The Out in Left Weekly: May 19, 2024
Load management and nothing more
Load management comes to baseball
ESPN published a piece this week about MLB teams’ emerging interest in “load management”—the practice of monitoring and moderating a player’s physical activity to maximize in-game performance—and I had to check that a Fitbit didn’t write it. Among the things not mentioned or explored:
How fans will react if star players, who reportedly exert themselves the most, start sitting out more games because a computer says it's time to rest.
If players being forced to rest impacts their availability and production and in turn their earning potential.
Relatedly, if team executives quantifying player movement provides them another metric to depress labor costs.
If data in any way supports the assertion that load management contributes to winning.
Load management has plagued the NBA for years, with the San Antonio Spurs mastering the technique in the 2010s. Superstars like Kawhi Leonard sitting out games as a preventative measure became so prevalent that before this season the league instituted the ‘player participation program,’ a set of rules that discourage and penalize load management. Among other things, the league can fine teams for sitting star players and, like a startup revoking its unlimited PTO policy, requires players to play in at least 65 games to qualify for certain awards and honors.
Baseball teams are starting to think like the Spurs. "As a player, you think you're invincible and can play every day,” Cincinnati Reds manager David Bell told ESPN. “But the grind of the season in baseball is an extreme challenge. Over time, it's compounded." Given the changing TV landscape, I wonder when MLB will follow the NBA’s lead. The latter cracked down on its teams to maximize the value of its broadcast rights. Broadcasters and fans not knowing the availability of marketable players undermines the business of basketball, but this is a problem of the NBA’s own making, as The Ringer’s Danny Chau pointed out. “...[It’s] important to recognize the bigger picture,” Chau wrote in September, “there are too many regular-season games for how the sport is presently played.”
Similarly, if David Bell is correct about baseball—that the game today is “more difficult”—and if MLB cares about player safety and longevity, then it should shorten spring training, return to the 154-game schedule of yesteryear, and realign the league and schedule to reduce travel. Instead, it has expanded the playoffs, committed its players to the World Baseball Classic, and sends teams around the globe for novelty series. The Philadelphia Phillies and New York Mets head to the U.K. in a few weeks for the London Series; I felt like I got hit by a Mack Truck the last time I returned from London the jet lag was so bad. I didn’t have to play professional sports or do promotional activities before, during, and after my trip.
This increase in workload for the players is meant to increase revenue, of course, but this leaves individual teams to balance the competing interest of workplace safety. This is expressed through the pseudoscience of load management, and the associated biometrics and analytics are lipstick on a centuries-old pig: wringing as much surplus value from labor as possible. Maybe load management actually does result in better performance and longer careers. Will the players receive an increase in compensation commensurate with the value that that performance and longevity create? LOL. Or will fans receive discounts and refunds on days that star players sit? LMAO.
My solution, which will be accepted by no one, is to accept human fallibility. Sometimes, a slump is just a slump, a bunch of random outcomes that occur near each other. Sometimes, a manager and a player just know when it’s time to take a breather. It’s a feeling, which as of this writing computers are not capable of having. I am often frustrated by the platitudes employed by professional athletes when they describe their performance, but their movements do defy precise description. Every batter knows to keep their weight back and take their hands to the ball, but what that feels like is unique to the individual. Our search for reason through and the obsession with analytics is our trying to control the human body, which is not meant to travel and play top-flight professional sports for 250 days a year. The advent of load management is not a scientific advancement. It’s the advancement of an exploitative economic system.
Bravo!