including myself, do not agree with that assumption. The Point F moment for us came when, during a stretch of three straight post-season appearances, the A’s traded their two most popular players, Yoenis Cespedes and Josh Donaldson, within a span of six months.

I wrote about my displeasure with these moves in an long essay called The Long, Long History of Why I Do Not Like the Josh Donaldson Trade. My argument was, in effect, that the purpose of baseball was not merely winning, it was the emotional connection that fans feel to a team in the process of trying to win.

When you have a data-driven process that takes emotion out of your decisions, but your Point G includes emotions in the goal of the process, it’s unavoidable that you will have a gap between your Point D and your Point G. The anger and betrayal that A’s fans like myself felt about these trades is the result of the process inevitably shooting beyond its Point D.

Business

If Moneyball is not the most influential business book of the last few decades, it’s only because of Clayton Christensen’s book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. The Innovator’s Dilemma tells the story of a process in which large, established businesses can often find themselves defeated by small, upstart businesses with “disruptive innovations.”

I suppose you can think of the phenomenon described in the Innovator’s Dilemma as a subset of, or perhaps a corollary to, the phenomenon I am trying to describe. The dilemma happens because the established company has some statistical method for measuring its success, usually profit ratios or return on investment or some such thing. It’s on a data-driven track that has served it well and delivered it the success it has. Then the upstart company comes along and sells a worse product with worse statistical results, and because of these bad numbers, the establish company ignores it. But the upstart company is on an statistical path of its own, and eventually improves to the point where it passes the established company by. The established company does not realize its Point D and Point G are separate points, and finds itself turning towards Point G too late.

Here, let’s graph the Innovator’s Dilemma on the same scale as our phenomenon above:

The established company is the red line. They have reached Point D by the time the upstart, with the blue line, gets started. The established company thinks, they’re not a threat to us down at Point A. And even if they reach our current level at Point D, we will beyond Point F by then. They will never catch up.

This line of thinking is how Blockbuster lost to Netflix, how GM lost to Toyota, and how the newspaper industry lost its cash cow, classified ads, to Craigslist.

The mistake the establish company makes is assuming that Point G lies on/near the same path that they are currently on, that their current method of measuring success is the best path to victory in the competitive market. But it turns out that the smaller company is taking a shorter path with a more direct line to the real-life Point G, because their technology or business model has, by some twist, a different trajectory which takes it closer to Point G than the established one. By the time the larger company realizes its mistake, the smaller company has already gotten closer to Point G than the larger company, and the race is essentially over.

* * *

There are other ways in which businesses succumb to this phenomenon besides just the Innovator’s Dilemma. Those companies that hold closely to Milton Friedman’s idea that the sole purpose of a company is to maximize shareholder value are essentially saying that Point D is always the same as Point G.

But that creates political conflict with those who think that all stakeholders in a corporation (customers, employees, shareholders and the society and environment at large) need to have a role in the goals of a corporation. In that view, Point D is not the same as Point G. Maximizing profits for the shareholders will take you on a different trajectory from maximizing the outcomes for other stakeholders in various proportions. When a company forgets that, or ignores it, and shoots beyond its Point D, then there is going to inevitably be trouble. It creates distrust in the corporation in particular, and corporations in general. Take any corporate PR disaster you want as an example.

Economics

I’m a big fan of Star Trek, but one of the things I never understood about it was how they say that they don’t use money in the 23rd century. How do they measure the value of things if not by money? Our whole economic system is based on the idea that we measure economic success with money.

But if you think about it, accumulating money is not the goal of human activity. Money takes us to Point D, it’s not the path to Point G. What Star Trek is saying is that they somehow found a path to Point G without needing to pass through Point D first.

But that’s 200 years into a fictional future. Right now, in real life, we use money to measure human activity with. But money is not the goal. The goal is human welfare, human happiness, human flourishing, or some such thing. Economics can show us how to get close to the goal, but it can’t take us all the way there. There is a gap between the Point D we can reach with a money-based system of measurement, and our real-life Point G.

And as such, it will be inevitable that if we optimize our economic systems to optimize some monetary outcome, like GDP or inflation or tax revenues or some such thing, that eventually that optimization will shoot past the real-life target. In a sense, that’s kind of what we’re experiencing in our current economy. America’s GDP is fine, production is up, the inflation rate is low, unemployment is down, but there’s still a general unease about our economy. Some people point to economic inequality as the problem now, but measurements of economic inequality aren’t Point G, either, and if you optimized for that, you’d shoot past the real-life Point G, too, only in a different direction. Look at any historically Communist country (or Venezuela right now) to see how miserable missing in that direction can be.

