Book Review-The Book of Joe By Joe Maddon and Tom Verducci

Sports memoirs fall into many general categories, this one however, tries to fit into too many categories at once. As I read the book, there are times when it feels like it is trying too much, and then there are times when it hits the right spot at the right time. I don’t know whether to ascribe the success of the book to holding my attention to Joe Maddon’s story or to Tom Verducci’s writing and organization. Regardless, I enjoyed the book.

Joe Maddon became famous first as the manager of the Tampa Bay Rays, a miracle worker who stopped the downward spiral of the team’s fortunes using his own unique philosophy. He reached the pinnacle of a major league manager when he managed the Chicago Cubs to win the World Series, the first and only one in 108 years. But he was unceremoniously replaced a few years later because he would not submit to front office interference. He returned to his roots, the California Angels, as manager, but he lasted only a few more seasons as the landscape of baseball managing changed completely. It is a stunning lesson in how quickly the center of gravity in professional sports management shifts and renders the celebrated expendable.

The Book of Joe tries to be a memoir first, it provides reminiscences of the meaningful factors in Joe Maddon’s life; it is also organized in chapters that are titled with the Maddonisms, those familiar sayings that made Maddon famous, which are then structured into a business how-to book; finally, it tries to be a reportage of how the Moneyball mindset, which had pervaded major league sports, has gone so far in the other direction, thereby cheating us of the essential elements of the reasons why we love sports. The last point is the slow developing theme that becomes the focus showing us the reason why Joe Maddon is no longer managing in the MLB. The book makes it clear that this situation is the epitome of irony since Maddon was one of the very first rebels who used and relied on statistical analysis for his decision making. The accounts of why and where he tends to rely on statistics is interesting to me, as I have my own opinions about the usage of statistics. I am not a luddite to the ways of statistical data, but as an engineer who has had to use statistical process control and the six sigma methods, I know where the limitations are when applying statistics to endeavors which are intimately coupled with human decisions, such as sports.

The threefold intent of the book is something that is very difficult to pull off. While I felt that the stories of Joe Maddon’s upbringing and his experiences within baseball were interesting, I also felt that some of the stories seemed forced because the authors were trying to wedge the stories into the other two intentions: as lessons and as means of explaining why he acted and reacted to the quant dominated front office regimes. I will admit that I was most interested in getting into Maddon’s head and trying to determine the magic of his managing successes. The book showed a significant part of the behind the curtains aspects of his decision making. I also appreciated Maddon’s loyalty to those who had shaped his insights and his instincts as a manager. He delved into the personas who had influenced his growth as a manager; most importantly, he was clear in giving us the reason’s why they had such influence over his experiences and how he uses those lessons on a daily basis in his managerial life.

It is his statement of his philosophy through the chapter titles that captured my interest the most. His ideas, while not entirely original, have been presented in a cogent and matter of fact manner; indeed, I have been inspired to write some articles on Maddon’s themes.

Not all the chapters are gems, but they are interesting enough to  keep me interested as I learned new ideas as well as being reminded of what I had known previously; that was worth the price of the book.

The underlying theme throughout the book is an interesting discussion of the reality in sports. Ever since the publication of Michael Lewis Money Ball ;  coaches and managers, both professional and amateur, have been inspired to change the way they coach and manage, often  with an urgency to use statistics to improve their decisions; those old guard who based their decision making on intuitions and gut feel have been displaced by quants or stat heads, the resulting revolution has swung the pendulum completely to the other end of the spectrum, where humanity and experiences has been relegated to the scrap heap and all the decision makers are drinking the Moneyball kool-aid. Indeed, there is nothing more dogmatic and inflexible as someone who was at one time on the outside, someone who was an innovator and had original ideas. So it is that all humanity and experience have been denigrated to the point of extinction in coaching and managing.

Maddon and Verducci use Maddon’s story to illustrate that point. Whereas Maddon was an early adopter and innovator in using statistics, the expanded front office of today have decided to justify the expenses of their own existence. Coaching and managing has become a top-down exercise in ego for the general manager. The crux of the problem is that statistics do not capture human nature nor the uncertainties that are a large essential part of sports. The  reliance on just statistics to make decisions is as foolhardy and deceptive,  as much as just using gut feels and intuitions.

As Dr. Edward Deming, one of the foremost proponents of statistics in manufacturing stated in point 11 of his 14 points for Total Quality Management: Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management. (American Society of Quality-Deming's 14 Points 2023) Management needs to understand that players are not cattle, and each individual player responds differently from someone else. This is the artistry of coaching and managing, being able to understand the players and the games artfully. Maddon’s story of how the front office dictated his choices in using the pitchers and bullpen sound staggeringly and sadly like managing by quota that is practiced in the global industry. I gained quite a bit of insight from this book, as I am a coach, I read the book with the intention of juxtaposing my own coaching experiences with how Maddon managed the various baseball teams in his career, this practice made me think about the dynamics of decision making that is involved in coaching and the pitfalls of putting my thought process on auto pilot or disengaging my own ability to think critically and feeling comfortable in a rut. The best recommendation I can make about The Book of Joe is that I will continually be consulting with the lessons from the book for a long time. This is saying quite a bit about a former Cubs manager for someone who is a Cardinals fan.

