The Importance of Adjustments in Sports

According to Baseball Prospectus, Mike Trout could have retired after the season before last at the ripe old age of 25 and gone down as one of the ten best position players ever to play Major League Baseball.  Not only is Trout an amazing talent, he also has been terrific at making adjustments.  Early in his career scouts thought he might be vulnerable to the high fastball; Trout adjusted and thwarted attempts to stymie him.  Trout was frustrated with his ranking as a centerfielder; he did drills to improve his reaction time to fly balls and rejoined the top third of all defensive centerfielders.  That is what the great teams do.  Some players and coaches and teams can do this; others cannot.  Whether they can do this or not defines their careers.


Juan Samuel was supposed to be the next great Phillies player after Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton and started out his career red-hot.  Then opponents figured out a weakness -- the outside breaking ball.  Samuel could not lay off it, ending up striking out a ton and playing himself into the role of a super utility players.  He just did not remain good enough to be an every day player -- his weakness would get exposed if opposing pitchers saw him too often.


Andy Reid right now is the best coach not to win a Super Bowl.  His main flaws -- bad clock management and inconsistencies picking talent in Philadelphia.  Every year the team went into the season with a pronounced weakness or two that, despite public statements to the contrary, came back to bite the head coach and his ambitions.  Since he has been in Kansas City he only has had the role of head coach -- perhaps this season could be the charm for him.


Chip Kelly dazzled at Oregon in what retrospectively was a relatively short tenure.  College coaches have all the power and can be dictators.  History has told us that what has worked in college does not necessary work in the pros.  Kelly, with his innovative thinking, got off to a good start with the Eagles.  But then he kept on doing the same thing, to the point where former offensive lineman Evan Mathis said the rest of the league knew what was coming and when.  Sure, the Eagles could get a play off quickly.  The problem was that the other team could guess what it was.  Chip Kelly is now back in college, trying to rekindle his old magic.


Buddy Ryan was an innovator with the 46 defense with the Chicago Bears.  Ultimately, the league adjusted to that scheme, but before it did Buddy's defenses were something to behold.  In contrast, Buddy was a lame thinker on the offensive side of the ball and refused to innovate or adjust.  He had a unique, transcending talent in Randall Cunningham and couldn't figure out how to make him into the best quarterback in the league.  Poor Cunningham played without a running game and with replacement-player-plus level receivers and a tight end with a big reputation who dropped the ball a lot.  He deserved better; Ryan ended up out of a job because he refused to adjust his thinking as a head coach and value the offense half as much as he valued his defense.


The Philadelphia Phillies were terrific in the 2007-2011 time frame.  Part of their success resulted from their outstanding development of three perennial MVP candidates -- Jimmy Rollins, Ryan Howard and Chase Utley.  Part of their success resulted from their maximizing the value of retrospectively vastly overrated prospects to land the likes of Cliff Lee and Roy Halladay.  But the team kept on getting older after their World Series victory of 2008, when the average age of a player was about 29.  They added the ultimately underperforming Raul Ibanez when he was 36 and the oft-injured Placido Polanco when he was in his early 30's.  They also failed to embrace the type of analytics that other teams, particularly the most innovate ones, were using, teams like Boston, St. Louis and Houston.  What resulted was their slide from a perennial contender into a team whose season was over by the All-Star break.


Pick your city, pick your discussion.  The Mets loaded up on starting pitchers with a tremendous amount of promise -- DeGrom, Syndergaard, Wheeler, Harvey, Matz, Gsellman.  The problem is that when you have so many young pitchers before the age of 25 throwing as hard as they can for long periods of time, they are bound to get hurt.  And many of them did.  The tragic part for the Mets is that this happened before with pitchers named Isringhausen, Wilson and Pulsipher.  Only Isringhausen had any type of career, and that was as a reliever.  The other two got so injured -- as did the Cubs uber-talented Kerry Wood and Mark Prior -- that you knew that what portended to be a team that could get everyone out might end up being a squad that would have difficulty getting players off the disabled list.


Failing to adjust or persisting in doing things the old way get management and teams into trouble.  Doing something the same way over and over again and expecting a good result but then failing has been called by some the definition of insanity.  Teams that truly innovate -- the elite soccer teams are among them -- videotape players and do a computer analysis of their workouts and their repetitive motions to ensure that the work they do strengthens the players and does not put undue stress on one part of the body to cause a recurring injury.  They have adopted cryotherapy rooms to take down a player's inflammation after working out and also focus strictly on sleep and diet.  Oh, sure, Chip Kelly did that in Philadelphia, I forgot.  The problem was that the didn't do enough to get the respect of the players with his communications and style to get them to buy in. 


Examples abound.  Adjustments are critical.  The teams that win, adjust, even if they are Golden State by maxing out their payroll to remain more than very relevant when they inked Kevin Durant.  That's an adjustment too.