Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> the growing tendency for parents and kids to focus on one sport, year-round, to the exclusion of all others.

>> But while the upsides of specialization are unclear, there are few doubts about the downsides.

What doubts? Winning. To be the best, and being the best is all that matters these days, you must focus on only one sport. For me it was swimming. To compete at the national level you have to train all year, 20+ hours a week. And to actually win at the national level you have to sub-specialize into particular events, specific stroke/distance combinations. Sure, some stars can win at everything, but the majority of swimmers focus. There aren't many champion 50m sprinters who can also medal in 400/800 IMs, not in the last decade or two.

So perhaps the NBA should stop taking only the best basketball players. Perhaps they should look at people who are not literally 'the best' and look at people who are well-rounded and therefor less likely to be injured in their first pro year. But that doesn't win championships. Professional players are essentially actors on a stage for an audience. They are tools for teams, businesses that will be around long after any individual players are injured/retired. What turns the most profit (winning) isn't necessarily what is best for the human players.

View on HN

This is what the grinders tell themselves. They still get beaten regularly (not all the time) by those with superior native talent. Those people don't focus as you suggest, and they still win. The NFL MVP last year could certainly have been an MLB MVP, had he chosen to go that way. When he quit college baseball, he was told by pro baseball players (e.g. A-Rod) that he was "wasting his baseball talent". Patrick Mahomes was born with a lot of native talent, so his time spent playing baseball didn't hurt him...

It's fine to play sports, but only so long as it's fun. If it ain't fun, you don't have enough native talent for it, and you're wasting your time.

(This isn't the case for other competitions that don't attract so many competitors. In those cases, sure, grind if you want.)

Mahomes was a third/fourth round draft type out of high school and the MLB draft is a loooong way away from even making it for a single day in the majors. Claiming that he could “certainly” be an MLB MVP is ludicrous.

The baseball draft is somewhat clueless; that's why they have 40 rounds rather than two or seven like a sport that has any idea at all about who's going to succeed. Yeah there were probably about a hundred guys standing in line in front of Mahomes for eventual MVP status. (He sort of jumped the line on the football side, winning in the first year he started.) Still, that's a lot closer than thousands of baseball grinders will ever get. He certainly had a chance. Reading is fundamental.

If "certainly had a chance" means "played baseball and was an OK prospect", sure, but then you're not saying much of anything.

The truth is that it's a lot closer to five thousand guys, a shoulder, and an elbow between a third/fourth round high school pitcher and an "eventual MVP". Take a look at the third rounds of 2010 [1], 2011 [2], 2012 [3] drafts, which are fairly representative: only ~40% have made the majors at all, and there's one All-Star reliever (zero chance at MVP) and one reserve All-Star catcher (with zero MVP votes in his career) of the lot.

There are 750 active MLBers at any one time and the odds are 60-40 against a third/fourth round high school pitcher, the riskiest kind of prospect, joining them. And of the 58 league MVPs awarded since 1990, exactly three have gone to pitchers.

[1] https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year... [2] https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year... [3] https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year...

Only 2/3 of first rounders make the majors, and there are political reasons to give them a chance, so it's not obvious that 40% means anything. You're the one who decided he'd be a "third/fourth" rounder anyway. He was a 37th rounder out of high school because he had already declared for college. You keep calling him a high school prospect, but if he had played four years in college that's not what he would have been. Also his father was in the majors for a decade. Numerous major league players thought he was talented enough for the majors. If you're telling me that MVP voting is set up to exclude pitchers, fine, he wouldn't have been an MVP. That seems rather far from the point, which was "athletic talent exists and dominates specialized practice". He did play baseball through his sophomore year of college, and he did wait to specialize on football until his junior year.

The scouting consensus is that he'd be a third/fourth rounder out of high school absent football [1]. That's being rather more charitable to his prospect stock than it probably deserves, considering he barely played in college as a freshman on a mediocre team (0 outs recorded, 2 walks, 1 HBP; 0-2 as a hitter [2]) and then didn't accumulate any stats as a sophomore before quitting.

