When Barbarians and Gatekeepers Collide

Matt Welch | January 7, 2005

As Reason has been documenting and championing for years, the liberating power of technology continues to make life sad and uncomfortable for gatekeepers of all stripes. The process -- in which empowered amateurs mock, supplement and occasionally replace previously respected tastemakers -- has been especially advanced in Major Lague Baseball, as I wrote in December 2003. Teams (including many of the most successful ones) have been increasingly hiring the outside rabble and heeding their advice, to the great consternation of many inside experts.

That backdrop adds intriguing metaphorical context to this already-interesting Baseball America roundtable discussion, in which two members each from the Old Guard and New alternate between testiness and rapproachment as they try to answer the exact same questions. I especially enjoyed how the recently co-opted bomb-throwers climbed down from some of their more provocative earlier comments, terming them "overstatement" and "exaggeration" that were "designed to sell books." (Link via Baseball Primer.)

Comments

gaius marius|1.7.05 @ 9:58AM|#

I especially enjoyed how the recently co-opted bomb-throwers climbed down from some of their more provocative earlier comments, terming them "overstatement" and "exaggeration" that were "designed to sell books."

i've said this before, i know, but mccrakcen's statements should be examined by those libertarians bent on killing all individual limitation:

VOROS McCRACKEN: I?ll go first because I was actually in the book. A lot of ?Moneyball? is a certain amount of exaggeration because Michael Lewis is telling a story. There are plenty of facts involved in all of these stories in ?Moneyball? that did not make the book because they didn?t quite fit the story as well as the facts that were included. So a lot of it was exaggeration designed to sell books. And on that score, ?Moneyball? was a success, because Michael Lewis sold lots and lots and lots of books.

killing the gatekeeper may be the received wisdom, but it is not good a priori. gatekeepers serve a useful function as informational clearinghouses that can, when properly operated, ensures a minimal standard of quality. an true open market in information, on the other hand, will be rife with propaganda and disinformation without moderation or (clearly in mccracken's case) ethics -- a la "moneyball", which is a clever read but is inherently deceiving.

if consumers of information were rational skeptics with vast resources of factchecking, that would not be a problem. but those consumers have never existed.

the proliferation of choice will mean confusion for the vast majority (and unfounded zealotry for others) -- and confusion will yield individuals cherry-picking information to suit their emotional, mystical inclination. again: people are not rational -- and worse, have in most cases abandoned what idealization of objectivity they may once have had under a romantic conception. we see it already here all the time.

i cannot see how that makes for a better informed public, but i can see how that makes for a less coherent society.

Matt Welch|1.7.05 @ 10:08AM|#

gaius marius -- Let me ask you this: Are we "a better informed public," because of the work of Bill James and the legions of (us) ankle-biters inspired by his work? I think the answer is not just "Hell yes," but "Hell yes, and I can't believe you even asked such a thing."

Thing is, it's actually damned hard for gatekeepers to be knocked from their posts, and that's not necessarily the barbarians' goal in the first place anyway. It's not like any daily newspapers are going out of business (on the contrary; they remain one of the most profitable types of business in the U.S.). Tracy Ringolsby still has a job, and so do most good baseball scouts.

So yes, there's a cacophony, and a lot of spiteful spew in all directions, but the gatekeepers are still keeping gates (indeed, as this exchange shows, the more innovative ones are learning how to *blend* the two concepts), while the rabble continues to produce dynamic new clusters of information.

I have at least as much faith in "consumers" as I have faith in myself, or in you; and it turns out we can all find tons more useful information than we could have even one year ago. That's something to celebrate, even if the agents of change can act like real jackasses sometimes.

|1.7.05 @ 10:16AM|#

So Matt wants to keep the gatekeepers, but likes to have barbarians keeping them on their toes. Alternating cycles of revolution and consolidation.

I want to see a permanent-revolution, kill-the-gatekeepers-type answer gaius' comment.

Matt Welch|1.7.05 @ 10:37AM|#

joe -- Don't get me wrong; I shed no tears when gatekeepers get toppled, and there are entire categories of brokerage-providing humans I'd love to see have to find new work.

Baseball is exciting to me right now precisely *because* the gatekeepers have been *forced* to deal with this new heretical (and better) information; American newspaper journalism (to cite one example) is years and years behind this curve, and probably will continue to be, due to its immense profits and built-in conservative culture.

