In the excellent, thought-provoking book Mind Game, the authors debunk one of the classic sporting fallacies, namely that a fight or brawl can motivate a team to play better in the games following the brawl. In a relatively exhaustive analysis of the brawls between the Yankees and the Red Sox, they show that there is no truth to this fallacy. Yet, this myth persists. In a theme that we will stress over and over in this blog the conventional wisdom is simply wrong.

The main reason is psychological; everyone wants to understand the world, yet not everyone has the knowledge or acuity to do so. In the absence of a proper understanding of how things really work, one merely devises an explanation that fits into their knowledge and experience, rather than trying to add knowledge. Here are three examples, one from baseball:

1. A slot machine player claims that “the machine is fixed.” In a sense this is true; but not in the sense that the player means. Since the player does not understand how a random number generator works, they lack the knowledge to understand what has happened. Similarly, when a slot player hits for 100 coins, they say “if only I played another coin I would have won more,” ignorant of the fact that in the time it takes to put in another coin the random number generator will have cycled through 10,000 different outcomes.

2. The current conventional wisdom on bullpen usage is far from an optimal pattern. Virtually every team uses their bullpen to maximize saves rather than to win. There are lots of reasons for this, which are beyond the scope of this post; there are many sources of analysis of bullpen usage. The point here is that the collective wisdom of managers is simply faulty; they “know” that only a pitcher of unique toughness and mental strength can pitch in the ninth inning despite copious evidence to the contrary.

3. There are a great many people who believe in outright frauds like the psychics John Edwards, Sylvia Browne and Uri Geller, to name some of the more famous psychic charlatans. It boggles the mind that even desperate police will seek out these con artists. Since they do not understand how these despicable individuals ply their trade through techniques like “cold reading” they merely believe they can speak with the dead.

So, we can see that it is not limited to just baseball. But baseball has plenty of such fallacies, the Mind Game example being just one. There will be many we discuss here in the future, but one that I wanted to address is one that I mentioned in an recent post on being an expert; the myth that players hit worse with two strikes. But before you read further, try to come up with the answer.

Essentially, the conventional wisdom is that the pitcher getting two strikes is a huge advantage. In fact you often will see or hear someone spout stats like “player X bats .300 with zero or one strike but only .130 with two strikes.” The conventional wisdom here is wrong for the same reasons that people believe in psychics and believe that casinos cheat them; namely their myopia and refusal to seek additional knowledge blinds them to what is really happening. It is easier to believe what one is told.

The simple and theoretically obvious answer is that one can only strikeout with two strikes!! So, in the case of player X, he may have 500 AB’s with 100 strikeouts, just to pick some easy numbers. In that case he will have 100 more outs with two strikes than without two strikes simply because one cannot strike out without two strikes. The hitter doesn’t get worse; it is just a simple matter of arithmetic.

A General will not merely uncritically examine what he or she is told. Conventional wisdom is often merely the collective fallacy of the masses. But just because many believe that a proposition is true doesn’t mean you need to. One of the hallmarks of expertise is independent thought. To the true Fantasy General this is a potent weapon. A General does not substitute superstition for analysis; a point that is relevant not just to baseball.