References

American Society of Quality-Deming's 14 Points. 2023. https://asq.org/quality-resources/total-quality-management/deming-points (accessed August 10, 2023).

 

 

 

Book Review-Infinite Powers By Steven Strogatz

After having been trained in the dark arts of engineering, I considered myself, if not a full-blown expert, at least well versed in calculus: what it is, what the idea can be used for in my engineering specialty, and some of the history about calculus through my classes. I now happily admit to my unreasonable hubris. Steven Strogatz is the master of all that is calculus, what it was, how it came into being, where it is now, and possibly where it is going to be in the future.

My initial arrogance concerning my knowledge on the subject made the initial chapters of the book flow by quickly, I read the historical notes that Strogatz included as a sidelight to the main discussion — something to entertain the less informed of the general reader — I wondered why we would need to know the arcana of ancient mathematics, even I also fancied myself a nerd for history of mathematics? Little did I realize how important these historical notes will be: to drive later discussions as well as to form the foundations of the macro view of calculus.

Strogatz frames the story of calculus in ten chapters, creating the intricate scaffolds that allows the readers to follow the technical developments through history with added notes on the mathematicians that originated the ideas which drove calculus to where it is now. An eleventh chapter serves as his own peering-into-the-crystal-ball statement on what he believes will come in the future. He carefully builds up the structure of the development of calculus and seamlessly build the connections between subjects and shows the open questions that was left at the end of the previous chapters and how the topics covered in the new chapters serves to answers those open questions. It is this attention to the many loose ends and how they were resolved that held my interest.

As Strogatz observed, the teaching of calculus had been subdivided into many subtopics for the sake of convenience, but in so doing, the students had been sold a myth that these subtopics are standalone topic because it suited the purposes of teaching logistics rather than suiting the purposes of gaining a holistic view of what mathematicians throughout history had wrought, continuously.

Chapters 8, 9, and 10 were the chapters that had me holding my breath, for it is in these chapters that Strogatz pulled together all the work from the previous seven chapters, integrated them and brought the story to a denouement, for the moment. It brought together the differential and integral halves of calculus, showed the true powers of the calculus. True to the title of the book, he also forcefully made the point of just how the powerful idea of infinity allowed the method to flourish in the minds of mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and so many more specialties.

One cannot discuss calculus without discussions — many times heated ones — about the two men who are recognized as the progenitor of the largest leaps forward in the calculus: Newton and Leibnitz. Strogatz recognition of each, while nicely put their contributions into the historical context of calculus without delving into the bickering that happened between proponents of either men, which is as it should be, even though the human smallness in me wanted some juicy stories about the two.

Strogatz introduced us to the important women mathematicians which made contribution to the art and science of calculus, their contributions were most often ignored and if recognized, their works were slighted. He gave them credit where it was due, and the book is much better for the recognition.

As I was taking my time reading and enjoying the narrative, I thought about how this book should be made an integral part of the teaching of calculus, a required text taught in parallel with the technical aspects of calculus; a book that answers the “why” and “how did it get this way” questions in parallel with the technical training that answers the “how to do it” questions. I then realized that the reasons that I appreciated this book so much are not the same reasons that the young students in AP Calculus or in college level calculus would appreciate. It took me years of working with the calculus to ask those questions that Strogatz had sought to answer. It takes a certain level of maturity and appreciation for the context of the methods which built up the citadel that is the calculus. I still think that the material in this book has a critical role to play in motivating the understanding of the “how” while also building an appreciation for what our forebears had wrought. As Newton had said: We Stand on the Shoulders of Giants. This book would nicely illumnate that blind spot.

One note of interest. I was reading Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren’s book How To Read a Book (Adler 1972) when it was brought to my attention that until the end of the nineteenth century, scientific books were written for the layman, that the habit of having specialists writing only for specialists was necessitated by the increasing complexities that comes with the expansion of knowledge in each scientific topic, so that the necessary knowledge needed to understand scientific books became so broad as to be covered in a single tome. Which I thought was a shame, but I understand how daunting the task of writing science and mathematics books has become. Which makes this tome that much more impressive in that, whether Strogatz realizes it or not, he had accomplished a rare and difficult feat — to communicate this very specialized and complex topic to the general public — a general public that has varying levels of a priori knowledge to draw upon to aid in their comprehension. He has joined the pantheon of authors which serves the knowledge of everyone, if they chose to read the book. He has served the role of the public intellectual by writing this book.

This is a remarkable book from my perspective, it filled in the gaps of my knowledge, technical, historical, and conceptual, without losing my interest nor overwhelmed me.

References

Adler, Mortimer. "How to Read Science and Mathematics." In How To Read A Book, by Charles Van Doren Mortimer Adler, 255-269. New York: Touchstone, Simon and Schuster, 1972.