Baseball and Systems Thinking
On a random walk through the heap of unorganized bookmarks in my browser I came across this one:
Of course, just two months later, Félix Hernández of Seattle Mariners would toss yet another perfect game. The third of 2012 and there hasn't been a perfect game thrown since. Just 23 perfect games in the history of baseball. How rare is that? In the history of Major League Baseball, there have been somewhere around 218,000 games played/ That means the chances of throwing a perfect game are around 0.01%. I’m not sure, but I suspect free-range deep sea organic tuna are struck by lightning more frequently than that.
The pitcher gets the credit, but the team makes it happen. From the Matt Cain article:
Two great catches in the outfield made the perfect game possible, something Cain clearly understood.
Left fielder Melky Cabrera chased down Chris Snyder's one-out flyball in the sixth, scurrying back to make a leaping catch at the wall. Cain raised both arms and slapped his glove in delight when Cabrera made the play.
Then, right fielder Gregor Blanco ran into deep right-center to make a diving catch on the warning track and rob Jordan Schafer for the first out of the seventh. The 27-year-old pitcher hugged Blanco in the dugout after the inning.
And the systems thinking lessons?
Cause and Effect: To take nothing from Cain’s pitching, the effect of two of Cain’s 125 pitches (the cause) would have erase the prospects of a perfect game if the outfielders hadn’t caught the ball. The effect of the outfielders having caught those balls (cause) was a perfect game. Furthermore, the cause of one person’s activity was dependent on the effect of another person activity in order for a perfect game to be the result.
Delay: The catches occurred earlier in the game, removed from the final, game winning pitch that officially made the game perfect. When the catches were made, the prospect of participating in a perfect game was very much in doubt so there was no way for Cabrera or Blanco to know whether or not their catch would have made a difference. It appears they played as if it would.
Erosion of Goals: Slacking off is easy and seductive. Reaching goals is hard and not always possible for a variety of reasons. But the difference between reaching a goal and settling for an eroded goal is frequently very, very small. Consider the two catches in the Giant’s game. Yep, reaching a goal is frequently hard, but when it happens, on any level, it’s perfection.
Now…play ball!
Photo by Jose Francisco Morales on Unsplash
I love thinking about the systems in sports - particularly baseball and football. Each play is a system of systems. Each game. Each series. Each season. Each playoff run. Each off-season - each draft, each trade. :) I love it all!