My apologies in advance to the OKBs* who can't grasp that all but a couple of dozen MLB players first played in the minors...
While the Mets and Yankees were leaking this information because it's good news for them (yay, our affiliates are closer), other teams are not happy (e.g. Giants), and Herr Manfred and Kumpel Woodfork want to tamp down the criticism (and the scrutiny, natch).
This is going to be a sea change for the minors as baseball fans know it. Or at least the ones familiar with the players not on the 40-man or the BA top 30 lists. And as Craig noted, many of the minor-league operators are waiting for this to all be over so they can have some semblance of how they might plan for 2021 after losing out on 2020.
The takeaway from “Swan Song” is that Johnny Cash can act. And also that game respects game and the guy from the NTSB immediately saw how perceptive Columbo is. Also, cool to see Hollywood legend and trailblazer Ida Lupino.
I started watching the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk series with the kids a couple years ago. The pilot and, to a lesser extent, the second episode, were both better than I expected with decent acting for the origin story. But the third episode was what I thought of when you mentioned the padding of a one hour show into two hours. Honestly, it probably should have been a half-hour episode, but a ridiculous amount of padding turned it into two hours. We couldn't deal with it again and abandoned the show. I guess it was a common thing the networks did in the 70s to fill airtime. Any other examples out there?
I’m realizing this can be said about a lot of “great” TV shows and movies from the 70s and 80s. We coax the kids into watching something from our childhood that we loved, and halfway through we’re debating whether to let the kids bail.
It’s all the small unconscious racism like the Bauer thing that end up building the edifice upon which a Breonna Taylor is shot in her own bed.
I am reading Eddie Glaude for the first time (highly recommended) and the internal becomes the behavior and then suddenly there is a White Supremacist in the White House refusing to leave.
Do you know the "Subpar Parks" poster series? Amber Share uses real one-star reviews of national parks as taglines on cleverly designed WPA-style posters. They're freaking wonderful. https://ambersharedesign.com/
The one for Yellowstone shows the hot springs with the caption "Save Yourself Some Money: Boil Some Water at Home."
According to the Mpls Star Tribune, the Twins fired the Rochester (NY) Red Wings as their AAA affiliate. They had been with Rochester for a long time. Lots of team officials and media members quite liked the people in Rochester. My guess is this did not go over well internally.
The Twins want to hire the Northern League's St. Paul Saints instead. Which geographically makes sense, of course. But the Saints don't want to pony up the $10 million or whatever to join the club. Negotiations have ensued. My guess is that if the Twins cut the Saints a break, said break will not be publicly announced. MLB will not want these other unaffiliated teams knowing that prices are negotiable.
I think you have this situation completely reversed. These minor league teams do still have owners, and the better-run ones do actually make some semblance of profit. But the affiliation with a major league team is a HUGE selling point. Being able to sell with “come see the future stars before they become big” or “come see this all-star while he rehabs an injury” are much better situations than “come see a bunch of high schoolers” or “come see a bunch of retreads”.
I’ll grant you all of these points, but I still don’t see how your initial premise works - that no affiliation would somehow be better than any affiliation
Most minor league teams don’t own their own stadium. These cities would easily figure out a way to cancel/buyout a lease with their resident MiLB team and work directly with the MLB teams if it ever came to that
Won't this just shift the burden to college programs? Like football and basketball, find some way to get suckers to pay for it and get the profits? MiLB is training. Training, especially for something as technical and rare as pro ball, is expensive AF. Businesses don't like paying people.
I loved the fact that the Saints were independent (and subversively so), but in the current environment I can't blame them for considering a deal. You can't eat (or spend) independence. NB That new ballpark is GORGEOUS - highly recommend to any stadium tourists out there in the After Times (if we ever get there).
On that subject, has anyone else here read Slouching Toward Fargo? One of my favorite baseball books.