[1] https://www.kansascity.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/sam-mell... [2] http://www.big12sports.com/fls/10410/

Great link!

“We’d be pretty similar pitchers now,” said Michael Kopech, a high school rival of Mahomes’ and now baseball’s No. 10 prospect according to MLB.com. “He was just a bulldog. To be honest, I think anyone who ever played with or against Patrick would’ve assumed he would’ve been a pro in any sport he played.”

Again, native talent not specialized practice. Or you could go with the example in TFA, Kobe Bryant who played more soccer than basketball until his junior year of high school. He still had some basketball success!

>The baseball draft is somewhat clueless; that's why they have 40 rounds rather than two or seven like a sport that has any idea at all about who's going to succeed.

That is just factually wrong. The MLB draft has 40 rounds because there are over 5 thousand players in professional baseball which is more than double the NFL and more than 10 times the NBA. Athletic skill traditionally follows a normal distribution which means the similarity in players' skill levels converges the deeper you go into the bell curve. The result is there is generally a smaller gap in talent between the 500th and the 1000th player selected than their is between the 1st and 100th player selected. If Mahomes had the skill of a 3rd rounder, there were way more than a 100 guys in front of him for an eventual MVP.

Here [1] is an article looking at the value of MLB draft picks that supports my point.

[1] - https://blogs.fangraphs.com/an-update-on-how-to-value-draft-...

To be fair, (part of) the reason that affiliated baseball has 5000 players is the same as reason that the MLB draft has 40 rounds: the gap between high school / college baseball and MLB is incredibly greater than the one between college basketball and the NBA.

Power law phenomena in known skills at the long tail of a normal distribution are a red herring in this case; the much much bigger factor is uncertainty about the probability of developing skills years later (can a pitcher add a breaking ball that complements his fastball? will a hitter be able to track MLB curveballs thrown faster than 95% of the fastballs he's seen?). Draft position and prospect status are based on imperfect guesses at the shape of the very very very wide distribution of potential outcomes for an individual player with very little data to go on.

The MLB draft is what what the NBA draft would be if they had to select 9th graders based on their performance at HORSE with a kickball on a 9 foot rim and a dunk contest on an 8 foot rim.

I would argue the difference between amateur and the top level professional baseball is so much wider than other sports just due to happenstance. MLB is older than the NCAA while the NBA and NFL are both younger than the NCAA. Therefore MLB needed to build up its own developmental leagues while the newer professional sports could rely on their college equivalents. Today almost every American born player in the NBA or NFL played in college while a whole lot of their MLB counterparts were drafted out of high school. That isn't due to some inherent difference in each sport or the ability of people to project forward a player's skill. It just the way the leagues happen to be setup.

All that said, you are certainly right that a projection of a player's skill is inherently more difficult to make the earlier that prediction must be made.

The existence of the NCAA doesn't have anything to do with it. It is, however, somewhat of an accident of history that the MLB draft is of high schoolers as opposed to AA/AAA players.

Before Branch Rickey pioneered the concept of "farm systems" in the late 1930s, a quarter century after the NCAA was established and around 75 years after the first collegiate baseball game, minor league teams weren't affiliated with MLB teams at all; instead, they were just other leagues with younger/worse players whose rights would be available to the highest bidder. The MLB draft to distribute talent didn't start until 1965, by which time all the teams had well-established farm systems via affiliations with minor league teams.

The unpredictability of the gap in performance between high school and pro, though, is IMO larger than in football or basketball due to the fact that the core talents for making it in MLB are not based on pure run-fast-jump-high easy-to-measure athleticism, but rather on reactive skills that even if present in high school are not observable against meaningful competition.

The MLB draft has 40 rounds because there are over 5 thousand players in professional baseball...

This is more of that "wet streets cause rain" logic we hear about. Baseball has 57 different minor leagues with 1253 minor teams because baseball scouts don't know who is going to be the best player ahead of time. If they did know, they could save themselves a lot of hassle. Hockey has a similar phenomenon, but it's less pronounced. Football has plenty of money, but somehow they feel like all of the player development and testing they need can be accomplished at the collegiate level. They are actually sort of offended by the existence of "minor" football leagues like arena and whatever Vince McMahon has planned.