The correct answer, as it seems to me in all of these examples, is to trust your data up to a certain point, your Point D, and then let wisdom be your guide the rest of the way.

Politics

Which brings us to politics. In 2016. Hoo boy.

Well, how did we get here?

I think there are essentially two data-driven processes that have landed us where we are today. Both of these processes have a gap between what we think of as the real-life goals of these entities, and the direction that the data leads them to. One is the process of news outlets chasing media ratings. And the other is political polling.

In the case of the media, the drive for ratings pushes journalism towards sensationalism and outrage and controversy and anger and conflict and drama. What we think journalism should actually do is inform and guide us towards wisdom. Everybody says they hate the media now, because everybody knows that the gap between Point D and Point G is growing larger and larger the further down the path of ratings the media goes. But it is difficult, particularly in a time where the technology and business models that the media operate under are changing rapidly, to change direction off that track.

And then there’s political polling. The process of winning elections has grown more and more data-driven over recent decades. A candidate has to say A, B, and C, but can’t say X, Y, or Z, in order to win. They have to casts votes for D, E, and F, but can’t vote for U, V or W. They have to make this many phone calls and attend that many fundraisers and kiss the butts of such and such donors in order to raise however many millions of dollars it takes to win. The process has created a generation of robopoliticians, none of whom have an original idea in their heads at all (or if they do, won’t say so for fear of What The Numbers Say.) You pretty much know what every politician will say on every issue if you know whether there’s a “D” or an “R” next to their name. Politicans on neither side of the aisle can formulate a coherent idea of what Point G looks like other beyond a checklist spit out of a statistical regression.

That leads us to the state of the union in 2016, where both politicians and the media have overshot their respective Point Ds.

And nobody feels like anyone gives a crap about the Point G of this whole process: to make the lives of the citizens that the media and the politicians represent as fruitful as possible. Both of these groups are zooming full speed ahead towards Point F instead of Point G.

And here are the American people, standing at Point E, going, whoa whoa whoa, where are you all going? And then the Republicans put up 13 robocandidates who want to lead everybody to the Republican version of Point F, plus Donald Trump. The Democrats put up Hillary Clinton, who can probably check all the data-driven boxes more skillfully than anybody else in the world, asking to lead everybody to the Democratic version of Point F, plus Bernie Sanders.

And Trump and Sanders surprise the experts, because they’re the only ones who are saying, let’s get off this path. Trump says, this is stupid, let’s head towards Point Fascism. Sanders says, we need a revolution, let’s head towards Point Socialism.

And most Americans like me just shake our heads, unhappy with our options, because Fascism and Socialism sound more like Point A than Point G to us. I don’t want to keep going, I don’t want to start over, and I don’t want to head in some old discredited direction that other countries have headed towards and failed. I just want to turn in the direction of wisdom.

“It’s not that hard. Tell him, Wash.“

“It’s incredibly hard.”

The following is a letter I wrote to the principal of my daughter’s elementary school, in support of a plan to limit the amount of homework given to our kids. It is a supplement to my blog entry, “The Data/Human Goal Gap“.

I heard you mention at Open House on Wednesday that you are considering a policy that would limit the amount of homework our kids are given. I am writing to give my strong support for that idea.

You mentioned that we should take a step back and think about what we are trying to accomplish with homework. What is the actual purpose of homework?

I have one child in college now, and one in high school, in addition to the one in elementary school. And here is what I keep hearing educators *say* the purpose is: to prepare you for the next level. In elementary school, they tell you it’s to prepare you for the amount of homework you get in middle school. In middle school, they tell you it’s to prepare you for the amount of homework you get in high school. In high school, they tell you it’s to prepare you for the amount of homework you get in college.

So ultimately, under this argument, the purpose of giving homework to a kindergartener is so that the kid won’t get shocked at a workload that might come 13 years later.

This is absurd. It does not take 13 years to adjust to the amount of homework you get in college. If you had never had homework, and you get to college, how long would it take you to adjust to this new level of homework? I think it’s maybe three or four weeks. It’s certainly not 13 years.

Of course, the *stated* reasons are not always the *actual* reasons. I think the actual reason educators at all levels give out so much homework is one they do not want to admit out loud: if we don’t give out homework, we’re afraid our test scores won’t be as high as they could be, and then the school administration will put a lot of pressure on us, and pressure is unpleasant.

The awful thing about that reason is that it’s a reason that is not for the benefit of the kids. It’s for the benefit of people who have to survive in a competitive environment that the emphasis on test scores creates.

I understand that reason, and why it’s not a reason anyone wants to admit out loud. I get it. Educators have to live in that test-score environment, like it or not. It’s not something an individual educator has much power to unilaterally change.