Fascinating story on Walter Tevis--that Hemingway lifestyle will kill ya. We quite enjoyed The Queen's Gambit, which deserves to sweep all available awards for set and costume design--haven't seen mid-century modern that over the top wonderful since (in a different cultural context) In the Mood for Love. And Anya Taylor-Joy is remarkable, as are many of the other performers, especially Marielle Heller, who's previously been mostly a really interesting film director. I did find the narrative arc of the one non-white character (Moses Ingram's Jolene) problematic--she's vivid and sympathetic as a child but rather under-written as an adult, functioning as a kind of Magic Pixie Black Girl for a self-destructive Beth.
As for the narrative, it's propulsive and mostly satisfying, but I have to say that it really felt like a story centering on a female character that was written by a man. Beth experiences hardships and traumas, but while early life events provide psychological explanations for some of that, it's curious how little her gender seems to matter as she climbs the ladder of success in the world of chess. Yes, as a young female chess master she's regarded as an anomaly, but once the (male) people in her life recognize that she really is a great player, they pretty much accept her into the club. (By the end of the story, she has her own almost all-male Scooby Gang.) So Beth's demons are progressively more internal and self-imposed. The last episode especially plays out as according to the sports movie formula--underdog finds reservoirs of ability she didn't think she had in her, etc. Again, it's wildly successful as emotional catharsis and an oddly sweet fantasy with regard to gender relations, but it's not that...deep. But I'll settle--really, really enjoyed it.
I am from Louisiana, where we are experts at political corruption, and cannot believe these dudes didn't plant a few fraudulent ballots for them to find. Complete amateurs.
Re: Passan's comments on Bauer. I work in the field of education, and I actually agree with his basic premise. There is a lot of research showing that the people who are most elite in their field get there because they work hard. I think where he goes astray is what Craig points out: it's making the distinction between who has "natural talent" and who "had to work to get there." It's a false dichotomy. There are some in the field who actually think there is no such thing as natural talent (Anders Ericsson, famous for the "10,000-hour rule" is the biggest proponent of this). Ericsson would say that when we see natural talent, what we're actually looking at is our own biases. For example, a coach looks at a tall kid and thinks "oh, I bet they're great at basketball" so s/he coaches them differently, gives them more attention, and nutures them more, and then that kid ends up being better at basketball. So did that kid have natural talent or did the coach's bias give that appearance? This happens in baseball all the time too, right? Short, scrappy guys are better infielders, tall guys can't play shortstop, fast guys should play the outfield.
I think what Craig rightly points out is that those biases tend to cut along more than just physical lines, they're also racial, ethnic, etc. The fact is that anyone who makes it into professional sports got there because they worked their asses off. Doesn't matter where they came from or what they look like, they probably didn't have "natural talent," they probably just worked a whole lot harder than everyone else to be in the top 1% of the top 1%. In fact, minorities probably had to work a hell of a lot harder than the white guys because of systemic barriers that prevent them from having the same types of opportunities.
All that to say, I don't want to completely throw out what Passan is saying because from a research standpoint, he's actually right. I think we need to expand that though and realize that Bauer is the rule, not the exception. Everyone had to work hard. Bauer isn't some anomaly that he just wanted it more than other guys. His story is every pro sports player's story. I think that's what's most problematic about Passan's take.
Not a researcher, but anecdotally watching kids go from t ball to youth travel ball, yes the ones that succeed are the ones that work hard, but the success has inputs of natural talent, that preceded the hard work. Hard work is 100% necessary to elite talent that gets to, and then the top, of major league baseball, but without the elite talent, there is no "success."
What does elite talent mean in this case, though? What type of equipment do those kids have access to at home? Are they practicing at home? How are they practicing? When did they start playing seriously? Ericsson wrote a book called "Peak" and he goes over the typical path that most people take to become major league athletes. That Tiger Woods story about how he was already using golf clubs when he was 3? That's not an anomaly, that's expected. Kids who show "elite talent" are often the kids who started playing earlier, the ones who had access to baseballs, bats, gloves, etc when they were still 2-3 years old. The type of practice also makes a huge difference. Those kids who show "elite talent," are they also practicing differently? Are they being more intentional in the way they practice? I'd be willing to bet that if you looked at the way they practice, it would look a lot different than the kids who don't show "elite talent." I think that's why we have to be careful about how we talk about talent because it's often obfuscating the amount of hard work that's going on to be elite. That's actually kind of Ericsson's point too. When we say people have talent, we're often doing them a disservice because we're not acknowledging how much effort, especially unseen effort, is going into being elite.