And, of course, this is all beside the point, as mentioned in a sibling thread.

>they feel like all of the player development and testing they need can be accomplished at the collegiate level.

It is cheaper for them to let taxpayers deal with player/coach development and testing.

It would be cheaper for baseball or hockey teams to do the same thing, but they don't. It's because they hire players before they know which players are the best.

Ya, I do not believe in an elite group with "native" talent granting them superiority. That might make you the best person in your home town but means nothing on the national level. By the time you are looking at nationals, all the non-talent people have been filtered out. Everyone now has the correct body type. They all have near-perfect reflexes. There is also no grinding. The guy who wins nationals doesn't do so because he tried harder than the guy in second place. Everyone is trying as hard as is humanly possible, to the point that trying any harder means inevitable injury. What matters is strategic training, good coaching, and access to resources.

Want to be a good swimmer? Join a club and try hard. Want to be the best swimmer in your city? Get a private coach and a 50 meter lane all to yourself every afternoon. Want to win a medal? Be rich. Live across the street from the 50m pool, have control over that pool's water temperature, have 24/7 access to a full gym, a dietitian, and a sports medicine doctor who won't make you sit in a waiting room.

You don't have to believe it for it to be true. Maybe swimming is an outlier, though I kind of doubt it. TFA is about basketball. It's obvious that a 7' athletic guy with good coordination will be a better basketball player the first time he touches a basketball than a slow 5'5" dude with poor balance would be after ten years of grinding.

The long tail dominates competition. All elite swimmers look the same to you, so we can safely conclude that you are neither an elite swimmer nor an elite swimming coach. You seem to think it's possible to buy one's way into swimming dominance. It's not. Michael Phelps didn't win 23 gold medals by being rich and getting better coaching than all the competitors in 23 different Olympic fields. He is the child of a teacher and a cop (divorced), who held a national record by the age of 10, having learned to swim at age 7. He is a supremely talented swimmer.

Sure, Michael Phelps is extremely talented and physically fit. But do you think he could be an excellent marathonist as well? Or that he could become an excellent sprinter without training for sprinting every single day and (re-) dedicating his life to this?

The GP post indicated was mentioning not that raw talent is unimportant, but that it is assumed at the top level. All of Phelps' competitors are extremely talented swimmers. Training and diet and dedication in general are also extremely important, and the final difference may well end up being there (assuming you have enough raw talent).

Of course, it is also important to remember the incredible amount of medical technology thrown at these competitors, and the difference that things like clothing can make even for swimming.

All I'm saying is that Phelps would have still been a champion swimmer if he had also played other sports. He might not have been a champion marathoner (a sport which seems specially selected to disadvantage his long-arms short-legs physique), but his time spent running would not have kept him out of the Olympics as a swimmer. I suspect he probably did all sorts of regular-kid activities between the ages of seven, when he learned to swim, and ten, when he set a national age-group record. I personally learned to dog-paddle at three, so we know that some of his 10yo competitors had years more practice than he had.

Others ITT overestimate the importance of practice. Yeah, sure, Phelps practiced swimming a great deal. We know for a fact that he practiced each particular event less than most of his competitors in that particular event, just from the sheer range of different events he dominated. He only has the same 24 hours in a day that anyone else has.

Perhaps there is a symmetry between "many competitors with maximum talent, differentiated by preparation" and "many competitors with maximum preparation, differentiated by talent". I would nominate auto racing, modern yacht racing, or doping-allowed bicycle racing as sports that fit in the first category, although I'm sure there are aficionados who would disagree. Swimming, and any sport that features human bodies without chemical modification maneuvering under their own power through some medium, is firmly in the second. That comes both from nature and from our collective sense of fairness. Fortunately they've outlawed the polyurethane suits, in no small part due to Phelps's boycott of events allowing them. When he claimed that his records had only been broken through the use of technology, most swim fans agreed.