I don’t know what to do about the test score culture, either. But I would like to take an even bigger step back, and ask some bigger questions, beyond what the purpose of homework is, or what test scores are good for.

What is the purpose of education? And here’s an even bigger question still: what is the purpose of childhood?

The answer to what we think childhood is for trickles down to the answer to what we think education is for. The answer to what we think education is for trickles down to what we think test scores are for, which then trickles down to what we think homework is for.

What is the purpose of childhood?

That is not a question that I hear many people asking, or answering. It’s a deep philosophical question. But the problem is, if you do not try to ask and answer questions like this explicitly, they get answered implicitly. Which means all the other answers are have an unstated, unexamined assumption at their foundation.

Having observed our education system for fourteen years now, here’s what I think our education system’s implicit, unstated answer to the top-level question is: the purpose of childhood is to prepare the child for adulthood.

I disagree with this answer.

Preparing for adulthood is *a* purpose of childhood. It is not *the* purpose of childhood. There’s a big difference.

When our forefathers gave the right to a pursuit of happiness as one of our core American values, they did not define happiness as something that only happens to you when you’re 50 years old and you’ve lived a life as successful citizen. They left happiness as something for individuals to define for themselves at any point in their lives.

Childhood is not merely a stepping stone on the path to a job and a mortgage and a retirement plan. Childhood is a destination in and of itself.

That means we should not only be preparing our kids for happiness thirty years into the future. We should be providing happiness right now. Today.

We should be providing happiness to a five year old as a five year old defines happiness. We should let a third grader pursue happiness as a third grader envisions it. A sophomore in high school should have access to a sophomore’s version of meaningful life.

And this means our children should have the time to climb a tree, slide down a slide, chase a bird, cover themselves in mud, scribble chalk all over a sidewalk, play tag, read a book, play a video game, watch a movie, pretend to be a prince or a princess or a pro athlete or a doctor or a teacher, build a sandcastle, destroy a sandcastle, play catch, do a cartwheel, do a somersault, just hang out with their friends and joke and gossip and goof around, or whatever happiness the child wants to pursue at any given moment.

And they should do those things not because those things somehow prepare them to become responsible adults in the future. They should do those things because those things have value by themselves, in this moment, right now. Their lives have value not just for the future, but for what they are today.

This moment, right now, matters just as much as a moment thirty years from now.

When you assume that the purpose of childhood is to prepare for adulthood, you think nothing of assigning a bunch of homework. It’s harmless at worst, and all in the service of the greater good, so on the whole, it can only be a net positive.

But if you assume a different purpose for childhood, homework is not harmless. Homework is taking something valuable away from the children. When I see my child spending a large chunk of her afternoon or evening or weekend or winter break or even summer break doing homework, it angers me. It’s disrespectful.

I am not asking for there to be no homework at all. I’m sure homework has some value, as a matter of making sure that good study habits and self-discipline can persist beyond the watchful eye of the teacher. But this value can be extracted with a minimal intrusion upon the time a child has to be a child.

The hours a child has as a child should not be treated as a resource that belongs to the education system to do with as they see fit. It should be looked at as a resource that belongs to the child, which the education system should only intrude upon reluctantly and respectfully.

This reluctance and respect for the value of a child’s time is the #1 thing I want to see in our homework policy. I was very happy to hear you are giving this idea serious consideration, and I want you to know you have my support. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help.

Sincerely,

Ken Arneson

What happens when a monoculture fragments?

* * *

Here’s the big question in politics these days: how do you explain Donald Trump? Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics has an interesting three part series on the question. Nate Silver presents three theories of his own. Scott Adams hypothesizes that Trump is a “master persuader“. David Axelrod surmises that voters are simply choosing the opposite of the last guy. Craig Calcaterra thinks it’s worse than all that, and we’re entering a new dark age.

Those are interesting ideas, I suppose, and maybe there’s some truth to them, I don’t know. But I want to throw another theory out there that I got, indirectly, while following the news of David Bowie’s death.

* * *

Bowie was very knowledgeable about music of course, but also visual arts, as well. There are a number of interviews of Bowie in the 1990s where he connects the history of visual arts in the early 20th century to what happened to music in the late 20th century, most notably an interview with Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight back in 1999.

* * *

First, some background. Up until the mid-19th century, the visual arts were very much a monoculture. Basically, you were supposed to paint pictures that looked lifelike in one way or another. But the invention of photography about that time changed the nature of the visual arts. The value of realistic paintings came into question, and artist began to explore other purposes for painting besides just realism.

The result of that exploration was that the visual arts in the early 20th century ended up splitting up into multiple subgenres like impressionism, cubism, dadaism, surrealism, and abstract impressionism. Bowie said, “The breakthroughs in the early part of the century with people like Duchamp were so prescient in what they were doing and putting down. The idea [was] that the piece of work is not finished until the audience come to it, and add their own interpretation.”

