Hybrid Professionals Dominate the Decathlon, w/ Michael Salfino

This episode features journalist Michael Salfino; who writes for The Wall Street Journal, FiveThirtyEight, The Athletic and other top shelf publications. In a spirited and wide-ranging discussion, we cover all of this (and yes, we use the word “multiverse” a few times):

• The statistic that changed Mike’s life
• The wisdom of Einstein and Twain
• The theme of the Hybrid professional resurfaces, this time for Analytics and Communication
• Why your career is a decathlon, and 90th percentile can actually be 99th
• How it’s often better to be LESS informed in your own domain
• Why the courage to improve must be fostered top-down rather than bottom-up
• How analytics might be “ruining” sports (and sports might be bad for compassion)
• Why theory is “over” facts, and facts sometimes should be ignored
• Why Rob thinks predicting political winners is VERY different from predicting sports winners

Here's some handy dandy links for you:

Michael Salfino's Twitter Michael's article on Data In Politics Michael's article on Facial Recognition and Race Michael's article on Movie Ratings

Episode Transcript:

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Welcome friends for our second episode and our first non co-host guest. We're very fortunate to have the one and only Michael Salfino. Now this guy writes for some really prestigious outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and FiveThirtyEight. And he's primarily known as a sports writer, but I think you'll see that he's a bit of a Renaissance man. And of course he's into data, otherwise we'd just called the podcast raw, wouldn't we? I've known Mike seemingly forever, even though we've actually never met in person. And I've been following his work since probably the mid two thousands. He and I even collaborated on a research project back in the day when I was still at Microsoft and I was working on the original, great football project. And that was the first time I aimed these BI tools at football data, which was my hobby at the time, but that was years ago.

Rob Collie (00:00:46): And we recorded this episode. We recorded this at the end of week three of the NFL season. And so you're going to hear some dated references in there from a few weeks ago. And don't worry if you're not into sports or football. The key thing to pay attention to is really how his mind works. He blends data with his subjective experience in a really, really, I think professional and smooth way. One of the things I really like about him is how curious he is. And of course, he's pretty funny. We had a really, really, really good time with Mike and I think we're definitely going to have to have him back on the show regularly. So without further ado, let's get to that intro music.

Announcer (00:01:20): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?

Announcer (00:01:27): This is the Raw Data by P3 podcast, with your host, Rob Collie, and your co-host Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to powerpivotpro.com. Raw data by P3 is data with the human element.

Rob Collie (00:01:45): Welcome, Michael Salfino. I've really been looking forward to this for a long time. I've been reading and listening to you for well over 10 years now, probably 13 years. You write for and contribute to a number of different projects and outlets. Why don't you just kind of give us a rundown of that?

Michael Salfino (00:02:02): Sure. I guess the best way to say it is I'm more of a reporter and journalist. So I'm just trying to use some of the more advanced analytics tools to communicate the players and the teams that are actually good and likely to remain good for the foreseeable future, as opposed to some of the methodology usually employed by journalists, which is more descriptive rather than predictive in terms of forecasting.

Michael Salfino (00:02:31): So I don't consider myself in any way some sort of like data guru or even statistician. But I think I have a good sense, from my background that originally began in the corporate world, of how to actually translate some of these higher minded concepts and to ferret them out so that readers are able to, I think, glean from them a better understanding of the game. So that's all I'm trying to do.

Michael Salfino (00:02:55): Like I want to give my readers their eureka moment that I had when I was a kid, when I discovered the yards per pass attempt statistic in a book about professional football. And despite following football so intensely from grade school through high school, I had never heard of this statistic. I had never heard of it on the radio shows that I listened to or the television broadcasts or in any of the articles. So I was extremely annoyed that there was a statistic that correlated to winning, they said 75% of the time, irrespective of any other statistic.

Michael Salfino (00:03:29): And it was an efficiency stat, which I sort of intuitively knew at that time. So it was much better than a total yardage stat. And I felt that I was cheated, as a person who is passionate about football, to not know something so important and not to have been told this through all of those years, thus far in my life. So I'm trying to actually provide some of that information to the people who read my stuff so that they can maybe better understand the game that they're so passionate about.

Rob Collie (00:04:00): At our company we have a saying, which is your metrics that you're using, half of them should have words in the name of the metric, like the word per.

Michael Salfino (00:04:10): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:04:11): Or adjusted or indexed. If you're not doing it that way, if you're just sort of using raw metrics, there's no denominator, there's no correction in it. You're probably breathing your own exhaust in a number of ways. But before we even get into that, I want to give you a chance to name drop a bit. I'm just going to cue this softball up there, right down the plate. What are some of the outlets you write for, Mike?

Michael Salfino (00:04:33): Well, I started a syndicating nationally in newspapers for fantasy sports. That was after I wrote for, then it was Baseball Weekly, but it became Sports Weekly. So they wanted somebody to cover fantasy football. Then after the fantasy football, I started working for some of the regional sports networks on the content side. And from there, I was discovered by a Wall Street Journal editor who liked article that I did on evolution and pitching mechanics, as it related to a Yankee pitcher at the time, Joba Chamberlain. He was criticized for suffering an injury and losing effectiveness because he was unable to precisely repeat his throwing motion when pitching.

Michael Salfino (00:05:17): But the biomechanics on the evolutionary side said that that is something that's just natural in athletics because nobody was able to hunt the mammoth the same exact way. You know what I mean? And so since sports is more akin to something like that, the ability to precisely repeat movement is not something that comes naturally to athletes. And just because you look at it when somebody gets hurt and you see that they're different, we're not looking at it at all the times that somebody doesn't get hurt or lose effectiveness. So there's no way to actually know whether this ability to precisely repeat motion, with slow motion video evidence is actually predictive of any kind of success, or even if it describes success.

Michael Salfino (00:06:02): So the Journal liked that article and they wanted somebody. They wanted, what they said was somebody who they said was like a real nerd to write analytics driven pieces on the sports side. So I did that for about 10 years. I still do it occasionally for them, but now I mostly write for The Athletic on the fantasy side of things, and for FiveThirtyEight on the analytics side of things. When an editor from the Wall Street Journal went over to FiveThirtyEight, I kind of went over there with him.

Rob Collie (00:06:33): Just kind of minor publication, you know. Wall Street Journal, FiveThirtyEight.

Michael Salfino (00:06:36): I'm very fortunate. Yeah. I don't know like how this happened, but I think I found a niche because I was able to produce reader friendly content because of my journalism experience. And I always had a passion for data, just coincidentally. So it was just a perfect fit to be at a publication like the Journal where you had to convey some of these higher minded concepts in a more sort of earthy and lay person kind of way. So it was just a fortunate fit really on my part. I've been lucky.

Rob Collie (00:07:11): I think that's actually really the thing that was compelling. I've been much more into fantasy football 13 years ago than I am today, but I'm still doing it.

Michael Salfino (00:07:19): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:07:20): But I mean, I used to read basically like the entire internet of fantasy football content.

Michael Salfino (00:07:25): Right.

Rob Collie (00:07:25): And so I had exposure to plenty of different people. And I think the thing that drew me to you and your oftentimes partner, Scott, is the blend, sort of, of the nerdery, of the technical stuff with also human element, which is, by the way, the tagline of this podcast, data with the human element. So that blend and the ability to explain it. One of Einstein's famous quotes is, "If you can't explain something simply