The Grit and Grind of Cal Ripken, Truancy and the NBA, and Hidden Flaws of Cause and Effect

Who says a title has to be short to be catchy?

I have loved baseball and the Red Sox since I was five years old. Today, they are a shiny model of modern corporate-sports machinery, but for a long time before that they were a tattered, beer-stained T-shirt, beloved, but useless in better company. They are the source of all my early cliches. They have broken my heart, darkened my soul, and crushed my spirit. Naturally, I see them in person whenever I can.

In 2001, the Red Sox finished second in the American League East, a mile behind the Yankees in a mile-long race. I was living in Washington, DC, and we had tickets in Baltimore for a meaningless game at the end of the season. As average as the Red Sox were that year, the Orioles were much, much worse. Tickets were easy to get. Until they weren’t.

It’s now a long time ago, but September 11th cast a shadow so dark that everything fell into it. Including baseball. I grew up listening to stories of where-was-I when President Kennedy was killed, but if you came of age around September 11th, you may recall that entire fall in startling detail. It was a moment of dislocation.

Among the ruptures, Major League Baseball shut down for a week, including our Red Sox-Orioles game scheduled for September 16. When the games restarted, the lords of baseball appended the canceled games to the end of the schedule. A meaningless week in mid-September became a frantic finale. Because of this bit of fate, my pilgrimage to Camden Yards became part of a much larger spectacle: the final game for beloved Oriole Cal Ripken, Jr.

When I was coming-of-age years, one fact that was always true: when you got up in the morning and read the box scores you were guaranteed to see that Cal Ripken Jr. had played the day before. Major league baseball teams play 162 games in six months with one day off in every ten. That’s a grueling schedule for an office-bound writer to be sure, but an impossible one for a player who is required to throw themselves hard on the ground as part of their daily routine. For 16 years, for 2,632 consecutive games, Cal Ripken Jr. played baseball. He was grit and grind.

On October 6, 2001, on a gloriously warm Saturday night, Cal Ripken Jr. played his last game, at home a game plucked from mid-season obscurity and plunked down as a coda to a historic year and a historic career.

No matter how hard you love baseball, it will never love you back just the way you want, not fully anyway. The Red Sox were leading 5-1 going into the bottom of the ninth, and the top of the Orioles' batting order was due to hit, Cal batting fourth. Surely the Gods of baseball would give him one last at-bat, one more electric moment. Two quick strikeouts brought Brady Anderson to the plate and Cal to the on-deck circle. As Cal took his donut swings, Brady worked a full count, and then by God, he swung at a high fastball that I could plainly see from the outfield bleachers was over his head and the game was over. And that was it but for the curtain all. Cal had finished.

The grit and grind had ended in a very Cal Ripken way. No exploding light towers from a mammoth, base clearing, game-ending, two-strike home run to chase away the demons. Just a tip of the hat, and a wave goodbye. I suppose it all makes sense when you look at it like that.

And the Red Sox won, which doesn’t happen every day.

Playing Hooky

Grit and grind. I read a John Hollinger article recently about the end of grit and grind in the NBA. These articles are timeless, evergreen in the parlance of the marketer, it is never as gritty nor as good as it used to be. This one though had a curious flavor to it. The principal idea is this: the NBA has a truancy problem and has chosen a mild sanctions scheme as a response. And like all sanctioning solutions to ill-disciplined behaviors, there are unexpected and unintended consequences. And this article was bemoaning one of those unintended consequences.

The NBA truancy problem is this. The stars of basketball make unseemly salaries and as those salaries can only rise so high before the people cower before them, the stars are rewarded in another, and unexpected way: They aren’t asked to play very often.

Although their seasons are the same length, there are half as many NBA games as MLB games, only 82. A truly brilliant NBA star, one commanding $50 or $60 million a year in salary is one of the scarcest commodities in sports. It has been more than 20 years since an NBA team won a championship without one of the top fifteen players in the league, and almost 15 years since a team won without a top-five player. (But. Does someone get picked for the first-team All-NBA and earn the designation as a top 5 player because they are one of the five best players in the league and they propel their team to victory because of their immense talents? Or does the best player on the best team get picked as a top-five player because their team is so good and how could they have possibly won without a great player?)