You're making a strawman argument. That's not what Ericsson says. There's something to be said for interests, but that's not the same thing as talent. Bauer got better at baseball because he practiced with the intention of improving his strengths (known as deliberate practice), he probably had good coaching throughout his childhood and schooling in baseball, and yes, I'm sure he had an interest in it too. None of that has to do with talent. If Bauer had an interest in singing and put in the same effort as he did for baseball, he would most likely be a world-class singer. If you look at the science and research of education, that's what's been found. And again, the research disproves your last point. If there is such a thing as talent, it only gets you so far. Over and over again in studies, people who work harder and practice their craft intentionally always outperform people who have "natural talent." Now, there may be other factors that can influence how far someone can advance, like perseverance, but again, those aren't innate skills. Those can be taught.
Just another example out of music. Some people have perfect pitch, i.e. they can hear a note and identify it. It's rare, and most people assume it's natural talent. Here's the thing. In Ericsson's research, he has yet to find a person who has perfect pitch who also did not have music lessons while they were growing up. You would expect that if perfect pitch was a natural talent, you would find someone who has never taken a music lesson in their life who has it because it's an innate gift. Yet researchers have not found that person yet. In fact, in one experiment in Japan, they found that instructors could teach perfect pitch to kids between 2-4 years old with a very high success rate. What we see as "talent" or "natural gifts" is almost always a result of our implicit biases.
There are plenty of people who live eat and breathe baseball and never make it out of a Dominican training camp. I don't think they worked less hard than Bauer did.
Yeah, like most things it's a binary. What concerns me is how for some people, we think "He's a natural talent, let's push him and hone him and emotionally and financially support him and care about him" and other times it's "He's a natural talent, he's lazy." This has implications, especially for underrepresented groups. A girl who works hard to get the best grades in math class, is a brown nosing grade grubber who's bad at math and needs to overcompensate. Not like the mad genius!
In no way am I endorsing the idea that some of the kids I saw in tball will be professionals, but the difference in some kids coordination levels was shocking to me as I was initially watching 5 year olds play sports.
I see kids that I know work as hard as others and don't have the marked improvement relative to peers.
Again, not a researcher, but watching kids grow in front of me playing a game I am very familiar with, and they all are using the same/similar resources/coaching/equipment, I lean towards innate ability being the fuel to the hard work's accelerant. Without the natural "talent" hard work doesn't overcome physical obstacles.
The 10000 hour rule didn't originally say that talent doesn't exist. It referred to how much training was necessary to see improvement, and there were plenty of other factors like dedicated instruction. I learned about it in university almost 20 years ago, and it was never held as the magic formula to get better.
But like most things, it got dumbed down so some idiot could sell a book. "10000 hours and be great!" became a meaningless slogan that has nothing to do with the original research.
If you read Peak, Ericsson makes that point explicitly. He argues there is no such thing as natural talent. That may have been something that came later into his thinking, but he's pretty unabashed about it. But he does also say that Gladwell took the 10000-hour rule out of context and made it a magic formula that doesn't exist. It glosses over what that 10,000 hours of practice looks like, the fact that it was just an average (some things might only take 3000 hours, some might take 17,000 hours). But he's gotten much more adamant about his views on talent.
But it wasn't JUST 10,000 hours. It was the 10,000 (or whatever) hours under specific conditions.
I think it comes down to how we define "talent". Very few people would agree that all people have the potential to be equally good at everything. But I think we're obsessed with prodigies in a way that doesn't really pan out.
