Various Thoughts on SPORTS

I like to think and I like to watch sports.  This means that at any given time, I have a lot of thoughts about sports.  This happens to be one of those times.  Usually these thoughts are all focused on the sport that happens to be in season.  However, in November all three of my favorite sports are in season, which means I have thoughts about all of them.  In honor of the guy holding up the generic "SPORTS" sign on Gameday this past weekend, let's combine all of those thoughts into one messy post about SPORTS.

SPORTS pic.twitter.com/sv69FiEIcm
— ParadigmShift35 (@NAWTADIGM) November 16, 2013

BASEBALL

Another year of MLB award voting came and went, and once again, there was controversy.  AL MVP winner Miguel Cabrera had a truly great year, but he was still clearly behind Mike Trout in terms of being the best all-around player in baseball.*  That said, the rest of the voting was actually pretty reasonable.  I even agreed with 4 of the 5 other winners (and Max Scherzer was a fine selection for the other award, although I know at least some of the writers did it for the wrong reasons).

*In the NL, the voters went the other (and correct) direction, picking the all-around CF over the slugging corner infielder.  This would be interesting if it weren't for the one variable that explains everything: playoffs.  McCutchen and Cabrera's teams made the playoffs, hence they won the awards.  Sigh.

While none of the winners surprised me, I can always count on examining the full results (on the BBWAA site) for a few interesting nuggets (and good laughs).  Full ballot reveals also lead to some new areas of discussion about the relative merits of other players besides the main contenders.  These discussions are usually glossed over in advance of the awards because people mostly like to speculate on who will win.  This singular focus does a disservice to all the great players who come up short, which is too bad when there is a loaded year like the NL in 2013.

Of special interest to me (for reasons that will quickly become clear) were Joey Votto, Paul Goldschmidt, and Carlos Gomez.  These are not the only notable runners up.  In fact, they probably aren't even the three best runners up.  However, every single one of their stat lines indicates an MVP-type season:

Goldschmidt: .302/.401/.551 (156 wRC+), 36 HR, 15 SB, 6.4 fWAR

Votto: .305/.435/.491 (156 wRC+), 24 HR, 1 infield flyball (!), 6.2 fWAR

Gomez: .284/.338/.506 (130 wRC+), 24 HR, 40 SB, +26 UZR, +38 DRS (!), 7.6 fWAR

Gomez leads the other 2 by a bit in fWAR, but you probably want to regress those defensive numbers a bit (while still acknowledging his awesomeness in CF), so they all appear to make a pretty even case.  They are so even, that I put them 6-7-8 in my own meaningless ballot.  However the voters, being the lovers of RBI that they are, put Goldschmidt ahead of these other two by a good margin.  Not every voter agreed with this line of thinking, as a few put Goldy in the same range that I did.  This angered fellow Diamondback and noted Twitterer Brandon McCarthy.  His tweet about the matter evolved into a long chain about the relative merits of other candidates as well.  Here was my contribution:

Now, Brandon McCarthy is one of the most stat-friendly major leaguers there is, so I don't want to pillory him for this.  When you spent the vast majority of the past 8 months playing with someone as awesome at baseball as Paul Goldschmidt, I can certainly understand the desire to see him celebrated as much as possible.  That said, this whole debate between Votto, Goldy, and Gomez gets to the heart of an important thing about Sabermetrics that is too often glossed over: There is very rarely a correct answer to debates such as these. 

You may very well point to WAR or something like that and say that Goldschmidt is better than Votto because he was 0.2 WAR ahead of him.  The problem with that is that there are enough margins for error in the components that make up WAR (especially the defensive components), that we can't say anything definitively for such small separations.  Furthermore, there are a lot of things that aren't in WAR that may very well determine value.  Areas such as sequencing and clutch hitting haven't been found to be particularly predictive, but that doesn't mean there aren't  some aspects of those areas that may indicate real value.  And then there are small things like defensive shifts that almost certainly have value, but we haven't been able to turn them into useful individual stats yet.  WAR is awesome and is our best look yet at the total value of a player, but it isn't yet the final word on the matter.

