This version from Buffet starts to hit on a piece of the original Ted Williams version that might not be apparent for non-baseball fans.
Williams is measuring batting average which is the number of hits divided by the number of at bats. Hits come on a single pitch but at bats are a collection of pitches. Therefore a pitch location for an at bat isn't really something that makes sense. This ends up biasing the results.
You see the pitches in the middle of the zone are not just red because it is easier to hit balls in that location, although that is certainly part of it. Another factor is how those pitches fit into an overall at bat. Pitches aren't thrown at random parts of the zone. There is a strategy to when they are thrown in what location. Pitchers will often only intentionally throw the ball in the middle of the zone when they are behind in the count and are trying not to walk the batter. The batter know this so he is able to anticipate pitches in the center of the zone when he has the advantage. By ignoring balls thrown to his weaker areas, he often is able to get ahead of the pitcher which creates a multiplier and allows him to hit the ball even better when it is in those locations in which he already excels.
Knowing his weaknesses allowed Williams to minimize the situations in which those weaknesses would come into play. That allows him to focus on his strengths and actually increase the number of opportunities that he had to act on those strengths. It is the equivalent of Buffett benefiting from compound interest that gives him more capital to invest the more successful his investments are.
> By ignoring balls thrown to his weaker areas, he often is able to get ahead of the pitcher...
Shouldn't this strategy tend get him behind in the count, not ahead? Since he'll be giving up more strikes. To get ahead he needs to avoid swinging at pitches outside the zone, but that's a trivially good strategy - if you can tell which pitches those are in time to not swing.
I guess what you're getting at is that pitches aimed at the edge of the strike zone are more likely to miss it. So there's a double advantage in not swinging at pitches away from the centre of the stroke zone - they might be called balls, and if you do swing you won't be very successful statistically anyway.
The reasons are twofold. Like you mentioned a pitcher's aim isn't perfect. Also a batter isn't perfect at reading pitches. A pitch aimed at the bottom of the strike zone might miss accidentally. Or a pitch like a curveball can be aimed below the strike zone but it appears to the batter to be a strike only for it to drop and end up outside the zone. Not swinging at these seemingly borderline pitches results in a lot more pitches being called balls.
Also pitches thrown in these tough to hit locations will often result in bad contact. Bad contact is generally worse than a strike. A ball that is weakly hit into play will almost always result in an out. A strike will only result in an out when there are already 2 strikes. Therefore swinging at fewer pitches means the batter sees more pitches and gets deeper into counts. The batter will therefore have more late counts in which they are ahead simply due to fewer at bats being ended prematurely.
Also, more pitches increases the chances of a bad pitch )a hanger, etc) and if you create a reputation for having a good eye, umpires will give the hitter the benefit of doubt on borderline pitches (I have no idea how this works now that they have robots calling balls and strikes, but it’d be nice if they kept some of the inexactness that “engages” people more.
>I have no idea how this works now that they have robots calling balls and strikes
They don't yet have robots calling the balls and strikes. In spring training this year they tested out a system to notify the umpires of the robotic balls and strike calls, but the umpire had the ability to overrule the automated system. That isn't used in the general season yet although many expect it is only a matter of time. Currently the umpires are graded on a regular basis compared to their performance versus a computerized system which has resulted in calls improving consistently over the last decade plus of baseball.
However you are certainly right that this approach can compound in a lot of interesting ways including an ump giving the benefit of the doubt. There is a perhaps apocryphal of a catcher complaining about a call that Williams received only for the ump to respond "If Mr. Williams didn’t swing at it, it wasn’t a strike."[1]
"low and away" is a weak spot for almost any hitter. The challenge for a pitcher is to actually hit that spot.
Ted Williams batted as a lefty. Most everything a right-handed pitcher throws has a tendency to trail leftward. A slight mistake and you've got something he will hit very hard.
Very difficult to execute because you have to get good at reading these pitches almost while they’re still in the arm of the pitcher, often starting your swing as they get released. A fastball is in the air for about 400ms or less before it crosses the plate.