Duchamp’s urinal is the prime example of what Bowie is talking about. Is this a work of art?

…especially since Marcel Duchamp and all that, the work is only one aspect of it. The work is never finished now until the viewer contributes himself. The art is always only half-finished. It’s never completed until there’s an audience for it. And then it’s the combination of the interpretation of the audience and the work itself. It’s that gray area in the middle is what the work is about.

—interview on Musique Plus, 1999

The urinal by itself is not a work of art, Bowie suggested. It becomes a work of art when you react to it.

* * *

But why? Why would this become an artistic trend? Bowie suggested that this is the natural result of the breakup of monocultures. When there’s one dominant culture, artists can dictate what art is, and isn’t. But when there isn’t a single dominant culture, breaking through to the mainstream requires the artist to meet the audience halfway. Bowie claimed that the visual arts went through this process first, and it became a full-fledged force in music in the 1990s.

I think when you look back at, say, this last decade, there hasn’t really been one single entity, artist, or group, that have personified, or become the brand name for the nineties. It started to fade a bit in the eighties. In the seventies, there were still definite artists; in the sixties, there were the Beatles and Hendrix; in the fifties, there was Presley.

Now it’s subgroups, and genres. It’s hip-hop. It’s girl power. It’s a communal kind of thing. It’s about the community.

It’s becoming more and more about the audience. The point of having somebody who “led the forces” has disappeared because the vocabulary of rock is too well-known.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I like to see what the new construction is between artist and audience. There is a breakdown, personified, I think by the rave culture of the last few years. The audience is at least as important as whoever is playing at the rave. It’s almost like the artist is to accompany the audience and what the audience is doing. And that feeling is very much permeating music.

Bowie suggests that it wasn’t just music that this was happening to in the late 20th century, but to culture on a broader scale:

We, at the time, up until at least the mid-seventies, really felt that we were still living in the guise of a single and absolute created society, where there were known truths, and known lies, and there was no duplicity or pluralism about the things that we believed in. That started to break down rapidly in the seventies. And the idea of a duality in the way that we live…there are always two, three, four, five sides to every question. The singularity disappeared.

Bowie then went on to suggest that the Internet will go on to accelerate this cultural fragmentation in the 21st century:

And that, I believe, has produced just a medium as the Internet, which absolutely establishes and shows us that we are living in total fragmentation.

The actual context and the state of content is going to be so different from anything we can visage at the moment. Where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in sympatico, it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.

It’s happening in every form. […] That gray space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about.

Look then at the technologies that have launched since Bowie made these statements in 1999. Blogger launched the same year as that interview, in August of 1999. WordPress launched in 2003. Facebook in 2004. Twitter in 2006. What’s App in 2010. Snapchat in 2011. Technologies such as these, which give broadcast power to audiences, have become the dominant mediums of the 21st century. The audience has indeed become the mainstream provider of culture.

* * *

Bowie didn’t make any specific claims or predictions about politics in these 1999 statements. But we can look at his ideas and apply them to politics, and see if they apply there, as well. It would, after all, be strange if this process which has been happening for over a century in the general culture did not eventually make its way into politics, as well.

First, let’s ask, are we seeing any kind of fragmentation in our politics? (I’ll limit myself to American politics, because I don’t know enough about other countries to speak coherently.) It’s fairly obvious that the two American parties are more polarized than ever, but let’s show a chart to verify that. This is from the Brookings Institute:

As you can see, the parties were rather clustered together during World War II. In the 70s, you could see some separation happening, but there was still overlap. Now, they are two completely unrelated groups. So Bowie’s model holds in this case.

It could be argued that in the 2016 election, we are seeing a fragmentation of these two groups into further subgroups. On the Democratic side, there is a debate between the full-fledged socialism espoused by Bernie Sanders, and the more economically conservative wing of the Democratic Party represented by Hillary Clinton. (There do not seem to be candidates from the environmentalist/pacifist wings…yet.) On the Republican side, there are also clear factions now: the Evangelical wing led by Ted Cruz, the Libertarian wing led by Rand Paul, the more establishment Republicanism of Marco Rubio, Chris Christie and John Kasich, and the nationalism of Donald Trump.

These factions have always existed in the American political parties, of course. And there have always been subgenres in the arts and the general culture, too. But the difference this time seems to be that each faction is claiming, and insisting on, legitimacy. They are no longer satisfied with mere lip service from the party establishment. The days of the One Dominant Point of View are in the past.

* * *

Suppose that American political parties are indeed fragmenting. What kind of politicians succeed in that kind of environment?

