There are many factors which come into play in making a pitcher effective. Among these factors are:
1) does the pitcher throw the ball exactly where he wants to throw it?,
2) is it easy or difficult for the batter to see the ball coming out of the pitcher's hand?,
3) can the pitcher throw his array of pitches at different speeds, confusing the batter's timing?, and
4) mound presence; that is, can the pitcher deal with adversity, or does he get rattled when things go wrong? (And they always go wrong.)

Those factors are all more important than how hard a pitcher can throw a baseball. But baseball's obsession with pitch speed, catalyzed by their ease at measuring it due to the radar gun, has caused some organizations to lose focus on what they're really trying to gauge; that is, the pitcher's effectiveness -- can he get batters out?

The Kansas City Royals are engaged in an experiment to challenge the assumption that faster is better.

Dayton Moore, the general manager of the Kansas City Royals, has issued an edict banning radar guns from the lower levels of the organization, where young drafted players first go to gain experience and develop their skills. Moore believes that this will eliminate a big distraction for young pitchers who get caught up in throwing hard, in order to be noticed and promoted, and forget about their jobs of learning how to get batters out.

Only time will tell if Moore's hunches are right, but I, and a host of soft-throwing pitchers in the Baseball Hall of Fame like Whitey Ford and Hoyt Wilhelm, are willing to bet that they are.

Let's end this little thought with the contemporary economist Adam Smith, who said...

Some years ago the sociologist and pollster Daniel Yankelovich described a process he called the McNamara fallacy, after the Secretary of Defense who had so carefully quantified the Vietnam War.

'The first step,' he said, 'is to measure what can easily be measured. The second is to disregard what can't be measured, or give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily isn't very important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist.'

The philosopher A. N. Whitehead called this tendency, in another form, 'the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.'

-- "Adam Smith" (George G. W. Goodman), Paper Money, New York: Summit Books, 1981, p. 37

So, the question is, are contemporary business and government leaders all too quickly and lazily falling into the trap of McNamara's Fallacy? Are we measuring only that which is easy to measure (and money, for one thing, is easy to measure) and making decisions based merely on those numbers because other important factors, such as long-term effects on quality of life and the environment, are just too difficult to quantify? Should we all be rethinking what we measure and why, just like the Kansas City Royals are? And what are our own industry's "radar gun measurements" that give us easy-to-acquire numbers that gather importance simply because they're easy to get?

Finally,this seems as appropriate an occasion as any to remind you of the immortal words of that Big Guy in the Sky...no, not HIM/HER/IT... but Albert Einstein who, as we all know by now once said: "Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts!"

(Photo from Flickr by chuckles396)