The main point to take away from all of this is that, like most things in the world, very few of these awards debates have clear-cut answers.  Yes, I'm pretty sure Mike Trout is the best player in baseball, but after that there are a bunch of gray areas.  Rather than thinking we have all of the answers, let's embrace debate honestly, and appreciate great players for what they are.  Goldschmidt's dinger prowess, Votto's insane eye, and Gomez's range are all things that should be celebrated by baseball fans everywhere.  Don't let the awards process convince you otherwise.


COLLEGE FOOTBALL

This past Saturday was as good of a day of football as we've seen this season.  Ed Orgeron pulled off the biggest win of his career, beating Stanford in the Coliseum.  Duke ran for all the yards against Miami, in a game that put them into the driver's seat in the Coastal division.  UCF held off a surprisingly feisty Temple team with one of the best catches you'll ever see.  Michigan beat Northwestern largely due to an insanely well-disciplined field goal unit.  And of course, Auburn beat Georgia with a deflected heave on fourth down in one of the craziest final quarters ever.

Of course, if you know me, you'll know that I want to talk about something much more mundane. In this case, it was something from the Oklahoma-Iowa State game during the early timeslot.  Chris Simms was the color man, which continues the trend of ex-Buccaneer players invading the media.  While I generally support this as a good thing, it unfortunately gives them a lot of chance to say stupid things.

I'll paraphrase what he said, because Google tells me that apparently no one else on the internet heard this and was inspired enough to write about it.  The setup was that he was asked about whether or not he thought Baylor deserved consideration for the title game, and responded with something like this: "They're really good, but we haven't seen if their style of football can win a title yet, so I can't put them in the top two."  There are a couple of hopefully obvious problems with this:

1. There's a massive circular reasoning problem there.  If the people in power (of which Chris Simms isn't one, thankfully) don't consider teams that haven't won titles before, then titleless teams they shall remain.

2. Chris Simms said this with presumably a straight face while broadcasting a game involving the first team to win a title with a spread offense (Oklahoma in 2000....you can make an argument for Florida's 1996 team as well).  Yes, Baylor's iteration of the spread is dialed up to 11, but a lot of the principles are similar to what Oklahoma still does to this day.

This leads to my main point:  Sometimes people are so blinded by tradition and the golden days of college football past, that they fail to see what's right in front of them.  In this case, stick-in-the-muds who shrug off Baylor's success this year are missing out on one of the most exciting teams of all time.  One of the strengths of college football is its adherence to tradition.  The hallowed ghosts that live in the decades-old stadiums are often brought to mind when we see a classic uniform like Alabama's, or hear a name like Notre Dame.  In spite of how much this respect for the past gives life to college football, it can also hold it back.  Thankfully, there seems to be enough impetus within the game to overcome the lines of thinking that Simms' statement embodies.  More and more people are appreciating and even celebrating the uniqueness of what Baylor does.  Next year, we will have a four-team playoff, and finally playing players for their work appears to be close to happening as well.  The traditions of college football are good, but when they become they alone are the only reason for continuing them, it's time for them to come to an end.



COLLEGE BASKETBALL

I was in Carbondale, Illinois visiting a friend this past weekend.  We spent most of the time watching football, playing pong, and eating pizza and platters of meat.  All of that was great, but being the Valley fan that I am, I just had to make my way over to the SIU Arena to catch a game while I was in town.  As luck would have it, the Billikens from St. Louis were in town.  Ever since the 2012 squad pushed Michigan State to the brink in the round of 32, I've been a big fan of this group of players.  A lot of the key contributors are still around for one more season, so I'm making sure to catch as many games as I can.  But until I saw this game on the schedule a couple days before my trip, I had no idea I'd be able to see them in person.

The SIU Arena is quite nice.  It was difficult to judge just how rowdy it could be since it was only about three quarters full, but the set up seemed conducive to creating a difficult atmosphere.  The stands on the baselines go all the way up to the ceiling without a break in the middle, which would create an impressive wall of noise and mayhem if entirely filled with students (it was not).