These players are so good that the league simply can’t pay them enough. Lebron James dragged a horrific Cleveland Cavaliers team to four straight NBA finals, generating hundreds of millions or even billions for the team and the city. During that run, Lebron was paid $27 million a year, generating a return of 10X or even 50X that value. But the NBA has decided that it can’t pay these players what the market will say they are worth.

The math is straightforward. There are 30 NBA teams but only five first-team all-NBA players. Since you can’t win it all without one of the five best players, and since the return on winning it all is ginormous, teams should be willing to pay these players impossible salaries. And they are willing to do that. But they can’t because the NBA won’t let them. There’s a salary cap for the team as a whole and a cap on any single player's salary. No team can pay any single player more than about 1/3 of the total team salary. So a team literally can’t pay their players what they are worth.

What do the teams do? They let their star basketball players do the one thing they most want to do, the thing that’s worth more than money, which is to not play basketball.

Which is a problem. Stars don’t play that much, sometimes barely more than half the games. And this is irritating to fans because the NBA relentlessly markets their stars and announces when the stars are coming to Your Town, and prices get jacked up, and your kid and your corporate client (and is there a difference?) really want to go so you pay up and there’s your first-team NBA superstar—right there!—sitting on the bench in street clothes yukking it up while there are guys on the court who aren’t nearly as good, so they have to play every game.

The NBA put a stop to this in a very NBA way, not by actually solving the problem, which is that market regulation causes star NBA players not to play very often, but by surreptitiously chiding the players for reasonably responding to the market incentives the NBA set for them. To solve the problem that NBA teams can’t pay their stars what they are actually worth, the NBA requires that players must play at least 62 games in order to qualify for post-season awards.

Which brings us to the grit and grind gripe. And it’s this. It turns out that to keep NBA players from playing just a minute or two of a game to qualify for post-season awards, the NBA also required that players play at least 20 minutes (out of 48) for at least 62 games. Thus, there is an unexpected casualty of the salary cap: the grit and grind NBA defender.

It turns out that many, or at least some, of the best defenders in the NBA, don’t routinely play more than 20 minutes a game. Defensive specialists often come into the game in specific situations and those do not occur with at least 20-minute-a-night regularity. Hence the title “specialist.” Because they are not always needed, many of the best defenders in the NBA do not qualify for the award for best defender in the NBA. And this of course is obviously bad, or so says the article.

But is it? Obviously bad, that is? Another way to look at this problem is to ask: what are the core attributes that make a great defender? One obvious attribute is energy. Defensive specialists are often referred to as energy guys, meaning that they play with higher-than-average energy. For the most part, NBA players always play with great energy, so to be known as an energy guy, you have to really bust your tail. And that’s where I think this logic breaks down.

It seems to me that you can only really be a great energy guy—a great defensive specialist—if your minutes are limited. Because only when your minutes are limited can you consistently bring above-average energy. You see the problem, of course. Yes, there are guys like Josh Hart who play at ridiculously high intensity and play a lot of minutes (the famed high-motor guy) but they are the exceptions who prove the rule. Defensive specialists are, by definition and by design, people who play less than full-time so they can do something really hard and bright (and short) and then burn out.

Now, the obvious solution is to acknowledge that your defensive specialist is unlikely to be a guy who is so great that you literally can’t pay him enough and you need to rest him as remuneration. It is instead going to be a guy that you can pay his actual market value. It is someone who plays every night but only for a bit.

So the solution is easy: change the rule to exclude defensive specialists from the minutes' restriction. Right now, since actual defensive specialists do not qualify for the Defensive Player of the Year award, it goes instead to a first-team all-NBA player who scraped his way to 62 games and is good at counting statistics like steals but is not actually great at defense (SGA, for example). And why aren’t these first-teamers good enough to be Defensive Player of the Year? Because they play too much to be great defenders. Even with all those days off.

But this would require the NBA to at least tacitly acknowledge that it has distorted the market for players, which is the real problem, and that is extremely unlikely to happen.

***

Hidden Flaws in Cause and Effect

Longtime External Processing readers, if such people exist, may have read this essay and thought to themselves, what the hell was that? It’s a fair question. I am firmly of the belief that what the world does not need more of these days are essays about politics. The Holy Grail of marketing is to sell you something you already own, and my guess is that people who read enough Substack to have stumbled on this essay, already own lots of essays about politics.

