Measuring Good: Sabermetrics and Spiritual Insight

If you have followed my blog or Facebook, and are not living under a rock, you know that I am a bit bleary-eyed today. The Cubs made history last night, ending the longest (by forty years) championship drought in modern sports. After 108 years, the Cubs are champs. This morning a friend (and LA Dodgers fan) asked me what I will do now that THIS season is over. I replied "Wait 'till next year!" The traditional Cubs-fan greeting has a different ring to it now. I can't wait!

I have one more piece of my own on the Neshama (soul) of Baseball. It will run tomorrow morning. First, I want to bring this terrific piece to your attention. This, appropriately, arrived from eJewishPhilanthropy this morning. Warning: it is based on some seriously nerdy Baseball thought. It is also, I think, brilliant. Stick with it. Rabbi Harris brings home in the end.

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The Neshama of Baseball, Part IV

Measuring Good:
Sabermetrics and Spiritual Insight

By Rabbi Maurice Harris

If Sabermetrics was a religion, Bill James would be the Messiah who was sent to reveal the Truth, Billy Beane his first prophet, and Theo Epstein the current High Priest of the Temple of Baseball. And if you have no idea what the previous sentence means, then permit this humble rabbi to invite you to into the garden of baseball nerdery.

I’ll start with a story: in the 1970s, while working as a night shift security guard, Bill James developed an alternative set of stats for baseball called Sabermetrics – an unorthodox analytical model worthy of Nate Silver. For many years, James’ ideas were only known to a tiny group of extreme baseball junkies. The story of how Sabermetrics was finally embraced by a major league team’s general manager, Billy Beane, is wonderfully told in Michael Lewis’ 2003 bestseller, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” and the 2011 movie it inspired.

Beane’s dilemma was that the team he was responsible for building, the Oakland A’s, didn’t have the money to compete for the free agents who were the best players. Beane was a Bill James fan with a small budget and nothing to lose. He concluded that if James’ stats were actually better at predicting success than the traditionally used stats, then maybe he could build a winning team by acquiring overlooked players that traditional scouts would miss – players whose Sabermetric stats were cream of the crop. He did, and the A’s went on to become the winningest team in baseball for a good stretch of years.

Finally, there’s Theo Epstein, who’s in the sports headlines these days. He’s the Sabermetrics whiz kid who applied James’ model to the Boston Red Sox, finally ending their long championship drought. He’s spent the last five years doing the same with the World Series Champion Chicago Cubs.

So what’s spiritual about all this? I promise, we’ll get there, but stay with me a bit longer.

Sabermetrics works by applying probability math to a very large amount of baseball data. It claims to deliver a higher probability of winning games over a long stretch of time. The regular baseball season is 162 games long, and typically the best teams at the season’s end win no more than 60% of their games, and the worst teams no fewer than 40%.

Applied over many seasons, the model has produced impressive results. For the first 10 years the A’s used Sabermetrics, their winning percentage was 52.1%. That may not sound that amazing, but it actually is. Historically, out of 30 major league teams and over 100 years of stats, there are only 3 teams with a higher all-time winning percentage – the Yankees (56.9%), the Giants (53.8%), and the Dodgers (52.5%). The team with the worst overall record throughout its history, the Tampa Bay Rays, still has won over 46% of its games.

Now, finally, we come to the spiritual insight in all this baseball meshugas.

Judaism is an optimistic yet realistic tradition. Every High Holy Days, we’re reminded of the sages’ teaching that we should all think of ourselves as people who probably do roughly the same amount of good deeds and bad, and that by taking a moral inventory and doing teshuvah, we have the power to tip the evenly balanced scales towards the good. We’re also taught that the world is profoundly broken, but that we collectively have the power to improve it. And, at least in liberal Judaism, we tend to believe that the world includes accidents, random events, and uncertainty.

Judaism’s attitude towards the power we have as human beings to improve the world is very sabermetrical. This is true of individuals and it is true of our organizations and congregations. If a group of us works hard to do good in a proven effective way, does that mean good outcomes will happen next week? Who knows? Too small a sample set. But if we stick with it over the long haul, our faith is that the cumulative effect will bend the moral arc towards righteousness.

This isn’t to claim that all the world’s problems can, or should, be addressed with comfortable incrementalism. That would be a misunderstanding of the Judeo-Sabermetric Tradition! Global warming needs dramatic action, for example, in part because we’re reaping the awful harvest of many decades of harm.

No, the faith of the rabbinic Sabermetrician is a faith that accepts the existential fact that even if we do the most good that we could conceivably do to address a great problem, the probability is that we only improve the odds of success by a few percentage points. For those of us worried about climate change, we have to reckon with the possibility that even if the entire world suddenly cooperates with massive clean energy reforms, we may be too late to avert lasting terrible consequences. That said, our best chance at making the world a better place, whether regarding global warming or, say, Jewish engagement, is for us to develop the most effective strategy to improve the situation and then implement it with discipline and consistency.