In fact, in most sports, talent varies to such an extent that superior talent dominates superior preparation, so long as the preparation varies only by a limited amount.

I'm a part-time musician and nowhere is this "native talent" more visible than in music. I've been grinding at the guitar for years and can only call myself above average at best. Yet, there are musicians I know who can literally pick up a brand new instrument, fiddle around for a couple of hours, and start playing intricate melodies on it all within a day.

Native talent is definitely a thing and anyone who says otherwise is either lying or trying to sell you something.

Doesn't mean that hard work isn't important, of course. But a natively talented guy with 10 hours of grinding will somehow be better than the untalented guy with 100 hours of grinding

> " anyone who says otherwise is either lying "

Often to themselves in my experience. People who've not yet discovered any of their own talents are sometimes bitter at the suggestion that talent is a real thing.

I think it is the opposite: there is a huge number of people in any nation, so talent is abundant. The thing is that at the top tier everyone is talented, and usually the dedication and factors other than talent, including luck, is what makes the difference.

FWIW, it’s pretty clear to anybody who watches pro sports that talent differs dramatically even at the highest level.

I am not sure that most people that watch pro sports have knowledge to judge the fine details. What is pretty clear to anybody is that someone plays better, but what is not clear is why is that so. For every dominant pro athlete there might be many that were injured or had other problems that degraded their performance.

It's pretty clear to even unskilled watchers that, for instance, Lebron James and Shaquille O'Neil are/were talented in a way that no players before or since were. Both players can move with the speed and agility of payers that weigh 50 lbs less. And if it's true that innate talent is the major differentiator at literally the pinnacle of the sport, why would one assume that it somehow ceases to be the case at the levels just below that? Especially when every single professional player has access to the same resources and hours in the day for the practice and training aspect of sports performance?

And, FWIW, Shaq was notorious for his poor work ethic. He never practiced basic skills (free throw shooting) and always started a new season overweight and out of shape. Then there's the fastest person who ever lived, Usain Bolt, who trains less than a motivated amateur cross fitter.

The truly greats in most sports just seem to have something "extra" that can't be earned by practice and skill alone. Their reflexes move just a little bit faster, their muscles recover just a tad bit quicker.

I really don't think the difference between an Usain Bolt and a Tyson Gay is practice. Or that no one has been able to beat Federer/Nadal/Djokovic in a decade consistently because they're not practicing hard enough.

At the highest level, it's a game of milliseconds and 0.1% improvements. The truly great just somehow have that

>> Native talent is definitely a thing and anyone who says otherwise is either lying or trying to sell you something.

Maybe it is a thing. But I doubt it's the most important thing.

I'm an amateur musician too (I think that's what you mean by part-time?). Yep, I've seen people with a native ability, who can just grab an instrument and play. At the same time, I've seen the same people never improve no matter how much they tried, mostly though because they never tried, while others who were not as "talented" spent the hours and got better and better and better, and eventually better than the talented person and then much better than that. Some of the talented persons are too talented for their own good and never figure out what "discipline" means, so their talent remains for ever precocious.

And I've also seen people get mightily impressed by others' talent and overlook their own abiilties, to the point that they severely underestimate them. I have a close example (not me!) of someone who is just good with theory, but gets awfully disappointed that she can't just sit at a piano and start playing without thinking about what she's doing, like a cousin and an aunt of hers do. On the other hand, when I play with her, she's always the one who figures out where a song should start from, how we should transport a melody to our respective instruments, and so on. She knows music. But she can't just "grab an instrument and play" so she thinks she doesn't have a talent. Well I can grab an instrument and just play, apparently, but I have no fucking idea what I'm playing (she usually is the one who figures it out for me).

I digress. My point is this. You observe a person who has a natural talent and a person who doesn't, at the start of their careers. At that point, you can not predict which of the two is going to be a master of their craft, sport, art, etc (or if both are, or neither). There are so many other factors involved that talent, on its own, means nothing.

I'd call myself an amateur in terms of skill. But I've been paid a couple of times for producing tracks so I take the leap and call myself a "part-time" musician now :)

Music is weird in the way that there are people with little to no training who can still write incredible melodies. And there are musicians who can write books on music theory but not be able to write a memorable melody.