What the world does need more of these days are some fun ideas to chew on. The fun idea I want to chew on for a bit is endogeneity. Stripped bare, endogeneity is simply the idea that there are many problems in this world of ours where cause and effect are jumbled up in a way that makes it extremely hard to parse the truth. These jumbles tend to come in a small number of flavors. Reaching again back to 2001 times, ol’ Don Rumsfeld walked up to the podium at the Pentagon—just four months after I watched Cal Ripken’s glorious last game—and made the case for invading Iraq to deprive them of the weapons of mass destruction that no one could find but Don was sure, sure!, were there. To do that, Don divided the world into known-knowns and known-unknowns. He put it like this:

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.

Now I’m a sucker for a good epigram, but ol’ Don used this one to claim that even though there is no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2002, it does not mean there are actually no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2002. It wasn’t just pedants who opposed this line of thinking…

That said, this was a clever epigram and a helpful way to think about classifying hard problems. I would argue that a much more helpful way to think about the world would be to focus on the one category that Don omitted, which is the unknown knowns. Applying a syllogism to Don’s epigrams, unknown knowns are things that we think we know that we do not. Unknown knowns are really interesting. These tend to be endogeneity problems. What makes these hard problems hard is that there is something a little off in our mental algorithm when we try to attach cause to effect. We impose a temporal order to these problems that does not actually exist.

There are lots of flavors of endogeneity. The two most accessible endogeneity problems are simultaneity and reverse causality.

Simultaneity problems are endemic in modern life—these are the problems where cause and effect happen at the same time. In my little corner of the universe, crime and police presence is the classic. Theoretically, the more police you put in a place, the less crime you will have there. But, if there is more crime in a place, more police should be assigned to that place. However, if you just wander into a place and see a lot of cops, should you think you are in a very dangerous place (what are all these cops doing here?) or a very safe place (isn’t it great that there are so many cops here to protect me?)? If you wander into another place and there are no cops, should you assume that this is a very safe place (it is so safe here we don’t even need cops!), or could it be a dangerous place (because there are no cops there)?

That is the simultaneity problem. Reverse causality problems are even more insidious. These problems occur when the effect causes the cause instead of the other way around. You might think that more police presence causes less crime, but it could also reasonably be true that more crime causes a bigger police presence. You might assume that police more cause there to be less crime, but when there is a lot of crime, that might cause more cops to be around. In a static world, it’s impossible to say.

What makes these kinds of logic problems really interesting is that they are often also unknown knowns. The problem is not visible to you because you think you know the answer—what is the cause and what is the effect—but you may be wrong. Chances are that in the police/crime example, you, dear reader, have some prior belief that causes you to lean hard in favor of one answer over the other. But again, in a static world, you can’t know for sure.

Now, there are ways to unpack these problems, and the most straightforward way is simply to turn it from a static problem into a dynamic one. This means gathering data over time (this is yet another reason my friends, why we need lots of rich data). Still, these problems are harder than you might think. For instance, the idea that more police necessarily reduces crime is still a controversial one in many corners of criminology.

So anyway, I thought I’d chew on that for a while. In academic circles, we often think of endogeneity problems as simply an obstacle to empirical research, something to be solved with a clever design or a sophisticated statistical model. I think it is a much more interesting phenomenon than that. I’d like to make the case that endogeneity problems permeate our lives, and that unknown knowns lead us to many ill-fated conclusions. Next time, I’ll say a bit about Love and Endogeneity.

See you then.

March Madness Interlude

By the time I publish this, the NCAA tournament will be underway, or at least everyone will be scrambling to fill out their brackets and looking at maps to find High Point University. You should just make it easy on yourself and pick the Terps to win it all because, destiny.

In the spirit of the tourney, I give you perhaps the greatest sports speech ever delivered. In 1983, Jim Valvano was the coach of the NC State Wolfpack—a grit and grind team if there ever was one—that improbably won the championship over a Houston Cougars team loaded with future first-team all-NBA superstars. Their motto was survive and advance. Survive and advance. Ten years later and still a young man, Jim Valvano was dying of cancer. This is what he had to say.

The Free Rider Problem

During the 2008 recession, we all learned a lot about the free rider problem. Here at External Processing, we have a different free rider problem, which is that we don’t have enough! Free riders that is. I see a lot of Substack’s advertising with Eggonomics. You know, subscribe to my Substack for just the cost of two eggs! Well, at this Substack the price is zero eggs. It’s free! So pass this along to your friends or subscribe if you are following. Otherwise, I’m just a middle-aged guy talking to myself.