It's also worth noting that pitchers will sometimes purposely throw pitches outside the strike zone in an attempt to get the batter to swing and miss. This usually happens when the pitcher is already ahead in the count, but not always.
“Science of investing.” Warren Buffett is rich because he bought companies and removed redundancies / restructured management, therefore making companies more profitable at the cost of decreased diversity of ownership of businesses. It’s a similar tack as globalism, where “stuff” gets slightly cheaper while jobs are shipped away.
If he did restructure the companies he bought, he would definitely not be alone in that. I'd always heard (though I haven't looked it up) that he tried not to fiddle with the management of companies, since good management was one of the reasons he'd bought them. In any case, no other investor who sweeps out existing management and removes redundancy is the most successful investor in history, so Buffett must at least be doing something else.
There are two well researched biographies of Buffett, The Making of an American Capitalist and The Snowball. Your characterization of his investments doesn’t match the narrative in either book.
I'd been using a baseball metaphor for my own change in strategy recently.
I don't think I'm meant to hit home runs. I don't mean just that the luck hasn't struck. It's more that I don't feel particularly connected to the mainstream and where they are headed, am sort of unreasonable about how I think the world should work in a way that makes me the opposite of a heat seeking missile, don't love scalable acts like creating a business that can scale on top of cookie-cutter jobs or on top of advertising or virality.
And sure, maybe I'll get lucky, and I'll get to that. But I decided to stop going up to the plate trying to hit a home run.
When I had venture capital, I thought I was Barry Bonds. But now that I don't, I realized I'm Tony Gwynn.
I go up to the plate trying to hit a single. If I have a runner on base, I try to move them over.
For my intention, a single is a business that will generate $10k in profit, has the potential to continue for several years, and can be completely run by other people, leaving me with time to go up to the plate again.
What I found last year is that I have enough time/energy to attempt about six singles and that I connected on three of them. And it feels similar this year.
You can score a lot of runners just by hitting singles and I think there's a better chance that will happen for me than when I was trying to hit home runs.
The driving force for me though was wanting different optimizations. It's depressing to strike out year after year. And so hitting singles has a lot more positive reinforcement. And then two, I wanted to make more money, which has happened because these singles pay off immediately.
Last, there is always the possibility of an inside the park homerun. Maybe I'll hit a line drive to the outfield, the fielder will kick the ball, lose track of it, chase it down, overthrow third, and I'll come running home.
It's a great analogy - and glad to hear of the success.
And while "all or nothing" is better for an investor (since it still costs them their time to be invested), consistent hits is probably the better option for an entrepreneur. Steady income, not to mention getting feedback on how to refine your craft along the way.
Exactly. One thing I like about both Gwynn and Ichiro is that they were technicians. A single is analyzable in a way that you can nearly feel like you can understand it.
A home run, especially a Venture-backed home run, is a mystery with a lot of luck that defies logic or analysis.
Once you realize the only important thing in baseball is getting on base the means by which you do it doesn't matter and you can't lose if you only ever get on base.
Wild to see this on HN. I'm a huge baseball nut and Ted Williams was my father's hero so naturally I learned a lot about him as a kid.
I believe this image is from his book The Science of Hitting.
Williams has a fairly fascinating biography and I'd encourage people to browse his story a bit. A few interesting things about him:
- He served in both World War II and the Korean War. During the latter, he crash landed his plane after it took heavy fire.
- He was an amazing angler and at times held tarpon or bonefish records. I believe he's also in the fishing hall of fame.
- He was actually a terrible baseball manager. Most people attribute this to giving no attention to pitchers and not being able to handle that his players simply weren't as gifted or as disciplined as him.
- He was the last player to have a batting average > .400 for a full season [1] but amazingly did not win the Most Valuable Player award that year. It went to Joe DiMaggio.
And regarding his military service, he lost three years of his prime to World War II, and another two-ish years to Korea. He put up 11 WAR in the years before and after WW II. Had he kept that pace from '43-'45 and put up decent years in '52 & '53 he'd be in the argument for greatest of all time.
His career WAR was about 130. Ruth's was about 168. It's entirely possible he would have reached 168 had he not lost those years.
