Pushkin

For roughly 5,000 years, people call themselves doctors and pretended to know all sorts of things that they didn't know and were as likely to kill you as to cure you.

These doctors existed because sick people desperately wanted to believe in them.

Coaching feels the same way to me.

For decades, people just sort of hoped that if a man was hollering at them, he must be helping them to win.

Maybe he was sometimes. But that's not my point.

My point is that even if coaches have no effect on performance, even if they're doing more harm than good, we might still insist on having them because we need someone on our side to believe in.

But coaching is changing in the same way medicine changed a hundred years ago.

Coaches are discovering science and science is discovering them.

I'm Michael Lewis and this is Against the Rules.

A show about various authority figures in American life.

This season is about the rise of coaches and this episode is about data and pitching.

A while back in 2003, I published a book called Moneyball.

It's about how the Oakland A's baseball team had used data analysis to get an edge on everyone else.

They were a poorly funded team in a small market.

They had no money to spend on players.

But their new and better statistics enabled them to value baseball players more accurately.

So they could sell the players that were overvalued and trade for the ones that were undervalued.

I remember at the time being shocked at the notion that baseball players could be misvalued.

I mean baseball players have been doing the same job for a century out in the open in front of millions of people.

But suddenly, all over, a thing that had been done a certain way forever was now being done a totally different way.

Everyone in baseball started using data and getting all sorts of insights from it.

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