Drunkard's Walk - Leonard Mlodinow [9]
Well, that’s Hollywood, a town where Michael Ovitz works as Disney president for fifteen months and then leaves with a $140 million severance package and where the studio head David Begelman is fired by Columbia Pictures for forgery and embezzlement and then is hired a few years later as CEO of MGM. But as we’ll see in the following chapters, the same sort of misjudgments that plague Hollywood also plague people’s perceptions in all realms of life.
MY OWN EPIPHANY regarding the hidden effects of randomness came in college, when I took a course in probability and began applying its principles to the sports world. That is easy to do because, as in the film business, most accomplishments in sports are easily quantified and the data are readily available. What I discovered was that just as the lessons of persistence, practice, and teamwork that we learn from sports apply equally to all endeavors of life, so do the lessons of randomness. And so I set out to examine a tale of two baseball sluggers, Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle, a tale that bears a lesson for all of us, even those who wouldn’t know a baseball from a Ping-Pong ball.
The year was 1961. I was barely of reading age, but I still recall the faces of Maris and his more popular New York Yankees teammate, Mantle, on the cover of Life magazine. The two baseball players were engaged in a historic race to tie or break Babe Ruth’s beloved 1927 record of 60 home runs in one year. Those were idealistic times when my teacher would say things like “we need more heroes like Babe Ruth,” or “we never had a crooked president.” Because the legend of Babe Ruth was sacred, anyone who might challenge it had better be worthy. Mantle, a courageous perennial slugger who fought on despite bad knees, was the fans’—and the press’s—overwhelming favorite. A good-looking, good-natured fellow, Mantle came across as the kind of all-American boy everyone hoped would set records. Maris, on the other hand, was a gruff, private fellow, an underdog who had never hit more than 39 home runs in a year, much less anywhere near 60. He was seen as a nasty sort, someone who didn’t give interviews and didn’t like kids. They all rooted for Mantle. I liked Maris.
As it turned out, Mantle’s knees got the best of him, and he made it to only 54 home runs. Maris broke Ruth’s record with 61. Over his career, Babe Ruth had hit 50 or more home runs in a season four times and twelve times had hit more than anyone else in the league. Maris never again hit 50 or even 40 and never again led the league. That overall performance fed the resentment. As the years went by, Maris was criticized relentlessly by fans, sportswriters, and sometimes other players. Their verdict: he had crumbled under the pressure of being a champion. Said one famous baseball old-timer, “Maris had no right to break Ruth’s record.”17 That may have been true, but not for the reason the old-timer thought.
Many years later, influenced by that college math course, I would learn to think about Maris’s achievement in a new light. To analyze the Ruth-Mantle race I reread that old Life article and found in it a brief discussion of probability theory18 and how it could be used to predict the result of the Maris-Mantle race. I decided to make my own mathematical model of home run hitting. Here’s how it goes: The result of any particular at bat (that is, an opportunity for success) depends primarily on the player’s ability, of course. But it also depends on the interplay of many other factors: his health; the wind, the sun, or the stadium lights; the quality of the pitches he receives; the game situation; whether he correctly guesses how the pitcher