The David Bowie theory would answer: politicians who possess the quality of allowing audiences to project their own interpretations onto them.

Whatever the policy differences between Barack Obama and Donald Trump, it’s hard to deny that both Trump and Obama possess that quality in spades.

The socialist and environmentalist and pacifist wings of the Democratic party seemed to project their fondest left-wing wishes onto Obama, even though his actual policy positions were rather centrist. As Obama’s presidency unfolded, these factions became disappointed, as reality set in. And likewise, in his Republican opponents there arose Obama Derangement Syndrome, where many right-wingers projected their worst fears of a far-left Presidency onto Obama, regardless of Obama’s actual positions.

Now we are seeing similar reactions to Donald Trump. The Republicans who are expected to vote for him are seeing him as a sort of savior to restore conservatism to prominence after a long series of losses in the Obama and Bill Clinton eras. This is despite the fact that, Trump’s immigration policies aside, Trump’s policy positions (that we know of), historically have been more consistent with establishment Democrats. And yet, many Democrats fear a Trump presidency and threaten to move to Canada if it happens.

So there are benefits and drawbacks to this “gray space” strategy. When you give the audience the freedom to add their interpretations to you, you may not like their interpretation very much. There was some pretty strong hatred of Duchamp’s urinal as a work of art. Others see that as part of its brilliance. Similarly, Obama and Trump can’t really control the large amount of people who react to them with repulsion. But it goes hand in hand with their success. That’s what the strategy does.

How do Obama and Trump accomplish this? What are the elements that allows them to interact in that “gray space”, when other politicians don’t? A few guesses:

• Be vague. Adhering to the specific policy proposals of a faction boxes you into that faction. It doesn’t allow room for other factions to meet you in the “gray space” between your factions.
   
• Be emotional. Obama and Trump know how to give speeches that rile up the emotions in the audience. You have to give the audience something to connect to, if it isn’t your actual policy positions.
   
• Step out from political clichếs. Bowie noted that by the 1990s, the standard three-cord rock-and-roll vocabulary had become too well-known to be a source of rebellion anymore. Similarly, the standard vocabulary of the Democratic and Republican parties have also become too well-known these days. The mediocre candidates these days seem to spend too much energy signaling that they know the Standard Vocabulary. We pretty much know what these politicians’ answers are going to be every question before they open their mouths to answer them. Hillary Clinton is a master of the vocabulary, but many people seem to be tired of it. Hence this article: “Hillary, can you excite us?”
   

How do you defeat such candidates? I don’t know, but it probably involves forcing them to be specific, to peg them as being trapped inside one particular faction or another. To reduce the “gray space” between them and the audience. Good luck with that. Should be interesting to watch as the primary season begins. Start your engines.

* * *

Postscript: Here’s the entirety of the David Bowie interview with Jeremy Paxman:

The A’s have a two-run lead. They are two innings away from their first World Series championship in 15 years. They are batting in the top of the eighth, with two runners on base.

Dave Henderson is at the plate.

Hendu has seen leads like this evaporate in the postseason before. His own homer off Donnie Moore. Bill Buckner’s error. Kirk Gibson’s homer. He was on the field for all of those improbable comebacks.

Hendu knows what’s at stake here. The A’s were leading 8-0 in this game, and now it’s 8-6. Those potential runs that are out there on first and second bases are very important. Driving those runs in, or not, could be the difference between a championship, and another agonizing defeat.

The Giants’ best reliever, Steve Bedrosian, is summoned from the bullpen to face Hendu. Hendu gets ahead in the count, 3-1, but then Bedrosian rears back and paints two blazing fastballs on the outside corner. Hendu fouls these perfect pitches off.

So here we are, a full count, with two outs. The runners will be going.

What does Hendu do?

Here’s what Hendu does: he yawns.

* * *

Dave Henderson passed away this weekend. He was only eight years older than me.

I’m about to turn 50. Unavoidably, my thoughts recently have been turning towards mortality. Before, when athletes my age or younger who have passed away, I could always find some thing about their deaths that I could dismiss as irrelevant to me. They had a genetic defect, or were freakishly large. They were addicted to drugs or alcohol. They played a violent sport where they repeatedly bash their brains against their skulls.

But I haven’t been able to shake off Dave Henderson’s death. Partly because he basically died of the kind of thing people die of when they die of old age: organ failure. It is hitting me now that death can come at any time now. It may come 50 years from now, but it may come in just eight. Or it may come tomorrow.

And I also have been unable to shake of Dave Henderson’s death because I loved the guy. If you were an A’s fan in the 80s and 90s, you loved, loved, loved Dave Henderson.

God, I loved Hendu. I miss Hendu.