The game itself was quite good.  SIU jumped out to an early lead as big as 13 on their ability to get to the basket, both through one-on-one drives and deft passing.  This led to a bunch of free throws for the Salukis and a little early foul trouble for the Billikens.  Luckily for SLU, their shooting heated up right before halftime, with Mike McCall and Jake Barnett both making multiple threes.  When the teams came back out for the second half, Saint Louis looked like a team that remembered how to play defense, and quickly built up a lead that they would not relinquish.  It wasn't their greatest game (Evans didn't dominate, and Jett only made 0.5 spectacular defensive plays), but it was a relatively easy win on the road against a decent opponent.

After watching one game and looking at a couple of other box scores, I don't know exactly what to make out of this year's Saint Louis squad.  The defense is still good, but it's probably not quite up to the level of the last couple of teams (losing Cody Ellis, Cory Remekun, and Kwamain Mitchell will do that).  The Billikens don't shoot particularly well from 3 (34% last year, 28.3% this year), though the quick spurt that got them back in the game suggests that their best offense might be one where they launch a lot of threes.  Dwayne Evans is the reigning player of the year in the A-10, but he had a pretty non-descript day against a team without a lot of effective size (318th in the country).  I still think that St. Louis is one of the teams to beat in their conference (along with VCU), but there will be a few questions that Jim Crews and his staff will have to answer if they want to make a deep run in the tournament.

Curvilinear

This is a very long post in which I get very nerdy about a very specific subject.  You have been warned (very).

During my time as an MBA student, my career coach was an interesting presence.  He was at times very helpful and insightful, putting me in contact with some great people at the places I wanted to work.  He could also be a little aloof, often forgetting what we had talked about in past meetings and not always offering the most actionable advice.  In the end, his work with me could have been better and it could have been worse.

Of course, I'm not going to write an entire post about the efficacy of my career coach.  What I am interested in, and what led me down the rabbit hole I take you through in this post, relates to something he said during one of our meetings.  In this meeting, we were discussing what I thought my strengths were and how I would be able to communicate them to interviewers.  Because I've done quite well in school and have always aced standardized tests, I said that my main strength was being really, really smart.  My career coach rebuffed this saying that a lot of people were smart, and that I needed to communicate what my "special sauce" was.  He then followed that up by saying that people on the super-high end of the intelligence spectrum were actually less good at managing than others than people of somewhat high intelligence.  That is, he said there was a "curvilinear" relationship between intelligence and management abilities. 

While I certainly took his "special sauce" advice to heart (learning agility is not only a better way to phrase what I was trying to get at; it's also more meaningful), I was taken aback by his second assertion.  It definitely surprised me that added intelligence could hinder my career opportunities, but I ended up not thinking much more about it and moving on.

...Until the next semester.  I was enrolled in a class pertaining to management and HR, which I actually enjoyed a great deal.  One of the books we read was (predictably) entitled 100 Things You Need to Know: Best People Practices for Managers & HR.  The book is sectioned into 100 small chapters with bits of insight and research pertaining to HR-related questions.  One subset of the chapters deals with intelligence and how it relates to managerial success.  One of those chapters included this quote (emphasis added):

"Intelligence is a necessary but not sufficient cause of adulthood success in careers that demand creativity or leadership.  Further findings reveal that excessive intelligence seems to hurt, with the most effective people being somewhat smarter than average for their group, but not too much smarter." (Eichinger, 2006)

Upon reading that, I remembered what my career coach had said, and began to wonder if it was true.  I could definitely understand how added intelligence might have diminishing returns when it comes to managing people, but it seemed strange and counter-intuitive that such skills would actually decrease with added intelligence.  If one's intelligence naturally causes them to be aloof or something like that around others, wouldn't he or she be able to use that intelligence to avoid this?  I know that this assertion may seem rather trivial in the grand scheme of things (and it's definitely a big generalization, which the 100 Things book itself keeps advising against).  However, I was in the middle of trying to map out my post-MBA career, which meant that information that tells me that I may not be as great of a manager or leader as I thought was (and still is) very relevant. 

Luckily for me, one of the other classes I was enrolled in at the time involved a deep dive into the academic side of marketing.  As part of this class, we had just completed a "library quest" where we went to Hesburgh and read from a lot of different journals, magazines, and other publications in order to better understand the depth and breadth of knowledge that was available to us.  Because of my increased confidence and research skills that arose from this activity, and because the 100 Things book is well cited, I undertook the process of finding out whether or not this assertion was true.

