February 19, 2012

Allocating Talent

Baseball blogger and economist J.C. Bradbury writes economist Tyler Cowen on the allocation of talent:

Back to Lin. He played in the Ivy League and his stats weren’t all that bad or impressive in an environment that is far below the NBA. If Lin is a legitimate NBA player, he didn’t have many opportunities to play his way up like a baseball player does. In the NBA, he experienced drastic team switches, and even when making a team he received limited opportunities to play. MLB teams often keep superior talent in the minors so that they can get practice and be evaluated through in-game competition. An important sorting mechanism for labor market sorting is real-time work. Regardless of your school pedigree, most prestige professions (lawyers, financial managers, professors, etc.) have up-or-out rules after a period of probationary employment where skill is evaluated in real world action. … Thus, I wonder if the de facto college minor-league systems of basketball and football hinder the sorting of talent so that the Jeremy Lins and Kurt Warners of the world often don’t survive. Thus, another downside of these college sports monopsonies is an inferior allocation of talent at the next level.

One problem with this arrangement is historical. Baseball developed before college sports became widespread. Colleges adopted baseball. Football and basketball were invented by colleges, and for many years the sports were all about the college level. A system like baseball for the NBA and NFL would destroy college football, and there was, I suspect, too much money involved to allow that to happen.

I also believe there is a lot more talent to go around in the NBA and NFL. We saw in the 1980s when the NFL used replacement players during a strike that the next level of talent could pretty much play a professional game of football. When we watch March Madness, we see tons of players who can dribble, shoot, pass, and play defense well. For the most part, it’s professional quality basketball. I suspect that if the NBA released everyone who is considered a starter today, and replaced them with the next five men on the team, the basketball played would still be very good, and not that different than we are used to seeing.

So basketball and football do not need to be as picky as baseball. They have so much talent available to them that they can pretty much throw darts at a list of players and put together a decent team. In more technical terms, there were only about 170 MLB players two wins above replacement in 2011 according to FanGraphs (101 position players, 69 pitchers). I suspect there is a much higher percentage of players in the NFL and NBA capable of performing at that level.

The NBA and NFL may not use the best systems for bringing along talent, but the amount of talent available to them allows them to make mistakes and still put a good product on the field. The expense of creating the baseball minor league system is just not worth it to them.

3 thoughts on “Allocating Talent

  1. Luis

    Baseball is vastly more difficult than either football or basketball, which is of course part of your point. In Baseball, you need to see a lot of games with a player to help avoid small selection issues..Length of season and other factors are part of that as well.

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  2. schtevie

    This, it seems to me, is a very misguided and odd statement: “I suspect that if the NBA released everyone who is considered a starter today, and replaced them with the next five men on the team, the basketball played would still be very good, and not that different than we are used to seeing.”

    On the one hand, it is superficially true, but only in the sense that it is for any professional/quasi-professional sports league: you eliminate the top X% and you have a new distribution of talent and the ability to create a compelling product on the field or court.

    On the other, regarding the specifics of basketball, it is decidedly untrue: in the NBA the 131st player is far, far worse than the 1st. Hence, it is very strange conceit to believe that a dartboard would be an adequate talent evaluator.

    Consider the distribution that regularized adjusted plus minus yields (not a VORP measure) as shown in http://stats-for-the-nba.appspot.com/ranking_rec. All (net) positive contributions on the NBA scoreboard come from the top 130 players. Now, it may indeed be the case that a hypothetical “net negative” NBA would be compelling to the average fan. The talent pool would surely remain vastly superior to that what exists in college. But that isn’t relevant to the point at hand.

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  3. baycommuter

    I’d never thought of historic development as the reason why college baseball is so much less important than football or basketball, but it makes sense. Technically, however, basketball was invented at the YMCA level, Springfield was a place where they trained YMCA directors and didn’t become a college until 14 years after basketball was invented there.

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