Well put. My dad would say (pre-WAR) that it cost him at least 100-150 home runs, likely putting him ahead of Willie Mays and behind only Ruth and Aaron (among pre-steroid era players).
Yes, he was an asshole. Yes, he took steroids. But this idea that he suddenly became good (or that steroids make anyone "good" in baseball) goes too far. It certainly allowed him to stretch his career out, but as a guy who grew up cheering for Bonds since he was a young man playing for the Pirates, who wouldn't want that?
My point here is to have a look at some of his career in earnest. He was always a fantastic ball player (led the league in OPS from 1990-1994). His 28-year-old campaign in 1993 was one for the ages, long before the steroid controversies. But his record-setting seasons are video game level. He was intentionally walked 120 times in 2004!
I don't think anyone has ever argued steroids made Bonds good (IMHO he was already a first ballot HOFer). It's pretty well understood that they aid in recovery. Bonds' most transcendent stretch came when most ballplayer's production is falling off or completely disappearing.
He put up 47 WAR during his age 37-41 seasons. That's unheard of. Given those seasons coincide with when he was using the cream and the clear, it's fair to call into question some of his counting numbers.
Being charitable, let's say he would have put up 23 WAR during those seasons[0]. That would leave him about 140 career WAR and around 660 HRs. That's solid Mays territory.
He would still be in the conversation for best ever. Mays certainly is. So it comes down to how you value those steroid seasons. Some folks want to throw it all out. Some folks (HOF voters) want to subtract points. Some folks think it didn't matter. We can never know. Just like we can never know how Ruth would have done in an integrated league.
[0] Given what we know about aging curves this is unlikely. But Bonds was a special athlete and it's not totally unheard of for players that age to have really good seasons.
Last player to have a batting average >.400 is what he's famous for but in the last few decades (as "Moneyball"-style analytics took over the sport) "on-base percentage" is now generally considered a better measure. Ted Williams is the all-time career leader with .4817 and led the league in it a record twelve times (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Baseball_... )
Not the point of this post, but I may as well ask, what makes someone an "amazing angler"? I mostly associate Ted Williams with god-tier hand-eye coordination, which doesn't seem readily applicable to fishing?
Well fly fishing in general is an activity that requires a good amount of coordination and practice to do well.
For Williams specifically, I think it was essentially him applying the same perfectionism, discipline and scientific approach to it as he did to hitting a ball.
Back to your question, I think its about "sportfishing"–that is, going after certain fish with certain gear, fishing in tournaments, holding records, etc. It's a thing (see https://igfa.org/)
Agreed that you probably want to change it back. The original posted the quote alongside it which was his philosophy at hitting, which can be applied to life in general. And Warren Buffett explicitly called out that philosophy as his approach to investing (which is why this was posted).
The new link is just an article about infographics about baseball. Completely useless outside of baseball - mainly now just trivia about an athlete.
Original link, and a comment with the link to higher resolution is best option.
I like this kind of technical technique break down in sports. It's interesting how you can break down a problem into a system like this and then focus on that system as a way to improve. It's similar to improving optimal outcomes in other systems, like driving more engagement in your app, improving uptime of your service, improving the speed at which your product flies off of shelves at the supermarket, improving your performance in a video game, or how optimal your shipping pipeline is from your manufacturing hub.
It's just a very neat thing to do, figure out what your problem is, whatever it may be, in a way that you explain a path to improving outcomes.
I find that it's almost impossible to appreciate and enjoy a sport until I start learning the technical pieces that determine decisions.
Football is full of all of these random plays that make no sense. Until you learn things about how clock management works. Then they become very tense and exciting.
The problem I have with baseball is that all of the minor strategic decisions are there, but you are talking about subtle changes that affect probability by a few percentage points. And that can take an entire series of games to see play out.
It takes way more than a series for it to even out, it's why they play 162 games. Even then it's not enough. A completely average team could win anywhere from 68-92 games, the difference between a bottom dweller and a division winner. There's a lot of luck involved.