*                      *                          *

 

The obvious place to start was with the citation from the book.  I was hoping this would lead directly to a study with data that supported this statement, but that was not the case (more on this in a minute).  While most of the journals I investigated during my library quest were available online, the Annals of Child Development, which was discontinued in 1998, was most certainly not.  Thus, I journeyed all the way up to the 13th floor of Hesburgh to find the necessary volume.  I ended up getting the following quote from a book that sits about 20 feet from Hesburgh's office, so that's pretty cool.  Returning to the main subject, here is the quote that almost certainly is the source of the 100 Things reference:

"The literature on both creativity and leadership frequently contains the speculation that an excessive intelligence might even militate against personal influence. (...) Will likely yield a curvilinear, concave downward function between intelligence and creativity or leadership.  Under many common conditions, for example, the highest odds of exercising personal influence in a group is enjoyed by that individual with an IQ only around 1.2 standard deviations above the mean IQ of the group." (Simonton, 1987)

One thing I learned from both the marketing academia class and this line of investigation was that academic papers pile citations on top of citations.  If something is cited from somewhere else, then that somewhere else is not always (or perhaps, is not usually) the first source of the finding.  As you might imagine, this can give rise to the same problem we see in the "telephone game."  Since I hadn't yet arrived at the end of this investigative road, I continued along my journey.

The Simonton article had two citations related to the above passage.  There was another article from another psychology journal and something called Stogdill's Handbook of Leadership.  What was interesting about this was how the sources came from two completely different disciplines, which shows how much interconnectedness there is between different areas of study.  Here is the passage from the management book:

"Five competent studies (out of 25) suggested that 'one of the most significant findings concerning the relation of intelligence to leadership is the extreme discrepancies between the intelligence of potential leaders and that of their followers militate against the exercise of leadership....'  Ghiselli reported supporting evidence.  In a study of three groups of managers, he found that 'the relationship between intelligence and managerial success is curvilinear with those individuals earning both low and very high scores being less likely to acheive success in management positions than those with scores at the intermediate level." (Bass, 1981)

And here is the quote from the journal article:

"Though a curvilinear relationship between intelligence and creativity has often been suggested, the only formal test (with negative results) of this hypothesis we are aware of was conducted by Simonton in a reanalysis of Cox's historical geniuses - a sample quite probably too rarified to be a particularly good test of the curvilinear hypothesis." (Barron, 1981)

There are quite a few takeaways from these passages.  First, you can see how both of these cite past studies which means each of them will lead me (and you, if you are still reading) further down the rabbit hole.  Second, the Ghiselli test sounds like it might be fairly conclusive, so that will be particularly interesting to follow up on.  Third, the journal article quotes a study from Simonton, who just happens to be the author of the article that 100 Things draws upon.  This means that Simonton quotes someone in his article who then quotes his own study.  Just cite your own study, man!  Finally, the Simonton study mentioned in the article seems to indicate that there isn't any proof of this curvilinear relationship, so it will be interesting to put this up against the Ghiselli test.

Let's start by following up on the first passage from the Stogdill's book.  It was rather difficult to determine exactly what the author meant by the "supporting evidence" from Ghiselli.  The book cited many studies by Ghiselli as well as others.  The study that seemed the most promising at first didn't seem to address the issue, as the results of the data analysis supported the introductory assertion that "...a positive relationship exists between the occupational level of jobs and the validity of intelligence tests is, of course, well known." (Ghiselli, 1963a).  This assertion was stated as a conclusion of one of his earlier studies which contained much of the same analysis and wording. What this study basically shows is that people higher up in management tend to be more reliably intelligent.  It doesn't offer any findings on whether or not intelligence determines success in those roles, so this appears to be a dead end.