Right, I actually think we agree. =) I'm not sure what Ericsson said prior, but I know in my master's program 4 years ago when I read Ericsson, he had clarified his 10,000-hour rule in light of the way Gladwell has misconstrued it (reemphasized the type of practice, the importance of instruction, the 10,000 hours as an average, etc) and putting less importance on talent. What I took away from him was that every person has their own personal ceilings based on a variety of factors, but we don't know what those ceilings are until humans actually try to hit those ceilings, and those ceilings are rarely outwardly observable just by looking at someone and usually has to be borne out by watching someone practice. Maybe another way to put it is that he's willing to allow that talent exists but talents become apparent because of deliberate practice. Outside of watching someone try to hit their ceiling, there's no way to observe someone and simply say they have natural talent.
I remember that it was around the time that Cal Ripken went into the Hall of Fame in 2007, so early days of Twitter, that many writers were leaning into versions of "a product of hard work rather than superior athleticism" lines about Ripken. There's a see-it-from-a-mile-away trail that leads there due to the comination of Cal being white and The Streak that some writers couldn't resist. But I remember Buster Olney on Twitter pumping the brakes and saying some version of, "He was 6'4" Gold Glove caliber shortstop who almost single-handedly reimagined the type of player that could play that position at the Major League level. To dismiss the kind of superior athleticism that requires is pretty dumb." They all can't be David Eckstein, I suppose.
And his co-Hall of Famer, Tony Gwynn, never got that. Gwynn was famous for practicing off a tee for hours, for inventing watching yourself on video, for having his wife carry around a camcorder from the betamax days, not partying with his teammates, but watching himself on video every day and meticulously cataloguing all his ABs. But his rep was "lol the fat guy can play!"
Wow, that Kyle Chapman is a tool, isn't he?
My apologies in advance to the OKBs* who can't grasp that all but a couple of dozen MLB players first played in the minors...
While the Mets and Yankees were leaking this information because it's good news for them (yay, our affiliates are closer), other teams are not happy (e.g. Giants), and Herr Manfred and Kumpel Woodfork want to tamp down the criticism (and the scrutiny, natch).
This is going to be a sea change for the minors as baseball fans know it. Or at least the ones familiar with the players not on the 40-man or the BA top 30 lists. And as Craig noted, many of the minor-league operators are waiting for this to all be over so they can have some semblance of how they might plan for 2021 after losing out on 2020.
* OK, Boomer - plural
Damn, the Braves sure did a lot since 2017. Takes up almost the entire newsletter! Can’t wait to see points (b) and (c) tomorrow.
I thought Craig might do a Paul Reiser in "Mad About You" thing where he says (a) this and (2) that.
Same thing! Although I think Buzz from Home Alone did it best with A, 2, and D
The takeaway from “Swan Song” is that Johnny Cash can act. And also that game respects game and the guy from the NTSB immediately saw how perceptive Columbo is. Also, cool to see Hollywood legend and trailblazer Ida Lupino.
I started watching the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk series with the kids a couple years ago. The pilot and, to a lesser extent, the second episode, were both better than I expected with decent acting for the origin story. But the third episode was what I thought of when you mentioned the padding of a one hour show into two hours. Honestly, it probably should have been a half-hour episode, but a ridiculous amount of padding turned it into two hours. We couldn't deal with it again and abandoned the show. I guess it was a common thing the networks did in the 70s to fill airtime. Any other examples out there?
I’m realizing this can be said about a lot of “great” TV shows and movies from the 70s and 80s. We coax the kids into watching something from our childhood that we loved, and halfway through we’re debating whether to let the kids bail.
Right, the pace of these shows is often much slower. My kids have been more or less fine with that. But the pointless filler...man...
Alaska was called for Trump.
Our long national nightmare is over.
Could've sworn Rijo won the Cy Young in '91. Looked up his numbers for that season and he should have...Glavine won it with those pesky Barves.
If you missed Craig’s big twitter announcement: https://twitter.com/craigcalcaterra/status/1326886944714989569?s=21
It’s all the small unconscious racism like the Bauer thing that end up building the edifice upon which a Breonna Taylor is shot in her own bed.
I am reading Eddie Glaude for the first time (highly recommended) and the internal becomes the behavior and then suddenly there is a White Supremacist in the White House refusing to leave.
