Discussion Questions. (Page 128)

4-17 In general sense, what kinds of decisions are made in baseball? Would you

characterize these decisions as structured or unstructured problems? Explain.

What type(s) of decision making condition would you consider this to be ?

Explain.

The most important in-game decision a baseball manager makes is when to

relieve a starting pitcher. Today, managers rely on various heuristics (e.g., pitch

count) to decide when a starting pitcher should be relieved. Baseball is full of

decisions; every single last pitch is a decision, whether to pitch it high, low, inside,

outside. Other than that , the coach must make the decision of which players to play

on certain nights and whether or not to take a pitcher out of the game. I think baseball

has the most decisions to be made out of all the “big four” sports.

Most decisions in baseball are structured problems, they are easily definable.

In a structured problem, the goal of the decision maker is clear, the problem familiar

and information about the problem easily defined and complete. For example, if a

slugger keeps hitting the fastball, it’s time to make the decision of pitching him

curveballs away from his hotspot in the strike zone. There is a standardized way of

handling almost every type of player and situation. Granted, there may be certain

decisions that are unstructured problems and are not faced everyday by the manager

such as a star player going down with an injury. The manager must make the decision

of how to fill the void left by the injury. If you believe in it, luck can be an

unstructured problem as well. In baseball all decision makers are faced with either

risk or uncertainty. I don’t believe there is any certainty in any sport. Even the best

pitchers have games where they falter so nothing is to be expected. To be the best

manger you can be in baseball you have to have as much risk as you can and as little

uncertainty as possible.   Knowing you will never have total certainty you have to

make the most accurate decision you can and it seems now the more stats you put into

making your decision the better off you are going to be. 

4-18 It is appropriate for baseball managers to use only quantitative objective

criteria in evaluating the players? What do you think? Why?

For my opinion evaluating the baseball player using only quantitative

objective criteria is not relevant or is not sufficient in trying to predict baseball player

and team performance. Even though using quantitative criteria is the priority because

use of statistics as an analytical tool allowed them to model baseball players’ histories

to better predict the future performance of new baseball players. Using quantitative

criteria just measures the player performance for one or some players. If there is some

people who are good in such as batting average, it is not involving his other

unpolished potential. The quantitative evaluation reports comprise one or more

statistical measure data. Apply analytic tools that would help them evaluate talent in a

more efficient and effective manner. Qualitative factors are also critical in order to

ensure that the manager makes the best decision by trust what their scouts saw in the

player (the qualitative), but they needed to combine that with analytic research (the

quantitative). When the qualitative evaluation of the baseball player agreed with the

quantitative evaluation then the team had great confidence in bringing that player into

the organization. When the quantitative didn’t agree with the qualitative it gave the

team reason to rethink the decision. In conclusion using quantitative measures really

isn’t sufficient in trying to predict baseball player because even though he is skillful

baseball player but if there is no cooperation and leading skill the whole team cannot

be success.

4-19 Describe how baseball front office executives and college coaches could use

each of the following to make better decisions :

a) rationality

b) bounded ratioanality

c) intuition

4-20 Can there be too much information in managing the business of baseball?

Discuss.

I think there be too much information in managing information such as

review performance of player, comment of supporter or fans, and it will give negative

effect for managing organization because they will faced hundreds of pages of

training material to review and were expected to do extensive data interpretation and

analysis. This, in many cases, created brain overload for many of the workers

involved and sometimes can be conflict and confusing.

The business of baseball has been wrought with conflict between owners and

players, leagues and players' unions, and team lawyers and players' lawyers.

Commonly used statistics of information such as stolen bases, run batted in and

batting averages that were typically used to evaluated players’ abilities and

performances were lacking in the quality and poor gauges of potential. This has led

to the development of many statistical methods for assessing individual baseball

players over the years.