Adopting a Sabermetrics approach forces us to ask: are we asking the right questions? Perhaps it is not total membership households that defines a congregation’s success, but some other measurable? Or should we even be talking about members anymore – maybe we should instead be categorizing peoples’ involvement and participation in Jewish communal life differently, and measuring it in some novel way that tells us more about how effective our work is?

Another thought: we live in a world of probabilities, and our tikkun olam work, if done well and over time, will shift those probabilities. Trusting that that is true – that the universe is wired that way – goes hand-in-hand with accepting that we can’t control the outcomes. Even if we make it more probable than not that justice will prevail, it’s still possible that injustice will win out in any given situation. Similarly, Sabermetrics is quite reliable at getting baseball teams to finish with a good enough record to get into the playoffs, but it loses its predictive powers in the face of a short series of games.

Sabermetrics and Judaism guide us towards comparable approaches to the work of improving baseball teams and human society, respectively. They say to us: 1) do the research to find out what specific work needs to be done to succeed – understanding that the best strategies may be novel ones; 2) do the best you can do as a team (or as a community) to implement that plan, and 3) accept the uncertainty of the outcome in any given situation but keep on keeping on.

To put it more succinctly: Study. Take action. Accept what happens next. Repeat. Have faith in this process. Play ball and/or Amen.

Rabbi Maurice Harris is associate director of affiliate support for the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College/ Jewish Reconstructionist Communities.

In the BIG Inning

The Neshama of Baseball, Part 3

Ari and Rachel

Rachel Margolis is an educator in Chicago and my partner in crime as co-chairs of the Communications Team for the Association of Reform Jewish Educators (ARJE). She and her husband Ari, a rabbi serving Congregation Or Shalom in Vernon Hills, Illinois. Ari and I have never actually met. When Rachel and I get together with our colleagues, he is usually home parenting their three spectacular daughters. But he has weighed in while Rachel and I have texted while watching the Cubs this post-season. He wrote this drash for Parshat Bereshit this past week. Rachel posted it on Facebook and The CCAR Blog picked it up as well. He gave me permission to post it here.

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An ode to the intersection of this week's Torah portion, Bereshit, and my beloved Cubs:

In the beginning. . .

There was a team that experienced an abundance of success. They went to the World Series three times in a row. But they fell from grace after two straight championships. Expelled from the Garden of Greatness, they lost their way, squandering opportunity after opportunity. They experienced a deluge of misfortune, a famine of talent and success as they turned away from the land of the World Series, winding up in the bondage of ineptitude. They wandered, searching to find the promised land for 71 years, escaping the oppression of poor management and indifferent ownership, never losing hope.

Suddenly, a new team arose who knew not the Cubs of the past. Together with new ownership, sabermetric analysis, young talent, and innovative management, the long suffering crew has found its way to back to the World Series, standing on the precipice of the promised land.

By next week, we will all know the outcome of this part of our story, yet to be written. But what we do know is that sure enough, a new baseball season will come next Spring with new opportunities for redemption, renewal, and understanding, just as we have opportunities to find the same in our own hearts during this next year of reading our Torah.

Here's hoping that the team that taught me to understand the narratives of our people, always striving to return home to the promised land, will have found their Jerusalem. And whether they do or not, as we say at the end of Passover ... Next year in the World Series!

The Theology of the Cubs

The Neshama of Baseball, Part II

Irwin

I have known Irwin Keller since 4th or 5th grade. He was a year ahead of me in religious school at Congregation B'nai Jehoshua Beth Elohim (BJBE) in Glenview, IL. He was always the smartest kid I knew, but I never told him that until now. He was not a know-it-all. He was a great guy who took knowledge - especially Jewish knowledge seriously. While we were all trying to learn how to decipher the modern Hebrew dialogues in B'yad Halashon, Irwin was mastering the language. He led the service for his Bar Mitzvah completely in Hebrew - or at least that is how we all remembered it. He has become a lawyer, founded a drag a cappella quartet, the Kinsey Sicks, and for many years has been the spiritual leader Congregation Ner Shalom in Cotati, CA. He is studying with the Aleph Alliance and will be formally ordained a rabbi relatively soon. He also blogs at Itzik's Well. You should read it. I learn something every time he speaks or writes, and I am proud to call him a friend.

Like me, he is also a Chicago Cubs fan. We watched Game 4 of the series together Saturday night. I was in the bleachers and he was in a bar in West Hollywood (don't know why he was in LA, I didn't ask.) But with Facebook in front of us, we were watching together. He wrote the piece below last week and gave me permission to re-post it. Enjoy this second installment of the Neshama of Baseball. The original article is here.

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A souvenir ball from Irwin's childhood

The Theology of the Cubs

by Irwin Keller

I grew up with a rabbi who regularly used baseball references in his sermons. I adored him (still do), and his outfield metaphors were usually just right. That said, he was a native South Sider, and a White Sox fan. Even as a kid I knew to look at his baseball enthusiasm with some skepticism. Sox fans were not like Cubs fans. My family – generations of North Side Jews – were the latter. Being a Cubs fan was as essential to who we were as being Ashkenazim, Chicagoans, Earthlings. We shared something special and formative with other Cubs fans. It was different from just being a baseball fan. Cubs fans had their own kind of faith, their own special theology.