Another potential font of supporting evidence was a 1948 article by the namesake of the book, Ralph Stogdill himself.  Much of the text from that is very similar, but I will quote from the original source:

"...Extreme discrepancies between the intelligence of potential leaders and their followers miliate against the exercise of leadership.  Hollingworth found that 'among children with a mean IQ of 100, the IQ of the leader is likely to fall between 115 and 130 IQ.  That is, the leader is likely to be more intelligent, but not too much more intelligent than the average of the group led." (Stogdill, 1948)

The article goes on to talk about how the reason behind this is likely communication.  A child with average intelligence is not likely to be able to understand the words and/or ideas coming from the child with superior intelligence.  This makes sense, and I don't really have any problems with the study or the conclusion.  However, I'm not sure how a study of children would necessarily lend itself to making similar conclusions about adults.  First, the leaders of the child groups are not necessarily being selected with the same goals in mind, and they are not being graded on the success of their leadership.  This shows a fundamental difference with what the 100 Things book is trying to demonstrate.  Second, adults with very high intelligence should typically be able to understand that they are very intelligent and thus be able to make the level of their communication appropriate to their audience, which weakens the theoretical underpinning of the argument.  This passage appears to be getting us closer to our goal, but it still seems incomplete.

In the end, a second study by Ghiselli seems to be the best support of the assertion from the Stogdill book.  This is a one page article (!) that details a brief study assessing intelligence levels and managerial success.  The conclusion states that:

"It appears that the relationship between intelligence and managerial success is curvilinear with those individuals earning both low and very high scores being less likely to achieve success in management positions than those with scores at intermediate levels." (Ghiselli, 1963b)

Jackpot!  Looks like the 100 Things book was right.  My blog post is finished.

Actually, I just remembered something my professor said (the one from the marketing academia class).  He said, in as many words, that "all studies are flawed."  What this means, is that no study is perfect since they are all based on making certain assumptions or only studying certain samples of the population.  In this case, I don't think this particular study is very useful.  First, there are no theoretical underpinnings to this study (as I said, it's a one page article).  It's entirely possible that there is some mechanism in the brain that makes those with extreme intelligence bad at management, but rather than providing some insight into how this might work, the study really just shows some interesting data and leaves it at that.  Second, the study treats success as a binary distinction, which is a little simplistic for my taste.  Third, and most importantly, the data do not hold up to statistical rigor.  If you click the above link, you'll see the presentation of the data, which makes it look like the highest-end group is indeed less successful as a manager.  Of course, you will also notice that the highest-end group is comprised of a total of 13 people.  Thus, I did some late night chi-square analysis to see if the observed percentage are statistically meaningful:

The summary answer is that no, the data do not indicate that these results aren't simply the product of random chance.  The long answer is that the p-value of 0.76 is far too large for us to reject the null hypothesis that all of the intelligence groups produce the same ratio of successful managers (for more info on how the chi-square goodness of fit test works, see the link from earlier).  These results do suggest that there is something worth investigating, but they are hardly conclusive one way or the other.  If this ends up being the main source of the assertion from the 100 Things book, then I will feel confident in my feeling that it isn't true (or at least that we don't know if it's true).

I have finished following up on the sources from the Stogdill book, so let's take a look at the sources behind the Barron article.  If you will recall, that article shared in my skepticism of the curvilinear claims.  As I also said, the article quotes a study from Simonton, who we have already heard from in this post.  This will help us to better understand where he was coming from in his quote.  The study in question performs multivariate analysis on the data from Cox's historical geniuses subset mentioned in the article quote above.  What is most interesting about this is that once the author adds control variables such as year of birth to the equation, "intelligence...exhibits neither a linear nor a curvilinear relation with ranked eminence." (Simonton, 1976).  At this point, other variables correlated with intelligence, such as education, do a better job of explaining leadership success than just intelligence itself.

That article does throw out the curvilinear hypothesis in the beginning, so I did want to quickly address that.  The author states:

"Moreover, since individuals can also be too intelligent to make successful leaders, the association between intelligence and leader eminence may be curvilinear." (Simonton, 1976)

This passage cites two studies.  The first study simply reiterates what all the others have said, without offering up anything else, so it's not particularly useful for our purposes.  The second study is more interesting.  That study examines the results of multiple studies concerning individual behavior in groups in order to come to some sort of consensus about the effects various factors have on such behavior.  In the section concerning intelligence's effect on leadership there is a lot of data that suggests that "the positive association between intelligence and leadership is found to be highly significant.... However, the magnitude of the relationship is less impressive; no correlation reported exceeds .50, and the median r is roughly .25." (Mann, 1959).  Nowhere in that section, nor the final conclusion is there any mention of the curvilinear relationship.  It seems that this avenue, too, is a dead end.