Do you know the "Subpar Parks" poster series? Amber Share uses real one-star reviews of national parks as taglines on cleverly designed WPA-style posters. They're freaking wonderful. https://ambersharedesign.com/
The one for Yellowstone shows the hot springs with the caption "Save Yourself Some Money: Boil Some Water at Home."
According to the Mpls Star Tribune, the Twins fired the Rochester (NY) Red Wings as their AAA affiliate. They had been with Rochester for a long time. Lots of team officials and media members quite liked the people in Rochester. My guess is this did not go over well internally.
The Twins want to hire the Northern League's St. Paul Saints instead. Which geographically makes sense, of course. But the Saints don't want to pony up the $10 million or whatever to join the club. Negotiations have ensued. My guess is that if the Twins cut the Saints a break, said break will not be publicly announced. MLB will not want these other unaffiliated teams knowing that prices are negotiable.
I think you have this situation completely reversed. These minor league teams do still have owners, and the better-run ones do actually make some semblance of profit. But the affiliation with a major league team is a HUGE selling point. Being able to sell with “come see the future stars before they become big” or “come see this all-star while he rehabs an injury” are much better situations than “come see a bunch of high schoolers” or “come see a bunch of retreads”.
I’ll grant you all of these points, but I still don’t see how your initial premise works - that no affiliation would somehow be better than any affiliation
Most minor league teams don’t own their own stadium. These cities would easily figure out a way to cancel/buyout a lease with their resident MiLB team and work directly with the MLB teams if it ever came to that
Won't this just shift the burden to college programs? Like football and basketball, find some way to get suckers to pay for it and get the profits? MiLB is training. Training, especially for something as technical and rare as pro ball, is expensive AF. Businesses don't like paying people.
I loved the fact that the Saints were independent (and subversively so), but in the current environment I can't blame them for considering a deal. You can't eat (or spend) independence. NB That new ballpark is GORGEOUS - highly recommend to any stadium tourists out there in the After Times (if we ever get there).
On that subject, has anyone else here read Slouching Toward Fargo? One of my favorite baseball books.
I'm pretty sure Western Civilization can do just fine without the Proud Boys "defending" it.
Fascinating story on Walter Tevis--that Hemingway lifestyle will kill ya. We quite enjoyed The Queen's Gambit, which deserves to sweep all available awards for set and costume design--haven't seen mid-century modern that over the top wonderful since (in a different cultural context) In the Mood for Love. And Anya Taylor-Joy is remarkable, as are many of the other performers, especially Marielle Heller, who's previously been mostly a really interesting film director. I did find the narrative arc of the one non-white character (Moses Ingram's Jolene) problematic--she's vivid and sympathetic as a child but rather under-written as an adult, functioning as a kind of Magic Pixie Black Girl for a self-destructive Beth.
As for the narrative, it's propulsive and mostly satisfying, but I have to say that it really felt like a story centering on a female character that was written by a man. Beth experiences hardships and traumas, but while early life events provide psychological explanations for some of that, it's curious how little her gender seems to matter as she climbs the ladder of success in the world of chess. Yes, as a young female chess master she's regarded as an anomaly, but once the (male) people in her life recognize that she really is a great player, they pretty much accept her into the club. (By the end of the story, she has her own almost all-male Scooby Gang.) So Beth's demons are progressively more internal and self-imposed. The last episode especially plays out as according to the sports movie formula--underdog finds reservoirs of ability she didn't think she had in her, etc. Again, it's wildly successful as emotional catharsis and an oddly sweet fantasy with regard to gender relations, but it's not that...deep. But I'll settle--really, really enjoyed it.
I am from Louisiana, where we are experts at political corruption, and cannot believe these dudes didn't plant a few fraudulent ballots for them to find. Complete amateurs.