I was raised into this religion from birth. My grandfather and his brothers-in-law were all formidable Cubs fans. Every summer Sunday of my childhood, like clockwork, like Shabbos, Grandpa Joe and Grandma Sade would pull up in their Oldsmobile and we would watch the ball game together. We'd turn on WGN at 1PM, in time to settle in with the announcers' pre-game chatter. My mother would pour her father a scotch on the rocks. I'd sprawl on the floor in front of the TV. And the game would start. My grandfather, like so many Chicago grandfathers, would yell at the umpires, would yell at Jack Brickhouse, would yell at Leo Durocher. Sometimes there were double-headers and all 6 of us would have to eat dinner in front of the TV so as not to miss any plays.

We were faithful fans, my family, although not fanatics. But fanatics did exist in my bloodline. My great grandmother's brother, Morris Levin, was a beloved figure at Wrigley Field. He earned a mention in the 1930 edition of Ripley's Believe It or Not for attending every game of the season and knowing every statistic in the National League, this while being completely blind. The players would say, "Hello, Mr. Levin" to him on their way onto the field, and he could tell from the sound of bat meeting ball exactly where a hit was headed.

Cubs games were daytime diversions in the days of my childhood; Wrigley Field had no lights. Too many extra innings and a game could be called on account of darkness. And who needed night games anyway? For Cubs fans, part of the joy was skipping school or work to go sit in the bleachers. And to a Cubs fan's eye, there was something vulgar about night games. Under electric flood lights, the White Sox looked like a Vegas stage show. Real baseball took place under the blue sky and bright sun.

I guess I'm saying these things to shore up my baseball cred, to try to convince you that I'm not just jumping on a Cubs bandwagon, although clearly here I am bouncing along on it. Baseball was, I think, something I sacrificed growing up and coming out. In perfecting my new, rebellious, gay identity, I embraced an outspoken and derisive ignorance of sports. And it was mostly true – I know nothing about basketball, football, hockey. I only care about soccer teams when they make beefcake calendars.

But baseball? Baseball I'm not ignorant about. I know the rules. I once knew the players. I know the pace and the feel and the culture. When I moved to California, that spirit chilled in me. I attended a few Giants games and a couple As games. And the company of my buddy Emily was wonderful. But I walked into Candlestick Park and it wasn't Wrigley Field. It was the wrong team in the wrong place. And rooting for a team that could actually win felt oddly meaningless.

Because being a Cubs fan has something to do with faith. Not faith in a specific outcome, but faith for its own sake. Faith as practice.

The Cubs last won a World Series when my Grandpa Joe was 5 years old. By the time I was watching ball with him 60 years later, the organizing principle of fandom could not have been any realistic expectation of winning. Instead faith was a posture, a relationship with the world, or at least the world of baseball. Rooting for a team that had a good chance was easy and it was beneath us. That kind of fandom was for people from other cities, where strength of character was not strictly required.

Whereas the theology of the Cubs fan had (and has) something to do with an embrace of the "is" rather than the "might be." It is belief without proof. Endurance without promise of reward. Patience just because.
If only we could live our lives this way! With such constancy. With exquisite endurance, faith that doesn't flag, joy even in the waiting. Holding the world – and each other – with love and loyalty, despite imperfection, despite unfinishedness. We don't need a perfected world; we don't need a perfect partner; perfect children, perfect self.  If we could just hang on to life, with all its ups and downs, with the fierce love with which Cubs fans hang on to baseball. What a world this would be!

And if every century or so there's a World Series title, no one would complain.

I sat last Saturday and watched the last National League playoff game, Cubs vs. Dodgers. Without a TV, without cable service, I had to connive my way onto the live stream. I sat, prodigal that I was, with my Israeli brother-in-law who had never seen a baseball game, and I elaborately explained it all. The rules. Why innings don't have a timer. How a normal game lasts as long as a movie but a memorable game with extra innings is like an opera. Why all the spitting (I had to make this one up) and crotch adjustments (ditto). What makes baseball fans better people. Pointing out how casual and respectful opponents were with each other. I felt all my love for the Cubs – not for these particular players, who were new to me and were all born long after my last visit to Wrigley Field, but my love for this religion that is the Cubs, that pours through and from me.

I relaxed in a deep way, a way that encompassed my entire life and not just that moment on the sofa. I forgot my work. I forgot the fatigue of the ongoing High Holy Days. I forgot the awful election. It was the 6th day of Sukkot, when we call in the biblical Joseph to be our guest in the Sukkah. Instead, it was my Grandpa Joe who was clearly at my side, his scotch in hand, in answer to my glass of local Sonoma wine.

And now tonight I settle in for the World Series. Sure, I'd like us to win. But it doesn't really matter. We want it but don't need it. We deserve it and so do the people of Cleveland who have been waiting a lifetime as well. We'll be fine either way. Because that's who Cubs fans are. That is our theology. We love, we believe, and we do so without proof or promise of reward.

Now play ball.

Joe and Sade arriving for Sunday baseball.