The genius of Greg Maddux

Growing up a Cubs fan, Greg Maddux was my favorite Cub ever, and the day Larry Himes let Maddux slip away as a free agent to the Atlanta Braves over a few million dollars remains one of the great stains on a heavily bloodied Cubs flag. I was so angry I sulked for weeks like a child whose parents have divorced.

One of the reasons I loved watching Maddux pitch was how unconventional his style was. Standing just 6'0" and weighing only 170 lbs, he didn't throw hard, and perhaps none of his pitches would be graded by scouts as an 80 (though his changeup was exceptional). His greatest strengths were his brain and his poise.

Many stories have been written about his understanding of both pitching and the hitters he was facing, but a recent article by Thomas Boswell in the Washington Post pinpoints a fascinating insight that might hold the secret to his mastery.

First, Maddux was convinced no hitter could tell the speed of a pitch with any meaningful accuracy. To demonstrate, he pointed at a road a quarter-mile away and said it was impossible to tell if a car was going 55, 65 or 75 mph unless there was another car nearby to offer a point of reference.

“You just can’t do it,” he said. Sometimes hitters can pick up differences in spin. They can identify pitches if there are different releases points or if a curveball starts with an upward hump as it leaves the pitcher’s hand. But if a pitcher can change speeds, every hitter is helpless, limited by human vision.

“Except,” Maddux said, “for that [expletive] Tony Gwynn.”

Because of this inherent ineradicable flaw in hitters, Maddux’s main goal was to “make all of my pitches look like a column of milk coming toward home plate.” Every pitch should look as close to every other as possible, all part of that “column of milk.” He honed the same release point, the same look, to all his pitches, so there was less way to know its speed — like fastball 92 mph, slider 84, change-up 76.

 

From reading The Sports Gene by David Epstein earlier last year, I learned that much of what a professional baseball hitter does is predicated on being able to read the motion of the pitcher and the rotation of the baseball. It's why major league hitters flailed helplessly against Olympic women's softball pitcher Jennie Finch despite the fact that her pitches reached home plate in the same amount of time as major league pitches and came with the larger hittable surface area of a softball.

It seemed that Maddux knew that long before the studies mentioned in Epstein's book. Amazing. But that's not all.

Then he explained that I couldn’t tell his pitches apart because his goal was late quick break, not big impressive break. The bigger the break, the sooner the ball must start to swerve and the more milliseconds the hitter has to react; the later the break, the less reaction time. Deny the batter as much information — speed or type of last-instant deviation — until it is almost too late.

But not entirely too late: Maddux didn’t want swings and misses for strikeouts, but preferred weak defensive contact and easy outs. He sought pitches that looked hittable and identical — getting the hitter to commit to swing — but weren’t. Any pitch that didn’t conform to this, even if it looked good, was scrapped as inefficient.

 

It's another secret of pitching that he seemed to have understood long before others: the batter must commit to swinging or not before a major league pitch has made it halfway to the plate, so after a certain point any unanticipated break in that pitch is not something the batter can react to. On TV, his sinking fastball with armside tailing action was a thing of beauty to watch, like spherical frisbee that always toppled to one side, but to the batter it must have been even more infuriating, like trying to swat a fly with chopstick.

Maddux was so good at inducing the weak contact he discussed above that he had a stat named after him: a Maddux is a complete game shutout requiring no more than 99 pitches.

Let's hope he writes a book about pitching someday, the pitching version of Ted Williams famous tome on hitting.

Will Federer adapt?