* * *

My peak as an A’s fan corresponded to the years that Dave Henderson patrolled center field for the A’s, 1988-93. I must have gone to 30-40 games a year those years. And I always sat out in the left-center bleachers, between the two (unrelated) Hendersons, Dave in center and Rickey in left.

It was a wonderful time. Yes, it was a happy era because the A’s were a great team those years. But the joy also came from Dave Henderson himself.

There have been players before and since who acknowledge and are grateful for and interact with their fans. But I have yet to see a player who could rival Hendu to the degree in which he actually, genuinely liked his fans. At any time, before, during, and after any game, he was ready and willing to interact with the fans behind him in the outfield. He’d sit in the bleachers during batting practice sometimes. He’d go out to dinner with fans after a game. And there was always a lot of joking banter between pitches.

I particularly loved the start of the game. Hendu would come out at the top of the first inning to warm up with a big smile on his face. He’d take the ball out of his glove, and wave it over his head at us in left-center, and then to his two(!) groups of fans in right-center: Henduland and Hendu’s Bad Boy Club. And then Hendu’s Bad Boy Club would launch their “Hendu is a bad boy” chant, and the game was on.

It was a ritual that said to you, every game: isn’t this great? Isn’t this fun? Isn’t this life just a joy to be living?

We need more rituals like that.

* * *

“Are you happy, Daddy?”

My eight-year-old daughter asks me this question a lot. She is the closest thing I have seen to Dave Henderson since Dave Henderson. People who only intermittently interact with her often ask, “Is she ever not happy?”

Of course, I see her so much that I know that she is not always happy. She has her pet peeves that set her off, make her grumpy. But her default mode is happy. She is, by default, smiling, excited, happy to see you. She is quite popular as a result. Happiness is infectious.

* * *

My default emotion is not happiness. It’s…I don’t know…satisfaction? I’m satisfied. Things are fine. I’m calm. I’m OK. But happiness doesn’t come easily or naturally for me.

Satisfaction is not infectious. People don’t flock to other satisfied people. I will never be as missed when I am gone as Dave Henderson is. It just doesn’t work that way.

Why is that? Why are the Dave Hendersons of the world the exception and not the rule? Why was Dave Henderson extraordinary instead of ordinary? Why can’t we all be more like Dave Henderson, or my daughter, and be joyous all the time?

* * *

This is a Swedish short film called “The Egg“. It’s a beautiful film, which presents a lovely way to look at why there are so many different kinds of people in the world.

You don’t need to believe in the Hindu idea of reincarnation to appreciate what a beautiful idea this is. Perhaps I’m not capable of being as joyous as Dave Henderson, or my daughter, because my soul simply isn’t as mature as theirs is.

Which means we have a dual responsibility to each other: theirs is to lead by example, to give our souls something to aspire to become in our future lives. Ours is to not turn them backwards, to not drag them back down to our more unripened levels.

* * *

The Hindu religion presents four main aspects, or goals, of human life: kama, dharma, artha, and moksha. Now, I’m not Hindu, so this is not my religion, but I am a believer in finding the underlying truths of any religion, and translating them into a form that you can understand. As God said in the film above, every religion is true in its own way.

So let’s take these aspects of Hinduism, and translate them (sort of like what the Pixar short Sanjay’s Super Team did) into a form we can understand: what these concepts mean in a baseball context. And let’s pick Oakland A’s players to represent each of these concepts.

Let’s call this framework Henduism:

• Kama.

  Kama represents our desire and longing for emotional, sensual and aesthetic pleasures. In Henduism, Kama is represented by Yoenis Cespedes.

  Cespedes, when measured objectively, was never an all-star quality player with the A’s. His statistical results were perhaps slightly above average. He wasn’t a star hitter because he chased high fastballs too much, leaving him vulnerable to various forms of pitch sequencing. Defensively, he often took bad routes on fly balls, and sometimes clanked the balls that fell in his glove. He didn’t read pitchers very well on the bases, so he was a poor basestealer, despite his speed.

  But oh my goodness, what a talent. In an A’s uniform, he was simply beautiful human being to watch, even in failure. If he dropped a ball in the outfield, he would often make up for it by launching a frozen rope to the next base as the player tried to advance. When rounding the bases, there was a spellbinding grace to his form when he ran with a full head of steam. And when his bat did make contact with the ball, the result was often the most majestic of home runs.

  If there is a baseball equivalent of lust, Yoenis Cespedes induced that feeling.

   

• Dharma.

  Dharma is the quality of conducting yourself virtuously according to the the duties, rights, and laws of your society. In baseball terms, it means “playing the game the right way.” In Henduism, Dharma is represented by Mark Ellis.