But you are 100% right in that an untalented musician who works at her craft can become good, while a talented one who never practices with the intention of improving will remain stuck.

Combine talent with focused practice, however, and you get magic :)

Sorry, I don't believe in magic :0

But out of the maybe dozens of swimmers in the world who have all those resources at their disposal, why is Michael Phelps still better than the others? Inborn talent is a real thing. Spanish soccer clubs have youth academies that operate as boarding schools for children, and have a vested interest in developing the best players, but even one of the best academies like Barcelona will train hundreds of kids for each one who ever makes the first team, and thousands of kids before they ever see another Messi.

Talent, otherwise known as having long arms, short legs, and hands the size of dinner plates.

We're only talking about two categories here, "focused preparation" and "native talent". What coaching techniques led to Phelps's physical dimensions? Stop grinding.

> By the time you are looking at nationals, all the non-talent people have been filtered out. Everyone now has the correct body type. They all have near-perfect reflexes.

And yet there are still enormous differences in how talented people are within this already extremely highly selected pool. Differences so huge that all the money in the world, and all the coaching, grit, determination and hard work can’t buy elite level athletic success.

Michael Phelps is the son of a middle school principal and a state trooper and he holds 28 Olympic gold medals. I’m sure his family made enormous sacrifices to help him train but there were if not thousands, at least hundreds, of children with families with more money chasing the same swimming dream.

Success in sports is a competition of extraordinary people against other extraordinary people, and the best make them look mundane in their talents. You can no more buy the athletic skills of Lionel Messi or Usain Bolt than you can the academic ones of Terence Tao. All of those people worked and trained very hard to get where they are but none of them came from the very wealthiest classes. They’re just the extreme right tail of a distribution of talent.

Egalitarianism is a lie to make you feel good. Not all people are born equal. Live with it.

Maybe he should be a latter day Bo Jackson or Deion Sanders and give it a try?

Swimming’s not really analogous to the NBA because the peak comes so early (for example, Phelps was an Olympian as a high school sophomore); women’s gymnastics is the same. Swimming is also a low joint-impact no-contact sport with no sudden unpredicted movements.

The point from the NBA’s perspective is not that the US players who are not specializing are better prospects, but that the guys who eventually do develop the running and jumping ability good enough for the NBA would have been better off not specializing until a much later age. In this case, the NBA’s interests in rookie health and long careers for stars are well aligned with those of the players but not aligned with those of AAU coaches and/or parents trying to get a college scholarship.

>> because the peak comes so early (for example, Phelps was an Olympian as a high school sophomore);

The youth trend in swimming is an aberration. New training methodologies developed recently that focus on technique/stoke rather than athletic ability. These techniques work well enough that they have become a commodity. Parents can buy a good coach for their kid, turning them into an olympian in a handful of years. That will change with time. As these techniques become more widespread, as the kids with the new stroke grow up, the ages will rise. It isn't like gymnastics where body movements and dimensions are so vital. Swimming is literally the slowest sport. The kids don't have that much of an advantage.

Are they only going to teach "the new stroke" to one cohort of kids? Why wouldn't old new-strokers lose to young new-strokers?

How much money have you spent on swimming instruction?

> Why wouldn't old new-strokers lose to young new-strokers?

Possibly because old are still stronger. The old are not 40 years old, they are like 20 something years old.

Because habits are hard to break. The kids who grow up with correct (new) strokes dont have to unlearn the old strokes. I still do oldschool breaststroke, not the new vertical kick. The new kids hoping for the olympics dont even recognize what i do. Soon it will become the new norm.

Check out the book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein for why generalists actually have better outcomes than specialists, even at specialized tasks.

Intuitively, I think this makes sense. Imagine skill as a logarithmic function with the x axis being time. Every unit of work you put in to train starts becoming less and less efficient. By training in different skills you are making more efficient use of your training time. And even if the skills appear to be orthogonal to see each, there’s definitely a cross training effect, for both mental and physical tasks.

