by John Tamny
Kobe Bryant, the legendary Los Angeles Laker, was known around the National Basketball Association for his incredibly high basketball IQ. Bryant could see the whole floor, anticipating the moves of his opponents and teammates. Although he skipped college to go straight to the NBA after high school, his education in the game of basketball had just begun.
Bryant already had NBA-level talent when he joined the Lakers in 1996. But as he told his teammate Byron Scott, “I want to be the best player in the league.”7 Endless practice was a huge part of a career that included five NBA championships, but so was study. Lee Jenkins of Sports Illustrated wrote that the young Bryant “was cocky but curious. He asked a hundred questions, of teammates but also opponents. He once asked Michael Jordan at a stoppage about the release angle on his fadeaway.”8
After the 2014–2015 season, Golden State Warriors power forward Draymond Green signed with the team for five years and $82 million. Green has talent so special that if not for his suspension from game five of the 2016 NBA finals versus the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Warriors likely would have hoisted the second of three straight NBA Championship trophies. But what most fans miss is how much Green studies in order to be the player he is.
In a pre-season game ahead of the Warriors’ recording-breaking seventy-three-win campaign of 2015–2016, Lakers forward Julius Randle “singed” Green with his “go-to-stutter-step move.” Green responded by asking a Warriors assistant for every film clip of Randle’s move going back to his time at the University of Kentucky. Green told Sports Illustrated, “I studied the s—out of that move, and figured out what I needed to do [to] stop it.”9
At Michigan State, Green “deconstructed Big Ten scouting reports for his teammates.”10 They say he can sniff out the opponents’ plays before they run them.11 He even tries to learn from the WNBA, whose players teach him more about the fundamentals of the sport than his NBA brethren. As he explains it, the women “know how to dribble, how to pivot, how to use the shot fake.”12
LeBron James and his Cavaliers deprived Green, Steph Curry, and the rest of the Warriors of a second straight championship. James’s enormous talent is well known, but it’s his basketball intelligence that his teammate Kevin Love raves about. James is a manager on the court, says Love. “You have to understand people and how to deal with them. LeBron is incredibly smart. He knows how to get the best out of us.”13
Love is not alone in his respect for James’s otherworldly intelligence in his chosen line of work. One NBA head coach calls him the “smartest player in our league.”14 Anyone who even sniffs the NBA is an extraordinary athlete. What’s unappreciated is that the MVP-level performers are the Warren Buffetts of their profession.
Why wouldn’t Caltech players want to spend more time working differential equations than practicing basketball? That’s what reinforces their skill and brings them happiness and success. At the same time, classroom-smart Caltech players would look pretty hapless on a basketball court with Bryant, Green, and James—and not merely because of the mismatch of athletic gifts. Those masters of basketball know their sport the way Stephen Hawking knows theoretical physics.
If you’ve got what it takes to make a career in basketball—that is, if you’re good enough to rate a collegiate basketball scholarship—it makes sense to pursue it. The money isn’t bad. In 2014, the NBA signed a $24 billion, nine-year deal with ESPN/ABC along with TNT to televise its games. In June of 2016, Nike signed an eight-year deal with the NBA to outfit its teams to the tune of more than a billion dollars per year. Coke, Pepsi, and Anheuser-Busch InBev are just a few of the name brands in partnerships with the globally popular league. Thanks to deals like these, not to mention television rights sold to local stations, the NBA is flush with money. This wealth is reflected in the value of individual teams, thirteen of which are worth at least one billion dollars.15
As the value of each NBA franchise soars, so does the pay for the league’s players. From 1985 to 2016, the average NBA salary rose 80 percent, to $5.2 million per year. These numbers explain the “one and done” phenomenon that has become the rule among top college basketball players. If you’re good enough for the NBA, it makes no sense to hang around campus for three more years when the minimum pro salary is more than half a million dollars.