Re: Passan's comments on Bauer. I work in the field of education, and I actually agree with his basic premise. There is a lot of research showing that the people who are most elite in their field get there because they work hard. I think where he goes astray is what Craig points out: it's making the distinction between who has "natural talent" and who "had to work to get there." It's a false dichotomy. There are some in the field who actually think there is no such thing as natural talent (Anders Ericsson, famous for the "10,000-hour rule" is the biggest proponent of this). Ericsson would say that when we see natural talent, what we're actually looking at is our own biases. For example, a coach looks at a tall kid and thinks "oh, I bet they're great at basketball" so s/he coaches them differently, gives them more attention, and nutures them more, and then that kid ends up being better at basketball. So did that kid have natural talent or did the coach's bias give that appearance? This happens in baseball all the time too, right? Short, scrappy guys are better infielders, tall guys can't play shortstop, fast guys should play the outfield.
I think what Craig rightly points out is that those biases tend to cut along more than just physical lines, they're also racial, ethnic, etc. The fact is that anyone who makes it into professional sports got there because they worked their asses off. Doesn't matter where they came from or what they look like, they probably didn't have "natural talent," they probably just worked a whole lot harder than everyone else to be in the top 1% of the top 1%. In fact, minorities probably had to work a hell of a lot harder than the white guys because of systemic barriers that prevent them from having the same types of opportunities.
All that to say, I don't want to completely throw out what Passan is saying because from a research standpoint, he's actually right. I think we need to expand that though and realize that Bauer is the rule, not the exception. Everyone had to work hard. Bauer isn't some anomaly that he just wanted it more than other guys. His story is every pro sports player's story. I think that's what's most problematic about Passan's take.
Not a researcher, but anecdotally watching kids go from t ball to youth travel ball, yes the ones that succeed are the ones that work hard, but the success has inputs of natural talent, that preceded the hard work. Hard work is 100% necessary to elite talent that gets to, and then the top, of major league baseball, but without the elite talent, there is no "success."
What does elite talent mean in this case, though? What type of equipment do those kids have access to at home? Are they practicing at home? How are they practicing? When did they start playing seriously? Ericsson wrote a book called "Peak" and he goes over the typical path that most people take to become major league athletes. That Tiger Woods story about how he was already using golf clubs when he was 3? That's not an anomaly, that's expected. Kids who show "elite talent" are often the kids who started playing earlier, the ones who had access to baseballs, bats, gloves, etc when they were still 2-3 years old. The type of practice also makes a huge difference. Those kids who show "elite talent," are they also practicing differently? Are they being more intentional in the way they practice? I'd be willing to bet that if you looked at the way they practice, it would look a lot different than the kids who don't show "elite talent." I think that's why we have to be careful about how we talk about talent because it's often obfuscating the amount of hard work that's going on to be elite. That's actually kind of Ericsson's point too. When we say people have talent, we're often doing them a disservice because we're not acknowledging how much effort, especially unseen effort, is going into being elite.
You're making a strawman argument. That's not what Ericsson says. There's something to be said for interests, but that's not the same thing as talent. Bauer got better at baseball because he practiced with the intention of improving his strengths (known as deliberate practice), he probably had good coaching throughout his childhood and schooling in baseball, and yes, I'm sure he had an interest in it too. None of that has to do with talent. If Bauer had an interest in singing and put in the same effort as he did for baseball, he would most likely be a world-class singer. If you look at the science and research of education, that's what's been found. And again, the research disproves your last point. If there is such a thing as talent, it only gets you so far. Over and over again in studies, people who work harder and practice their craft intentionally always outperform people who have "natural talent." Now, there may be other factors that can influence how far someone can advance, like perseverance, but again, those aren't innate skills. Those can be taught.
Just another example out of music. Some people have perfect pitch, i.e. they can hear a note and identify it. It's rare, and most people assume it's natural talent. Here's the thing. In Ericsson's research, he has yet to find a person who has perfect pitch who also did not have music lessons while they were growing up. You would expect that if perfect pitch was a natural talent, you would find someone who has never taken a music lesson in their life who has it because it's an innate gift. Yet researchers have not found that person yet. In fact, in one experiment in Japan, they found that instructors could teach perfect pitch to kids between 2-4 years old with a very high success rate. What we see as "talent" or "natural gifts" is almost always a result of our implicit biases.