  Ellis spent nearly a decade in an A’s uniform, a rarity in the tenure of Billy Beane, who swaps players in and out like a card dealer flips over playing cards. In many ways, Ellis was the opposite of Cespedes. Ellis rarely did anything that tickled your aesthetic senses and made you say “Wow!” He was an ordinary-looking athlete of ordinary size and strength and speed. But in those ten years, I can probably count on my fingers the number of times Ellis made a mental mistake. He was always in the right place at the right time, making the right decision of where to be, of where to throw the ball or not throw the ball, of whether to take the extra base or to stay put.

  You knew exactly what you were getting with Mark Ellis when you wrote him into the lineup. You could always rely on Mark Ellis, because he always played the game the right way.

   

• Artha.

  Artha refers to the goal of reaching prosperity and success. In Henduism, Artha is represented by Rickey Henderson.

  If the goal of baseball is to score runs, then nobody has achieved that goal more than Rickey Henderson. Rickey holds the all-time record for most runs scored in a career.

  But there’s more to Rickey than that. Rickey was the full package. He could hit for average, he could work the count and get on base with a walk (OMG could he do that), he could hit for power (most home runs ever leading off a game), he could steal bases (single-season and career records in that, too), and he could play defense, too. As Bill James famously said, you could split Rickey in two, and you’d have two hall-of-famers. And he also won a couple of World Series, to boot.

  If your goal is winning, and you were picking an A’s player in history to build your team around, Rickey would be your first pick.

   

• Moksha.

  The goal of Moksha is to make real the kind of the person you were meant to be. This can only follow from a liberation or release from the fears and burdens of everyday life.

  Moksha is represented in Henduism by Dave Henderson.

* * *

“There’s not really much pressure when you’re supposed to make an out. And I guess I’m the only one who realizes that. So, I have a distinct advantage in that everybody else on the field is pressured, and I’m not.”

—Dave Henderson

Hendu yawned.

Dave Henderson would often do this in a tense situation in a ballgame. He’d take a step out of the batter’s box for a moment, and let loose a nice big yawn.

Then, relaxed, liberated by the yawn from the pressure of the situation, he’d get back into the batter’s box and face the battle before him, as the best possible Dave Henderson he could be in that moment.

There are those who do not believe in clutch hitters. But Dave Henderson hit .324/.410/.606 over the four World Series he played in. You may think that’s just the luck of the statistical draw. I do not. I think it was Moksha.

* * *

Most of us are broken in some way. We have fears, anxieties, scars, built up over years of heartbreak and abuse and neglect and failures. We build psychological walls around ourselves to protect ourselves from these problems. Mine are certainly lesser than others. I’m sure many, many people have scars far worse than mine, with much thicker walls built up around them.

But here I am: a child of divorce and alcoholism, who got sent to a different country in a different climate with a different culture and a different language just as I was hitting puberty. I developed some psychological walls around myself as a result. I think I fear success (Artha) a bit too much, because I feel like it could be too easily taken away from me. I’m afraid of Kama, too, of being too amazing and sexy and strong, because losing that would be too painful, too. So I hide inside Dharma, doing my duties, behaving properly, probably a bit too much. I miss out on the other connections I could have.

* * *

I think most baseball players, like most of us normal human beings, have their own fears and anxieties and scars. A baseball career is a fragile thing. One small mechanical hitch could be the difference between being in the majors and being out of baseball. One hit a week is the difference between an all-star and an also-ran. Is there time, is there energy, to risk making emotional connections to the whole wide world, when every moment, every play, is so critical to success or failure?

But then there was Dave Henderson. Hendu could yawn in the face of pressure. Hendu had accepted his vulnerabilities, and released himself from the fear of failure. And because of that liberation, he could afford to smile and wave to an audience who watched his every move. And through that smile, and that wave, he lifted an entire fanbase.

* * *

“Are you happy, Daddy?” The wise old soul inside my young little daughter looks into my eyes, and intuits that I have not reached Moksha. I am not quite the person I could be, because I have not released myself from my fears and inhibitions. And most of all, I have not allowed myself the freedom to release myself from my biggest fear of all: that I will somehow mess up this responsibility of fatherhood, that I will play the parenting game in the wrong way, that I will throw some unnecessary scars onto her, and set back her beautiful soul.

She won’t accept my unhappiness. She wants more from me.

“Come on, Daddy, ” she says, and grabs my hand. She pulls, and my inertia yields. She lifts me out of my chair. A smile starts to form on my face.

“Let’s go play!”

