The philosophy of baseball

 If I were fabulously wealthy, I would endow a university center dedicated to the philosophy of baseball. The research faculty would include philosophers, statisticians, a psychologist or two and some baseball players.

The center’s project would be to study the gap between what we know and what we think we know. That question is too large to get a wrench on. I think we would do better if we confined ourselves to baseball.

The interest in baseball statistics is barely believable. We have statistics on launch angles and barrel rates of batters. 

I got interested belatedly, when the St. Louis Cardinals acquired Jhonny Peralta to play shortstop in 2014. Peralta did not look like a shortstop to me. He looked like a slow, but surehanded, third baseman. He had no range.

In trying to understand the Cardinals’ thinking, I discovered an online community of mostly young, tech-savvy, data-driven fans. Some of them explained that range was no longer relevant in considering the defensive abilities of infielders. So much was known about positioning that the fact that Peralta could not move to his left or his right was not a concern. The Cardinals had data on where their opponents were likely to hit the ball and would put Peralta in the right spot.

Defensive statistics were — and still are — in their infancy. After watching ground balls go through the infield for a couple of years, the Cardinals moved on.

But the passion for “data-driven decisions” about baseball has accelerated.

I think the Philosophy of Baseball Center could help. We humans use concepts in thinking about the world, and concepts have their own logic. Sometimes the assumptions underlying one concept conflict with those underlying another. More often, we are not aware of what the underlying assumption imply until we start to lose money on bad predictions.

If the experts at the Philosophy of Baseball Center could demonstrate why conceptual problems lead to flawed thinking about a fascinating but trivial subject, we might learn some lessons about how to think about serious problems.

But I’m not fabulously wealthy. Humanity and academia are spared.