In the past six months, Federer has beaten Juan Martin del Potro and taken sets from Rafa Nadal and Novak Djokovic. But he's also had some shocking results. He's not only losing now to guys who are younger and stronger. Hewitt, after all, is 32, the same age as Federer — in fact, a few months older than Federer. Tommy Robredo, who beat Federer at the U.S. Open in September, is 31. The problem isn't just that Federer has more days now where he wakes up with a stiff back or in need of an extra cup of coffee. The problem isn't just that his movement is a microsecond slower, or that he doesn't quite have the flexibility he once did, or that he doesn't anticipate as well as he did when he was dominant. It's not just his body. It's his head. The shanks are what you notice; that whiff is what you remember. But the shanks aren't why he lost that first set to Hewitt — nor why, after settling down, playing decently, and winning the second set, he went on to lose the match. He has lost because he bunted his returns and tried to rip his groundstrokes, and it was hard to see any purpose, any plan. The standard advice, almost always, for almost anyone, is to be aggressive, but the way he tried to be aggressive was bizarre. He took big risks at strange moments, unloading on forehands that should have been defensive shots. He mistook pace for boldness, ran through standard forehands, and seemed to have no clue what he wanted to do with the ball next. He lined up a rally ball and hit it two feet long and five feet wide. He hesitated before charging the net and then hit approach shots that turned him into a sitting duck. I'm being unfair — sort of. In the second set he found his range. But it wasn't enough. And when the pressure was on most, when he had break points on Hewitt's serve, his shots once again broke down.

 

Louisa Thomas in Grantland on Roger Federer.

Federer is old for a tennis player, and he also plays in one of the most competitive ages for men's tennis. What's difficult for an athlete, I imagine, because I am not one, must be facing up to the fact that one must change one's strategy because of the a decline in physical skills. Federer is not the tennis god he once was, and yet the memory of those days must still be so vivid. He's only 32, after all, he's not that many years removed from making the semifinals of every Grand Slam with frightening regularity.

But tennis is a game of slim margins. Winners of matches usually win by the slightest of margins on total points. In last year's U.S. Open, for example, in which Nadal beat Djokovic in four sets, Nadal won 121 points, Djokovic 102, and it was one of the more decisive Nadal wins versus the Djoker. Often just a few points separate the winner from the loser.

Federer's declining hand-eye coordination, stamina, and foot speed all mean that he can't beat other top players just by trying to outplay them in long rallies. The longer the rally, the more his physical deficits are likely to factor into the point's outcome. He has to be more clever, take more smart risks, try to shorten points.

In the past I've been skeptical that Federer would be willing to shift his strategy significantly, but he's at least said some of the right things following the worst year of his career since he ascended to the tennis elite. He's promised to serve and volley more this year. He hired serve and volley great Stefan Edberg as his coach. He's committed to using a larger 98-inch racket from Wilson this season.

I'm skeptical that attacking the net in the modern game is a winning strategy. With modern racket and string technology, it's much easier to pass than in previous ages of tennis, and Djokovic in particular has a devastating return. However, I'm glad to hear Federer acknowledge that he has to try something. I'd love to see him run around more backhands on his return and try to seize the advantage on points using his forehand which remains his most dangerous stroke, albeit not as reliable as in years past.

Changing one's strategy after achieving some level of success, to speak nothing of the historic greatness Federer put on his resume, is so difficult. Perhaps embracing his role as the underdog now will loosen him up to be a more dangerous opponent.

A more affordable, convenient way to measure V02 Max?

The iriverON Heart Rate Monitoring Bluetooth Headset makes a unique claim for a heart rate monitor, at least that I've seen: it can measure V02 Max.

V02 Max is a measurement of the maximum oxygen your body can deliver to its muscles and consume during exertion. Usually, to test this figure, you have to go a lab where they put a mask over your face and have you run on a treadmill. Aerobic exercise can improve your V02 Max.

Endurance athletes bandy V02 Max figures about like bodybuilders discuss body fat percentages or basketball players discuss vertical leaps. The average person has a V02 Max in the 30 to 40 range (ml/kg/min). As a point of comparison, some of the great aerobic athletes of all time have had tested V02 Max of 80 and higher. Miguel Indurain, the great cyclist, was said to have confirmed V02 Max of 88.