“Steph Curry’s great. Steph Curry’s the MVP. He’s a champion. Understand what I’m saying when I say this. To a degree, he’s hurt the game. And what I mean by that is I go into these high school gyms, I watch these kids and the first thing they do is run to the three-point line. You are not Steph Curry. Work on the other aspects of the game. People think that he’s just a knock-down shooter. That’s not why he’s the MVP. He’s a complete basketball player.”

—Mark Jackson

I’m more ghost now than man.

I’ll be turning 50 in a month. Of those 50 years, I’ve played soccer for maybe 42 years. I probably peaked physically at around age 27 or 28, as most human beings do. Which means that half my soccer-playing life, 21 of those 42 years, has been spent in the slow process of fading into a mere shadow of the player I used to be.

There was a time when I never worried about what was behind me. If I had half a step on an opponent, I was gone. No more. Every advantage I earn disappears quickly these days. Each decision I make takes much longer to execute. Younger players just read my eyes and get to where I plan to go before I do. My moves are all telegraphed, like an outdated metaphor trying to go viral on a brand new communications medium.

My ghosting is almost complete. The last lights on my neural relay are flickering.

* * *

I have a friend, Jeff Raz, who once was the lead clown in a Cirque du Soleil show, Corteo. Jeff played a clown imagining his own funeral. A procession of acrobats and jugglers and clowns arrive to play tribute to the dying clown, to give him a few last moments of amazingness before his time is up.

I’ve learned from watching him up close what a huge difference there is between a world-class clown in a world-class circus, and the amateur clown at your kid’s birthday party.

A top-level, world-class circus contains a wealth of jaw-dropping acrobats and jugglers and performers who push the limits of what the human body can do. But your jaw can only drop so many times before jaw-dropping becomes repetitive, and amazing becomes normal.

The job of the clown in a world-class circus is to push the reset button on amazingness. The clown taps into your natural ambition to do amazing things, but mistakingly focuses on an element of the preceding act which is not actually the source of its quality. So, for example, if a dancer does an acrobatic Fred Astaire act with a broom, a clown follows that act by trying to replicate that success by dancing with a vacuum cleaner.

Of course, the cleaning utensil was not the point of the preceding act; it was the skill and strength and artistry and precision of the dancer. The clown replicates the form of the act but not the quality, and in doing so, brings our expectation levels back down to those of the normal human being, so that the next act can wow us again.

* * *

In a way, then, your birthday party clown unintentionally makes the same mistake the the top-level clown makes on purpose: s/he imitates the form of the clown, with the makeup and the outfits, but often not the function or the quality. And it is this form without function which horror films use to turn clowning on its head, from a reset button on amazingness to a trigger for the grotesque side of human nature.

* * *

Every once in a while, an athlete comes along who drops our jaws, and changes the baseline of what we think is humanly possible. Right now, that athlete is Steph Curry.

The shooting, the dribbling, the shooting, the passing, and OMG the shooting — Curry dazzles us like no other basketball player has done before. With his human proportions amidst the giants of the NBA, Curry serves as both acrobat and clown in the same, complete package. It’s the greatest show on earth.

* * *

My youngest daughter is eight years old. I have coached her soccer team for a couple of years now. At first, the kids only understand the simplest element of soccer’s form: trying to kick the ball in the direction of the goal. A soccer game with six-year-olds is a clump of small human beings clustering around a ball as it pinballs around within the cluster. It is not exactly The Beautiful Game.

But now, two years later, I can see the kids’ eyes becoming open to the function of the game instead of just the form. The first time being aware of the game instead of just the ball. The movement into open space with a dribble. A reminder to a teammate not kick the ball into the middle of the field in front of your own goal. The first primitive attempts at passing the ball to an open teammate.

It’s like a closed flower beginning to open its petals to the sunlight.

* * *

Meanwhile, I keep playing, twice a week, getting worse and worse every time I play. I am one injury from hanging up my soccer cleats for good. Any time I step on the field now, it could be my last time.

But every once in a while, I still manage one more good run, one more nice pass, one more good shot, and the sun delays its setting for just one, brief, bittersweet moment.

But not everything can be avoided. Not forever. Times end, because they have to.

* * *

The young kids in the high school gym, chucking three pointers instead of playing beautiful basketball, they’re just inexperienced youngsters who see the form but don’t yet understand the function. With guidance, their time will come.

You may, if you choose, elect to judge children and old men against the standards of the peak human being, to compare amateurs and novices to professionals. You may elect to criticize their mistakes in an isolated snapshot, as unconnected events to be judged without context, each a single flawed image in a grotesque horror show, every one of which harms the potential perfection of the universe.

Or, you can join me and take a seat at the finest table in all the galaxy. Let us watch the beautiful circus of life, from naïve clowns to amazing acrobats to sad ghosts, march by. It’s my amazing funeral procession, and you’re all invited.