Of course, there are only thirty NBA teams, with rosters limited to fifteen players. Isn’t it absurd to plan a basketball career in the face of such impossible odds? Sure, but as global prosperity increases, so does the desire of the world’s newly prosperous to be entertained. You don’t have to be one of the 450 NBA players to make a living in basketball.
More and more foreign countries are getting professional leagues of their own. Basketball is both internationally popular and lucrative. Most professional basketball players outside the United States earn from $1,500 to $20,000 per month, and some of the top European players earn as much as $50,000 per month.16
Each year, millions of once desperately poor Chinese join the middle class, and these newly prosperous consumers like basketball. There are now players in the Chinese Basketball Association earning more than a million dollars per year, even though their season has only thirty-eight games.17 As prosperity takes hold around the world, so will demand for basketball talent. And the story doesn’t end there.
The NBA is littered with head coaches earning $5 million or more per year, and a few—like Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs, Glenn “Doc” Rivers of the Los Angeles Clippers, and Tom Thibodeau of the Minnesota Timberwolves—make more than $10 million.18 NBA assistant coach salaries are harder to track, but reports indicate that many earn in the high six-figure range.19
At the collegiate level, at least thirty-five college head coaches were earning $2 million or more in 2017. Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski sat atop the heap as recently as 2016 with a salary of $7.3 million, but by 2017 Louisville’s Rick Pitino (before he was fired in a scandal) and Kentucky’s John Calipari were pulling in more than $7.4 million.20 As reporters noted in USA Today, “The $2 million coach, once rare in college men’s basketball, is becoming routine among the upper-echelon programs.”21 Pay for assistants is also on the rise. Calipari’s assistant Kenny Payne earns over $500,000 each year, roughly what he earned as an NBA player in the 1990s.22
Basketball’s popularity, unlike football’s, extends to the women’s game too. Draymond Green is surely on to something when he watches the WNBA to learn the fundamentals. Geno Auriemma, head coach of the University of Connecticut’s perennial national women’s championship team, earns $2.17 million each year. At least two of his counterparts at the other three 2016 Women’s Final Four schools weren’t doing too badly either. Washington’s Mike Neighbors earned $410,000, with Oregon State’s Scott Rueck right behind him at $400,000.23
The good times in basketball extend to the high school level, even in football-mad Texas. Four boys’ coaches and four girls’ coaches in San Antonio were earning more than $80,000 annually in 2017.24 High school baseball coaches are also doing well in San Antonio, where five earn more than $80,000.25 Something is up. To see what that is, let’s turn our attention to the game of baseball.
Michael Lewis’s classic book Moneyball (2004) depicted the evolution of baseball into a numbers game in which statistics-crunching wonks ran teams like a hedge fund. The Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane and his team of quants revealed that the traditional ways of evaluating players were highly flawed. Readers of box scores and home run counts suddenly looked silly. There was a serious game behind the game that brought to mind Warren Buffett and value investing.
The precursor to Moneyball was George F. Will’s Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, published in 1990 and the bestselling baseball book of all time.26 Will explained to Americans how incredibly complicated, precise, and, yes, cerebral their national pastime is, drawing readers’ attention to the importance of mental ability. Baseball IQ matters in a big way. As he explains in the introduction to the twentieth-anniversary edition of Men at Work,
I do not deny that extraordinary (literally: not ordinary) physical ability and natural talent are prerequisites for playing baseball at the major-league level. But neither do I believe that those gifts are sufficient. The history of baseball is littered with stories of failures by players who thought that their natural physical endowments would be sufficient.27
Men at Work was also the precursor of this book in two important ways. As Will observes in the same introduction, “The financial rewards that accrue to athletic excellence are already enormous, and as our increasingly affluent society increases its leisure time and discretionary income, those rewards will increase.”28 He saw that prosperity would allow more people to pursue “non-traditional” work to meet the growing demand for entertainment.