And, to be voyeuristic about it, the clash between the two camps, in any & every discipline, is very interesting to observe & especially participate in. Yes, it can get tedious, and produce mounds of steaming BS, but it's also dynamic and often very fun.

|1.7.05 @ 11:03AM|#

Speaking of Ringolsby, did you read some of his comments in Rich's Weekend Baseball BEAT? Here is a gem:

RL: I also noticed that you voted for Jack Morris and not Bert Blyleven.

TR: Jack Morris has always been an easy choice for me. He was the pitcher that you wanted on the mound in a big game throughout his career. He had that extra sense of how to win. He didn�t let big games get away from him.

Matt Welch|1.7.05 @ 11:46AM|#

Luca -- I thought that Ringolsby interview was very interesting; I had totally written him off as a crank before, but this cracked the door open a little.

And it was yet another interesting artifact of the culture clash -- look how genuinely wounded Ringolsby seemed by all the stat-head criticism. You could almost feel sorry for the guy ... until you remember he's paid good bucks to write crap and make dumb HoF votes.

gaius marius|1.7.05 @ 12:04PM|#

there's a cacophony, and a lot of spiteful spew in all directions, but the gatekeepers are still keeping gates

so long as this is true, mr welch, i have no issue with change. heresy has an important, vital function. it's when the objective of change becomes not reform but destruction that i get angry.

it is an important but often unrecognized truth of our age that the object of much reform post-1750 is not reform -- a rearrangement of institution -- at all but destruction -- the end of institution. much of the appeal behind the hysteria over "moneyball" finds its source in the emancipatory notion that any schmope with a data set can be branch rickey. that is absurd, of course -- but millions seem to believe it, having bought into the religion of individualistic empowerment.

baseball is one thing, but i would not want to see something as important as the press fall victim to such plebiscitarian chaos.

|1.7.05 @ 12:12PM|#

I thought McCracken tried to defend himself precisely because he wasn't thrilled with Moneyball's deception. It's not like Moneyball was the first stathead book on the market, its difference is that is the first to be written as a "gatekeeper vs. barbarian" story.

I never got the impression from reading the more detailed research that the statheads ever wanted to remove the gatekeepers, I think they just wanted them to open the gates. It's the readers of the statheads that wanted the gatekeepers out, and that's what Moneyball appealed to.

gaius marius|1.7.05 @ 12:18PM|#

It's the readers of the statheads that wanted the gatekeepers out, and that's what Moneyball appealed to.

which is why its less sabremetrics itself, which is fairly innocuous, than the massive popular reaction to it that is telling.

that's an old story, of course -- martin luther ran into the same issue, as i recall.

Matt Welch|1.7.05 @ 12:25PM|#

Russ D -- Very good points. But I think some of the statheads (defined here as active sabermetricians) *did* (and do) want to remove some of the gatekeepers, or at least switch places. Bill James' "Politics of Glory" closed with an extended rap on just why was it that the Tracy Ringolsbys of the world had a Hall of Fame vote, while Bill James did not. Bitterness toward the lunk-headed gatekeepers has always been a feature of stat-head writing, and understandably so.

As for Lewis' framing, I think A) it's brilliant, from a marketing standpoint, and B) it's largely correct. There *is* a culture clash; it *is* a revolution, and there *are* many non-baseball implications. My theory is that what we're seeing now in baseball will be replayed over several years across many disciplines.

|1.7.05 @ 1:14PM|#

Matt,

Good points. My perspective was from looking at the gatekeepers of active baseball teams, which is who the interview was with, and where my interest lies.

As far as the gatekeepers of institutions like the HoF are concerned, I agree with a lot of the bitterness statheads have toward the gatekeepers but since the whole idea of the a HoF bores me, I really don't care about those conflicts. So I really don't care for the transfer of that bitterness to the "performance prediction" side of things.

|1.7.05 @ 1:26PM|#

Seriously, it's impossible for GM to go into a thread without referring to a long dead philosopher.

|1.7.05 @ 2:59PM|#

Gaius -- All of this hyperindividualism and wild abandon in the West has left us with a highly respectable, heavily raunchy body of pornography. Doesn't the community benefit from that?

gaius marius|1.7.05 @ 3:49PM|#

Doesn't the community benefit from that?

you don't have to tell me, man -- we used to get jiggy with the hookers right there in the circus. :)

gaius marius|1.7.05 @ 3:50PM|#

it's impossible for GM to go into a thread without referring to a long dead philosopher.

a consequence of education, mr goiter. :)