A good example is programming. For longer than I care to admit I was one of those guys who could code but wasn’t that strong in math. I was frustrated because it felt like I wasn’t getting better. I decided to strongly focus on math, started exercising, and did brain training with dual n-back tests to increase my fluid intelligence.

I was pleasantly surprised that all these unrelated activities boosted my programming ability to a significant degree, in a comparatively marginal amount of time.

Coincidentally, a point of view against the supposed benefits of early and narrow specialisation:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jul/12/general...

I'm going through Epstein's book now and with basketball and other team sports, I feel that he is correct. The late bloomers stand a better chance than the early specalizers.

Epstein makes the point that the world need both types of people, but that early specalizers are a little too 'en vogue' right now. He points out that in games like golf and chess, where the objectives and next steps are very clear and where the information in the activity is minimally hidden, being an early specalizer is a good thing to bet on. In other games and sports like tennis and poker, where the objectives and next steps are not clear and where information is hidden and not accessible, then going through a sampling period and then deciding is a better method. Obviously the world is mix of those things among many others.

In basketball, I'd argue that the sport is not clear and the information is hidden. Practicing shots is essential, but the inter-person play and the mental gamesmenship is a feature of the sport. It's the bluffing, the flopping, the timming, the brinksmanship that make elite basketball a great sport to watch. Information about specific plays is hidden, the next move to make is about juking and fooling people, and the team aspect makes coordinating many high level players nearly impossible. As such, players that have a lot of other experience besides just shooting field goals really well, will do better. You still have to be very good at basketball, of course. But trying out a few sports, cross-training not just the body but also the mind, and developing other neural pathways is essential for elite players.

>Professional players are essentially actors on a stage for an audience. They are tools for teams, businesses that will be around long after any individual players are injured/retired.

Absolutely. It shocks me how many people buy up the “our” team stuff and don’t realize that a lot of the narrative around interviews and sports-talk and drama are just advertising campaigns.

This is big business.

But to the topic; You’re right, if it’s really about winning it has to be one sport and be one section inside that. It shouldn’t be about winning national championships for kids, because millions will try for the spots a couple hundred will fill, but that’s not really any of my concern I guess.

> It shocks me how many people buy up the “our” team stuff and don’t realize that a lot of the narrative around interviews and sports-talk and drama are just advertising campaigns.

I get sports fandom that's fundamentally arbitrary and/or fictional. I mean that's been with us since at least Rome, and probably before. Happens naturally on the school yard, even. I'll gladly join in. It's fun.

What I don't get is pro sports fans who don't seem to be "in on the joke", the way, say, your average pro wrestling fan is "in on the joke", so far as the framing narrative of their sport and team being fiction. The kind who will get actually-mad over the stuff, or start fights and spend the night in jail over it. But maybe they're just way better at maintaining kayfabe.

> But maybe they're just way better at maintaining kayfabe.

Violence in sports 100% sucks, but I can pretty much say that most of these people do not see it as a joke. Talking about history, here's one very famous and pretty old sports-related rivalry that was not a joke at all, as tens of thousands of people ended up dying [1]:

> The Nika riots, or Nika revolt, took place against Emperor Justinian I in Constantinople over the course of a week in 532 AD. They were the most violent riots in the city's history, with nearly half of Constantinople being burned or destroyed and tens of thousands of people killed. (...) There were initially four major factional teams of chariot racing, differentiated by the colour of the uniform in which they competed; the colours were also worn by their supporters. These were the Blues, the Greens, the Reds, and the Whites, although by the Byzantine era the only teams with any influence were the Blues and Greens. Emperor Justinian I was a supporter of the Blues.

On a more optimistic note sports supporting done right can absolutely give some sort of purpose to one's life (I know these are big words, but that's how I see things), for example if you look at these Aris Thessaloniki supporters chanting and supporting their (basketball) team [2] it's almost impossible not to get hyped up. Or these San Lorenzo fans [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcvAOpnnMK0

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9RMPBoTAVE&feature=youtu.be...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com