Ted Williams's Strike Zone

Williams is measuring batting average which is the number of hits divided by the number of at bats. Hits come on a single pitch but at bats are a collection of pitches. Therefore a pitch location for an at bat isn't really something that makes sense. This ends up biasing the results.

You see the pitches in the middle of the zone are not just red because it is easier to hit balls in that location, although that is certainly part of it. Another factor is how those pitches fit into an overall at bat. Pitches aren't thrown at random parts of the zone. There is a strategy to when they are thrown in what location. Pitchers will often only intentionally throw the ball in the middle of the zone when they are behind in the count and are trying not to walk the batter. The batter know this so he is able to anticipate pitches in the center of the zone when he has the advantage. By ignoring balls thrown to his weaker areas, he often is able to get ahead of the pitcher which creates a multiplier and allows him to hit the ball even better when it is in those locations in which he already excels.

Knowing his weaknesses allowed Williams to minimize the situations in which those weaknesses would come into play. That allows him to focus on his strengths and actually increase the number of opportunities that he had to act on those strengths. It is the equivalent of Buffett benefiting from compound interest that gives him more capital to invest the more successful his investments are.

And while "all or nothing" is better for an investor (since it still costs them their time to be invested), consistent hits is probably the better option for an entrepreneur. Steady income, not to mention getting feedback on how to refine your craft along the way.

Not the point of this post, but I may as well ask, what makes someone an "amazing angler"? I mostly associate Ted Williams with god-tier hand-eye coordination, which doesn't seem readily applicable to fishing?

His career WAR was about 130. Ruth's was about 168. It's entirely possible he would have reached 168 had he not lost those years.

Edit: ok, changed back from https://deadspin.com/the-beautiful-infographics-of-ted-willi...

Football is full of all of these random plays that make no sense. Until you learn things about how clock management works. Then they become very tense and exciting.

The problem I have with baseball is that all of the minor strategic decisions are there, but you are talking about subtle changes that affect probability by a few percentage points. And that can take an entire series of games to see play out.

It's just a very neat thing to do, figure out what your problem is, whatever it may be, in a way that you explain a path to improving outcomes.

You just want to make sure that a path to improving in one thing doesn't decrease your performance elsewhere, ala the project management triangle (which is just one example).

or

"If you had to rank these 5 highest priority projects from 1-5, what would that list look like"?

Managers like this need to have it shown to them in black in white that you are at capacity. Once you push back, I suspect you will have better luck.

Modern baseball analytics places a very high value on the the "Three true outcomes" [1]. Batters are "optimizing" for the exit angle of the ball leaving the bat - we're in a juiced ball era (perhaps even a juiced batter era) and home runs are valued very highly. You'll notice that strikeouts are also setting records. Nobody seems to care as much about ground balls or line drives and that seems to be what a "flatter" swing gives you. If we were playing with the same baseball as Ted Williams played with, you'd have a lot more fly ball outs. I'm pretty sure that his "slight upswing" was actually very slight compared to current players.

[1] https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Three_True_Outcom...