Even better, Will pointed out that in an economically advanced society with rising disposable income, people can pursue passions that have little to do with their professional work. As he put it, “the writing of Men at Work was not done by a man at work. Nothing that was so much fun should count as work.”29 Will is fortunate to have been born in the affluent twentieth century, when men no longer had to spend nearly every waking hour toiling to survive. “Work” done for fun became a reality in our wealthy country in the last century. It will become a global norm in this one.
To give his readers a deeper understanding of baseball, Will explains various positions by focusing on a particular figure—Oakland’s Tony La Russa (manager), the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Orel Hershiser (pitcher), the San Diego Padres’ Tony Gwynn (hitting), and the Baltimore Orioles’ Cal Ripken (fielding). If you read Men at Work you never see the game the same way again.
The manager, writes Will, “is responsible for wringing the last drop of advantage from situations that will occur in each game. To do this he must know the abilities his players have revealed in their past performances and he must have similar knowledge of the players in the opposite dugout.”30 Local scouts, advance scouts, position coaches, and front office workers keep him supplied with that crucial information. For example, La Russa’s pitching coach, Dave Duncan, briefs him on Red Sox outfielder Ellis Burks: “Third base, we play him straight. Shortstop, we play him to pull. Second baseman will be up the middle until there’s two strikes on him and then we’ll move back to straightaway.”31 Will describes his exhaustive game preparation: “Duncan has charts for all balls put in play by particular players off Athletics pitching, a chart for those balls put in play to the infield, a chart for those to the outfield.”32
La Russa couldn’t manage by pure instinct unless he wanted to fail. As Will tells it, his “‘instincts’ are actually the result of an ‘accumulation of baseball information.’ They are uses of that information as the basis of decision-making as game situations develop.”33 Baseball, in other words, is not for the stupid.
The late Tony Gwynn understood that. He told Will:
I just don’t feel I’m prepared unless I’m doing what I can to be a little bit smarter, a little bit better, a little bit more prepared. I have been brought up in the game to do every little extra thing, get every bit of extra knowledge that can help you get a base hit in a key situation.34
Gwynn knew so much about hitting that he could tell from the windup what some pitchers were throwing. His confidence was the fruit of “work done—with batting machines, with videotape—before he gets to the plate. His reaction depends on his analysis of what this particular pitcher does.”35 Gwynn “will look at tapes for hours. He has one tape of each team. Each tape has all his at bats against that team in the season.”36 Gwynn was unquestionably a great athlete; he played baseball and basketball at San Diego State. But he was also a remarkably intelligent student of baseball. His physical and mental prowess made him a Hall of Famer with a career batting average of .338 alongside 3,141 hits.
That same kind of baseball intelligence characterizes today’s stars too. Consider the Chicago Cubs’ outfielder Kyle Schwarber, an indispensable member of the 2016 World Series champions. Schwarber is “not going to go into macroeconomics and get an A,” says his college roommate Kyle Hart, but “when you get on the baseball field, that kid might as well be Albert Einstein.”37
If you’re hoping to make baseball your life, I’ve got the same exciting news for you that I had for football and basketball lovers. Combined revenue for Major League Baseball’s thirty teams was $8.4 billion in 2015. From 2011 to 2016, team values rose 146 percent on the way to an average of $1.3 billion.38 And as you might expect, player salaries are rising accordingly. When the 2016 MLB season began, a record 127 players were set to earn more than $10 million per year, while the average Major League salary rose to $4.4 million.39
The high pay at baseball’s top level is starting to trickle down. The average AAA minor league salary is about $2,100 per month, while some players in the system earn in the $60,000–$70,000 range per season.40 It’s only a matter of time until the pay on the “farm teams” reflects the soaring value of the teams at the top.