There is more to being world class at a sport than just a high V02 Max, one's lactate threshold matters, too, but to date only professional or very serious athletes have had access to regular V02 Max testing during training. I've always been curious to see where I stack up and how my figure shifts from working out, but traveling to a testing facility and paying hundreds of dollars for each test has always been prohibitive.

I have no idea how accurate the iriverON measure of V02 Max is, but I'm going to give it a try and will report back here. The methodology is one I've never heard of; CEO Steven LeBoeuf (no relation to Shia, I hope), explains in this post: 

Valencell has designed a highly miniaturized sensor module that is capable of fitting inside virtually any earbud or audio headset. The sensor module shines light into the ear region and measures how this light interacts with blood flow.  

This information is then processed by novel signal extraction algorithms to pull out blood flow information (which is actually very faint) from what amounts to be an incredible amount of noise.  For example, the signal from blood flow is more than 100-1,000 times weaker than the signal coming from motion noise and environmental noise (like sunlight).    

Next, Valencell’s novel algorithms process this information into important vital signs metrics, such as heart rate, respiration rate, energy expenditure, and more. These vital signs metrics are then sent wirelessly to select smartphone applications (Android and iOS devices) that generate real-time fitness assessments such as  resting heart rate, training load, VO2max, personalized heart rate zones, and recovery time. 

 

I have yet to hear of a more convenient way to measure one's lactate threshold that doesn't involve running on a treadmill and continually pricking your fingertip to draw blood.

More lessons in human-computer team-ups

"I don't know if you know anything about Six Sigma," Coombs asked rhetorically. "a human being is at best a 2-sigma machine. Which means that humans get things right 92 to 93 percent of the time."

 

From Alexis Madrigal's piece on telemarketing “robots.” It turns out the robotic Samantha West who telephoned a Time reporter was a telemarketer choosing pre-recorded audio clips from a sound board using call assist software that is increasingly popular in the industry.

Madrigal raises two other great points in his investigation of this industry that Samantha West brought into the limelight.

"The impact on the people was really dramatic. It was one of the things we didn't expect," Bills told me. "In outbound sales, it knocked our turnover from 400 percent a year to 135 to 140 percent. And it dramatically changed the characteristics of employing people."

To be clear, 140 percent turnover is about on par with the fast-food industry. The paragons of employee retention keep their numbers in the single digits. These are still hard jobs. 

But maybe this technology makes it a little bit easier. 

"It creates detachment," Bills said. "What we see is that our employees, when they have a successful outcome of the call, they take pride in operating the system effectively. When it doesn't work, they say, 'Ahhh that wasn't me.' It doesn't beat people up in the same way."

The machine absorbs some of the "emotional wear and tear" that comes with the job. CallAssistant can even employ people full time because the "shift fatigue" that hits other outbound telemarketing firms doesn't set in in quite the same way. 

* * *

Though no one quite puts it this way, the number-one selling point for the soundboard technology is obvious to Filipino telemarketers: Americans' xenophobia. We want to hear from people who sound just like us. 

 

Anyone who's ever worked in telemarketing (I've made fundraising calls in college and for the Obama campaign) knows you already work off a script, so it's entirely shocking that the industry would transition to using pre-recorded audio clips.

One thing I thought when watching the Spike Jonze movie Her is how humans have a finite amount of love and attention to give and how computers can increase the supply in the world by a near infinite degree. For humans to accept it, though, we have to shift our conception of the definition of love. How much do you value someone's love because you know it's finite and they've chosen to give that precious resource to you? It sounds selfish but it may be wired in our DNA. [SPOILER ALERT for those of who haven't seen Her, skip the rest of this paragraph]. When Joaquin Phoenix's Theodore finds out his operating system Samantha is carrying on love affairs with hundreds of others, he doesn't rejoice at the amazing leverage and increased supply of love in the world, he reacts like a jealous lover, to no human's surprise. An economist might be disheartened, though.

I'm reminded of Joe Pantoliano in The Matrix: “You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy, and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realise? Ignorance is bliss.”