There are plenty of people who live eat and breathe baseball and never make it out of a Dominican training camp. I don't think they worked less hard than Bauer did.
Yeah, like most things it's a binary. What concerns me is how for some people, we think "He's a natural talent, let's push him and hone him and emotionally and financially support him and care about him" and other times it's "He's a natural talent, he's lazy." This has implications, especially for underrepresented groups. A girl who works hard to get the best grades in math class, is a brown nosing grade grubber who's bad at math and needs to overcompensate. Not like the mad genius!
In no way am I endorsing the idea that some of the kids I saw in tball will be professionals, but the difference in some kids coordination levels was shocking to me as I was initially watching 5 year olds play sports.
I see kids that I know work as hard as others and don't have the marked improvement relative to peers.
Again, not a researcher, but watching kids grow in front of me playing a game I am very familiar with, and they all are using the same/similar resources/coaching/equipment, I lean towards innate ability being the fuel to the hard work's accelerant. Without the natural "talent" hard work doesn't overcome physical obstacles.
The 10000 hour rule didn't originally say that talent doesn't exist. It referred to how much training was necessary to see improvement, and there were plenty of other factors like dedicated instruction. I learned about it in university almost 20 years ago, and it was never held as the magic formula to get better.
But like most things, it got dumbed down so some idiot could sell a book. "10000 hours and be great!" became a meaningless slogan that has nothing to do with the original research.
If you read Peak, Ericsson makes that point explicitly. He argues there is no such thing as natural talent. That may have been something that came later into his thinking, but he's pretty unabashed about it. But he does also say that Gladwell took the 10000-hour rule out of context and made it a magic formula that doesn't exist. It glosses over what that 10,000 hours of practice looks like, the fact that it was just an average (some things might only take 3000 hours, some might take 17,000 hours). But he's gotten much more adamant about his views on talent.
But it wasn't JUST 10,000 hours. It was the 10,000 (or whatever) hours under specific conditions.
I think it comes down to how we define "talent". Very few people would agree that all people have the potential to be equally good at everything. But I think we're obsessed with prodigies in a way that doesn't really pan out.
Right, I actually think we agree. =) I'm not sure what Ericsson said prior, but I know in my master's program 4 years ago when I read Ericsson, he had clarified his 10,000-hour rule in light of the way Gladwell has misconstrued it (reemphasized the type of practice, the importance of instruction, the 10,000 hours as an average, etc) and putting less importance on talent. What I took away from him was that every person has their own personal ceilings based on a variety of factors, but we don't know what those ceilings are until humans actually try to hit those ceilings, and those ceilings are rarely outwardly observable just by looking at someone and usually has to be borne out by watching someone practice. Maybe another way to put it is that he's willing to allow that talent exists but talents become apparent because of deliberate practice. Outside of watching someone try to hit their ceiling, there's no way to observe someone and simply say they have natural talent.
I remember that it was around the time that Cal Ripken went into the Hall of Fame in 2007, so early days of Twitter, that many writers were leaning into versions of "a product of hard work rather than superior athleticism" lines about Ripken. There's a see-it-from-a-mile-away trail that leads there due to the comination of Cal being white and The Streak that some writers couldn't resist. But I remember Buster Olney on Twitter pumping the brakes and saying some version of, "He was 6'4" Gold Glove caliber shortstop who almost single-handedly reimagined the type of player that could play that position at the Major League level. To dismiss the kind of superior athleticism that requires is pretty dumb." They all can't be David Eckstein, I suppose.
Obviously Billy ripkin was too much of a fuck face to be a hall of famer.
And his co-Hall of Famer, Tony Gwynn, never got that. Gwynn was famous for practicing off a tee for hours, for inventing watching yourself on video, for having his wife carry around a camcorder from the betamax days, not partying with his teammates, but watching himself on video every day and meticulously cataloguing all his ABs. But his rep was "lol the fat guy can play!"
Anyone who didn't love Tony Gwynn is a nincowpoop.
And meanwhile, he's still the best point guard San Diego State has ever produced.