*               *                *

In the end, it appears from my (admittedly amateur) research that the assertion from the 100 Things book has two primary sources:

- The research that indicates leaders among children typically don't deviate far from the norm.  I didn't spend much time verifying this because it seemed to be pretty much accepted in many of the articles I read, and it's somewhat tangential to the topic at hand.  This may indeed be an avenue towards proving the statement from the 100 Things book, but it doesn't directly address it, so we can't really be confident in the conclusion from this alone.

- The (flawed) 1963 study from Ghiselli that shows the curvilinear relationship between intelligence and leadership.

Given this shaky foundation, it seems difficult to say we should apply this assertion substantively.  This is, those in charge of hiring managers should not necessarily be wary of hiring those with very high intelligence if they are otherwise qualified.  Let me be clear that I am not rejecting the hypothesis at all; it may indeed be true.  What I am saying is that it isn't an extensions of some basic common sense/logic, and I haven't found any ironclad support for it in the research that would make me question that logic.  In whole, this exercise taught me a number of things:

1. Don't be afraid to check facts.  We can't each spend the amount of time it would take to check every fact we come across.  Given our constraints, we have to determine what sources of information and reliable and go from there.  However, if something seems especially fishy and that thing affects your life in some way, you should take the time to investigate it further.  It did not take me a great deal of time to track down the information contained in this post, which certainly helps (luckily for me, I had some time between graduation and moving where I was able to do this).  Given the proliferation of information on the internet, it is continuously getting easier and easier to do this.

2. Academic writings, in spite of their vaunted air, are not perfect.  It is certainly tempting to see that something is highly researched and peer-reviewed and accept that as truth.  In reality though, the people who assemble such findings are just as biased, resource-starved, and imperfect as you or me.  I certainly give a lot of credence to what I read in academic publications, but it's good to play the part of the skeptic at least every now and then.

3. Findings that come from abnormalities in data need to be supported by some theoretical foundation.  Saying that it appears that there is a curvilinear relationship between leadership and intelligence because of the data is fine.  However, without some plausible explanation (or at least idea of how to determine an explanation), all it is is data.  The communication gap theory that I saw in other articles (mostly the ones that talk about data related to children) certainly could explain that relationship, but I never really saw the connection spelled out in what I read.

I very much enjoyed going through a little research project like this.  It shined the light on some of the great things about the academic world, while also putting some of its imperfection on display.  Most importantly, it got me a little bit closer to learning the truth about that which I set out to learn, and it showed me that I had the ability to do this.  Although the focus of college is often classes, grades, and extra-curriculars, this activity helped me get to the heart of what it's all about: the unabashed pursuit of knowledge.  I heartily recommend it if there's something that you want to learn more about.


Works cited:

Barron, F. and Harrington D.M. (1981).  "Creativity, intelligence and personality."  Annual Review of Psychology, 32, 439-476.

Bass, B.M. (1981).  Stogdill's Handbook of Leadership.  New York: Free Press.

Eichinger, Robert W, Michael M Lombardo, and Dave Ulrich (2006).  100 Things You Need to Know: Best People Practices for Managers and HR.  Lominger Limited Inc.

Ghiselli, E.E (1963a).  "The Vailidity of Management Traits in Relation to Occupational Level."  Personnel Psychology.  1963, 16, 109-113.

Ghiselli, E.E (1963b).  "Intelligence and Managerial Success."  Psychological Reports, 1963, 12.1, 898.

Gibb, CA (1969).  "Leadership." Handbook of Social Psychology (volume 4, ed 2).  Addison-Wesley.

Mann, RD (1959).  "A Review of the Relationships Between Personality and Performance in Small Groups."  Psychological Bulletin, 1959, 56, 241-270.

Simonton, DK (1976).  "Biographical Determinants of Achieved Eminence: A Multivariate Approach to the Cox Data."  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 33, 218-226.

Simonton, DK (1987).  "Developmental Antecedents of Achieved Eminence."  Annals of Child Development, 4, 131-169.

Stogdill, RM (1948).  "Personal Factors Associated with Leadership: A Survey of the Literature."  Journal of Psychology, 1948, 25, 35-71.