The death of momentum

As Ian Dury once said, there ain't half been some clever bastards, and one of them is Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002, even though he's not an economist, he's a psychologist.

Kahneman is the star of Michael Lewis's piece in the new issue of Vanity Fair, a story that fills in a little hole drilled by Lewis's book Moneyball. Kahneman, as you might expect of a man who knocked off a Nobel in his spare time, had the answer to a question that Moneyball left hanging, namely, why, if baseball coaches had spent their entire lives watching baseball, had they got player selection wrong so often, and by so much?

The solution lay in cognitive psychology and something Kahneman called 'the availability heuristic', which was the notion that human judgement is often based on the most easily recalled information. He explained this by means of one of his experiments: a roulette wheel was rigged to stop on one of two numbers, 10 or 65. Kahneman asked the groups he assembled in front of the wheel to write down the number they saw. He then asked them an unrelated question: 'What is your best guess of the percentage of African nations in the UN?'

The average answer of the groups whose wheel landed on 10 was 25 per cent, and of the groups who landed on 65 was 45 per cent. In other words, the unrelated number affected their guess.

Kahneman called this 'the anchoring effect'. He conducted lots of other strange experiments too, like creating a character called Linda, who 'was bright, majored in philosophy and who was deeply concerned with discrimination and social justice'. He asked his subjects which statement was more true: i] Linda is a bank teller ii] Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. Eighty-five per cent of people opted for number ii even though it is logically impossible [if number ii is true, then number i must be equally true].

Daniel Kahneman developed all of this stuff into 'prospect theory' which was about economics and ultimately, many years later, won him the big one. A Harvard undergraduate called Paul DePodesta, who had been hired by Billy Beane at the Oakland As, became interested in it. Along with Bill James, their maverick statistician, they exploited the 'willful ignorance' of the baseball player market, and revolutionised the way the game was measured.

Michael Lewis thought of all of this when he stumbled on a letter written to him in 1985 by Bill James. 'Baseball men have an entire vocabulary of completely imaginary concepts used to tie together chance groupings,' James wrote. 'It includes momentum, confidence, seeing the ball well, slumps, guts, clutch ability, being hot and my all-time favourite, intangibles'.

Kahneman's work seemed to answer Bill James's question. Baseball coaches often based their judgement on nebulous concepts and 'instincts' rather than empirical evidence of the kind rooted out by Bill James.

Cricket does it too. Australia dropped Simon Katich for being too old in the face of all available evidence: in the previous three years, he was the only Australian batsman to average over 50, had scored more runs, home and away, than anyone else, and two payers who kept their places, Ponting and Hussey, were older than Katich. There are plenty of other examples: how long did Steve Harmison's 7-12 affect opinion of his game?

During an insane day at Newlands yesterday, when Australia were bowled out for 284 and then South Africa were bowled out for 96 and Australia's second innings score stood at 21-9, Robin Jackman asserted on commentary that 'South Africa have the momentum here'.

How did Jackman make that judgement? Probably because, in his mind, South Africa taking 9-21 was further forward than the knowledge that Australia were 209 runs ahead on a day when 20 wickets had fallen for 128 runs.

Momentum is king of those nebulous concepts affected by the availability heuristic. In truth, not even Daniel Kahneman could tell you what's going to happen at Newlands today, other than that someone's going to win, because there's almost nothing to compare it with. Try one for yourself: Next time Australia bat, which will be in Johannesburg, how many do you reckon they'll score? Not that easy is it, when your availability heuristic is all over the place.

Andy Flower plays the Moneyball card

It's no secret that Andy Flower is a Moneyball guy, a fan of Michael Lewis's book on Billy Beane and the Oakland As baseball team - an underfunded and unfashionable franchise made into winners by Beane's attention to statistical detail.

Peter Moores turned Flower onto Beane's methods, which worked because he realised that traditional baseball stats like Runs Batted In weren't particularly effective in measuring performance, even though everyone in the game used them and had done for a century. Some fans of fantasy baseball found better ones to run their teams, and Beane employed them to analyse players for him.

Ever since Lewis's book, every sport has tried to find its version of Moneyball. Andy Flower found Nathan Leamon, a mathematician from Cambridge University who was also a qualified coach, and provided a well-funded black-ops stats department at the ECB for him to use [it's easy to imagine A-Flo wrapping an arm around Nathan's shoulders and telling him to 'think the unthinkable...']. Flower has been even more guarded than usual when he's been asked about the numbers being run, saying only that the work was 'very interesting' - at least until last weekend, and piece by Simon Wilde in the Sunday Times.

