The Art Neuro Weblog

Assembling A Roster
Taking up the challenge of explaining the link between baseball viewed through the 'Moneyball' prism and say space exploration, I'm going to say a few things about rosters. If there's anything that I've consistently mentioned in my baseball entries, it has been about who is contributing what and how. At the heart of the roster is the question of "who does what on this team?". Mission crews, Baseball squads, Combat units, Film Cast & Crew, Construction workers, all involve the assembly of personnel. The assembly of a crew roster as to who is on and who is not becomes a crucial aspect of team work.

By team work I'm not going on about the ra-ra rhetorical stuff of 'pullling together and getting it done'. I'm talking about the gestalt effect of a group of people working otwards a goal giving rise to a performance. Included, (not excluded) in this idea is the subtle dynamic of performances of many people mixing together to arrive at the desired destination or goal. To get there, who does what directly or indirectly to what sort of effect, is an issue that cannot be overlooked or underestimated. Who is going to get better, who is going to get worse? Who is going to be consistent, barring accident, and who is going to be streaky? What contexts suit which members better or worse? All these practical issues make the MLB season a fascinating lab from whence we can draw lessons for roster assembly in other areas.

Film shoots are notorious for the ego tensions because the collision of cast and crew is actually a lot more intractable than outsiders imagine. Both are there to do their professional jobs, but cast will always get the better treatment for their contributions. Crew, in turn work against the cast in subtle ways. If you hear a shoot is troubled, the only reason you would know is because crew are talking about it off set; and that's just a typical example. Just as the composition of a cast may change the picture, the composition of crew members greatly influences the outcome of a picture. From what I have expereinced, given a script and a budget, casting and crewing is 80% of what determines the physical outcome of the shoot. How many shots were done, how many pages were shot in the days, what was the shooting ratio, how many days did it get behind or ahead of schedule. The other 20% is determined by the Producer and Director.

In baseball teams you find that they talk about 'team chemistry' a lot. It's a notion that is poo-poo-ed a lot by the sabermetric stat-head community, together with 'clucth players'. Part of the problem is that these things are hard to quanitfy. However, it goes without saying that if a team can work together better, then there is efficiency gained; but also through that efficiency there is scope to arrive at a better gestalt result where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That is exactly where we want to arrive. Thus, we perceive at the problematic of quantifying and qualifying the nature of team performance.

The time frame of operation is also a crucial factor to consider. A Mission ot the moon is measured in days; a mission ot Mars will be measured in years. A MLB baseball team plays a season of 162 games for 6 months, while it issues multi-year contracts to its 'franchise' players. There's something to be said for watching how winning teams assemble and manage their rosters to maintain success. Particularly a team like the Oakland Athletics who have bucked conventional wisdom and yet continue to win. Even fantasy baseball leagues where one follows the daily stats teaches us the nature of statsitical clustering. A player who produces a certain level of performance in thier career doesn't do so without ups and downs; they do so with tremendous upheavals in their success cycle during the long season (as we saw with my mate 'DJ' this season).

And so one sunny day in the future, somebody must assemble a manned mission to Mars. Beyond the obvious issues of how we get there and what technology we use to achieve the objectove, the inevitable question that will have to be addressed will be who shall be on this mission and why them? The Mars mission crew roster is going to have to utilise the entire human knowledge of roster assembly to make the mission a success. Who will captain? Who will astrogate? Who will be the medical officer? Who will run the communications system? Who will maintain the propulsion system? Which scientists do we want to have on Mars? What kind of table of operations do we want? What kind of contingencies will dictate who will be in line of comand should the captain fall ill? Who is going to play that game of TAGWAR ('The Amazing Game Without Any Rules') against the Martian team?

It's simply not good enough to say, "we'll send the guys with 'the Right Stuff'"; if anything that would be an anathema to what the mission is going to be. Hence, even if all this natter about El Duque and DJ and the Yankees and Daisuke Matsuzaka and the whole Olympic baseball thing doesn't seem to relate to space exploration, I can see how there are lessons to be drawn. :)

- Art Neuro