Yup. As Tommy Lasorda famously said, "No matter how good you are, you're going to lose one-third of your games. No matter how bad you are, you're going to win one-third of your games. It's the other third that makes the difference."
Of course, the Mets went 40-120 in '62. I'm fairly certain the Orioles didn't win a third of their games for the last couple of seasons either. But it's not as nice to say you're going to win one-fourth of your games.
Soccer is similar in that there is a tremendous amount of "luck" involved. Only a couple of goals are scored in a typical match, so teams can play excellent soccer for 90 minutes and still lose because a ball broke the wrong way.
I think what's fun about that is that it mimics business (and life) much more. You have limited control over a few key factors, luck plays a large role, but if you play smart, you can see things break your way over a long period of time.
And of course this is how e.g. the Premier League and other top soccer leagues are scored - so that the best team emerges over the long term rather than in a noisy single-elimination playoff system. Which makes underdog stories like the 2015-16 Leicter City season all the more unbelievable and magical [1].
> but if you play smart, you can see things break your way over a long period of time
Which brings to mind a great quip attributed to Gary Player (the multi Grand Slam winning golfer / peer to Palmer & Nicklaus) which goes,
"I've found that the harder I practice, the luckier I get."
And as anyone who knows golf knows, the game is rife with unknown unknowns and butterfly effect types of outcomes; but over time those nearly infinitesimal improvements move the deterministic needle in ways that change your score.
Hopefully, if a fan understands this, they'll get less angry when their team's clean up batter takes a close strike 3 instead of swinging at a pitch that has a high chance of ending up as a double play.
It's just a very neat thing to do, figure out what your problem is, whatever it may be, in a way that you explain a path to improving outcomes.
You just want to make sure that a path to improving in one thing doesn't decrease your performance elsewhere, ala the project management triangle (which is just one example).
I know my strike zone. When a project gets handed my way that I know is not suited to my strengths/job description and lines up particularly well with someone else's on the team, I communicate that to my manager. Unfortunately, my manager is batting 1.000 when it comes to ignoring me :). I don't even get a token "this is something I need you to improve in".
If I wasn't so busy or if every project wasn't "highest priority", it might not matter as much.
"My assessment of the priority is A, B, C. I only have time to work on A, B. I am going to let TPTB know that I am focused on these, and that C isn't getting my time. Let me know if you disagree with my prioritization, but otherwise, this is how I plan to manage the situation."
That's another great approach. In almost every case this has happened to me simply pointing out that you cannot have everything as top priority caused the manager to reassess.
I'm surprised by the "The Slight Upswing is Best" graphic. I understand Cub-Scout-softball-playing-me isn't any example at all for what a professional-league baseball player should do, but I always internalized swinging up and through the pitch, and I was the best batter in my league. Is (or was) there some explanation for why you would want to swing flat at a ball?
You'll notice in the bottom right of the graphic that it says "*exaggerated". Timing is important - the bat is not presented at a constant angle to the ball despite what the graphic implies! You could hit the ball 500 feet but on the wrong side of the foul pole, and you've accomplished nothing.
Modern baseball analytics places a very high value on the the "Three true outcomes" [1]. Batters are "optimizing" for the exit angle of the ball leaving the bat - we're in a juiced ball era (perhaps even a juiced batter era) and home runs are valued very highly. You'll notice that strikeouts are also setting records. Nobody seems to care as much about ground balls or line drives and that seems to be what a "flatter" swing gives you. If we were playing with the same baseball as Ted Williams played with, you'd have a lot more fly ball outs. I'm pretty sure that his "slight upswing" was actually very slight compared to current players.
That's a great batter's point of view. Here's a pitcher's POV [0], a poster breaking down the different pitches. ”Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing.“
Baseball is probably the most intellectual of the sports. There's a lot of strategy in it. The fielders are reading the signs the catcher gives the pitcher too so they have some idea of what to expect. The game is ultimately about pitching more than anything else as opposed to softball, which is a superficially similar game but the game is much more about batting and fielding.
https://omaha.com/money/buffett/warren-buffett-waits-for-a-f...
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4157066-science-of-investin...