Wilde's story [unfortunately behind the humble Rupert's paywall] revealed something of Leamon's methods. The boy's gone to town and then some. England's enthusiasm for Hawkeye extends way beyond the DRS - they've used to it log and analyse every ball delivered in Test match cricket around the world in the last five years.

With access to such vast data they now run simulations of every Test match they play, taking into account venue, conditions, selection and pitch. Leamon reckons that such 'games', when he checks them against the actual matches, 'are accurate to within four or five percent'.

Other work has been in breaking down pitches in areas for bowlers to aim at: Leamon claims England's palpable success against Sachin Tendulkar was due in part to statistical analysis that showed Sachin made the bulk of his runs on the leg side until he reached fifty.

'It's all about asking the right questions,' Leamon told Wilde, 'which can be the short cut to six months of work. A lot of the old ways of looking at the technique of opponents leads to guesswork - feet position, how they hold the bat. Hawkeye enables you to come up with answers'.

Unlikely though it is that Flower and Leamon would reveal much of what they know to a newspaper, it is nonetheless strangely comforting that five years of work has simply produced a shortcut to knowledge rather than anything more revelatory, because if the numbers had unpicked the game, had stripped it back to a simple series of probabilities, some of its deep and human mysteries would have been lost.

Moneyball worked for Billy Beane in part because every franchise plays hundreds of games per season and the vast majority aren't watched by the other coaches and teams. Test matches are much rarer things, and are more closely observed. And Moneyball only really worked until all of the other teams knew about it and started using the same information. Once they did, the variables of power and money that Beane had overcome reasserted themselves.

Baseball is also a more mechanical game than cricket. The batter only really has one swing, so his ability to adapt is compromised to a far greater degree than, say, Tendulkar's who, lest we forget, once made a double hundred in Australia without hitting a single cover drive - on purpose. The numbers are beautiful and fascinating, but as Rahul Dravid said last week, cricket is a game 'played in the space of the mind', and that is more fascinating and beautiful still.

The harsh and strange lessons of Moneyball

Billy Beane, the hero of Michael Lewis's revelatory book Moneyball, should have been a superstar. He was a natural, a baseball player so gifted that scouts came from across America to his high school field just to watch him train. He looked a billion dollars. He was a first round draft pick for the New York Mets in 1980. 

And then he played 148 games in six seasons for four different teams. He hit a career total of three home runs. 

Billy would have been just another schoolboy phenomenon who couldn't cut it in the major leagues had he not absorbed the lesson of his own life. Instead, he realised that how baseball looked wasn't necessarily how baseball really was. 

He became general manager of the Oakland As in 1997 and proceeded to pull off the greatest ongoing giant-killing in sport by recognising that conventional wisdom meant very little in an organic, living game. 

Baseball runs on stats. Ultimately, teams, players, eras are defined by them. And Billy worked out that the stats used in baseball were wrong. Or at least, they were out of date. Standard measures like RBIs and stolen bases were relics of a bygone age. Their usage led enormously rich teams to waste huge amounts of money and time on players that would never deliver. 

Beane found his new measures of success or failure in a fanboy's book of geeky stats called Baseball Abstract. He began working with a new set of standards named sabermetrics. With them, he discovered that many effective players were being rejected by other teams because they looked weird and ugly, and because they weren't successful by the old measures. The Oakland As ended up with a bunch of cheap rejects who consistently outperformed the market. Beane now co-owns the team. He is a superstar at last. Everyone in baseball uses sabermetrics.

Baseball was reshaped by many things: the size, strength and athleticism of its players (and, it should be noted, rampant steroid use), and external factors like the demands of TV. It took 37 years for Roger Maris's single-season home run record of 61 to be broken, but once Mark McGwire had done it, it was broken twice more in three years. As soon as players understood what was possible, they went and did it.

Cricket's reshaping is happening much more quickly. Imran Nazir just got 111 from 44 balls in the ICL final, and it doesn't even seem that extraordinary any more. 

The lesson of Moneyball is, what are the stats that define this new game? Strike rate during powerplays? Economy rate whilst bowling second? Boundaries to balls faced ratio? The Batsman doesn't know, but I don't think it's the establishment that are going to find them. So it's over to the geeks and the freaks. The answers are out there.

England's limited over sides seem a little like the baseball teams that Billy Beane overcame. It's not that they're not thinking, it's just that they're not thinking the right things. Beane thought differently and came up with a team full of unfashionable freaks.

Napier, Mascarenhas, Rashid, Panesar, Wright, Key... who knows? But Moores doesn't have much longer to find out. Beane used his stats to develop and drive a philosophy on playing the game. What's Peter's?

NB: KP's post-matchers just get better. Today's was along the lines of: 'okay, we were thrashed, but we were less thrashed than last time...' Accentuate the positives, chap.