Major League Baseball doesn’t disclose the salaries of managers, but at least three can claim annual earnings of $5 million—Joe Maddon of the Chicago Cubs, Mike Scioscia of the Los Angeles Angels, and Bruce Bochy of the San Francisco Giants—with several more making a million dollars or more.41
As baseball becomes sophisticated, games are more likely to be decided by the slightest advantage in information. This development is raising the profile of coaches, who, as Tom Verducci notes in Sports Illustrated, haven’t always gotten much respect. Historically, the “first base coach has been held in such low regard that among the many who have filled the job for major and minor league teams are Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh (for two teams), the Famous Chicken mascot and 7′2″ former NBA center Greg Ostertag.”42 Mickey Mantle, an occasional first base coach himself, observed wryly, “There’s nothing to worry about out there. Nobody listens to the first base coach anyway. I never did.”43
The rising fortunes of first base coaches are a reminder that baseball’s past is no predictor of the present. Winning in the “Moneyball” era is less about home runs than about getting runners on base and advancing them. Verducci writes:
Thanks to the proliferation of video and the difficulty of the stolen base, the role of the first base coach has gained greatly in importance, even if much of it remains unfamiliar. Armed with granular intelligence to crack secret codes, the first base coach, not the manager, just might be masterminding your team’s running game.44
As the coach’s role has changed from ceremonial to crucial, his pay has grown accordingly. Nowadays, a first base coach makes between $75,000 and $125,000.45
What about the scouts, the guys who fill out the minor league rosters that will eventually determine the look and quality of the majors? Barry Svrluga calls them “baseball nomads,” whose “job is filled with tedium: calling coaches for pitching schedules, driving countless miles to high school games, talking with families and friends to learn players’ histories, their other interests, their favorite ice cream flavors.”46
To most people, scouting would be not a job but a sentence. Yet for someone who’s baseball-mad, it’s a foot in the door. Mike Rizzo was a minor league player who didn’t quite have the game to reach the majors, but the growing administrative side of baseball allowed him to remain a part of a sport that he loved. He started as a scout at $11,000 a year—scouts now make about $30,000—and today he’s the general manager of the Washington Nationals.
Recalling for Svrluga his traveling days as a scout with another ex-minor leaguer, Kris Kline—now a colleague at the Nationals—Rizzo says, “Neither of us really had any other interests. I often ask him, ‘What would you do if you weren’t in baseball?’ He has no answer for it. I have no answer for it.”47 Rizzo weathered the low pay in the early days pursuing the only thing he cared about, and now he earns $2.5 million a season.48
As for Kline, while he’s not sitting in the general manager’s chair, his work at a lower salary for a thriving team
sets him up for a more lucrative future. In addition to his salary, he’s now got 1.2 million Marriott points and thirty-five free round trip flights on Southwest Airlines—that’s a lot of otherwise expensive vacations. Above all, he’s pursuing his passion. “People spend their whole life trying to find the one thing you love doing,” says Kline. “I’ve found it. I don’t need to do that.”49
There are lots of guys like Kline. The Nationals employ more than “1,100 people who never get an at bat or throw a pitch.”50 But they’re part of a sport that fascinates them and on a team whose value continues to surge upward. The line about a rising tide lifting all boats isn’t a theory. It’s reality. The better the elites of baseball do, the more the game can employ thousands more who love it.
Compensation is one of the most powerful market signals. Word of good pay and intangibles tends to travel. Baseball is big business, and it’s attracting top-flight people whose talents aren’t necessarily athletic. In 2015, the ranks of general managers included graduates of MIT, Stanford, and Amherst (there were three Jeffs, actually).51 Sports Illustrated reported in 2016, “Every MLB organization has an analytics team in place to try to figure out what to do with all the data that comes from 2,430 games—roughly 750,000 pitches—a season.”52 And the baseball writer Bob Nightengale has called the Los Angeles Dodgers “Analytic Geek Squad, a group boasting Wall Street résumés, Massachusetts Institute of Technology diplomas, including Ph.D.s.”53
Today, top athletes and front office executives alike apply their impressive intelligence to a game they’re in love with. Gone are the days when most of us had to toil joylessly just to get by. That’s the dividend of prosperity.
CHAPTER THREE
Education Isn’t Meaningless, But It’s Grossly Overrated