Where We Put our Energy

Jason’s Random Words

I’ve played softball for most of my adult life. It’s a great combination of (lots of) social and (some) physical, and since many American kids grew up playing baseball, it’s the logical transition for our sporting careers as we age. Needless to say, pulled hamstrings are about as common as players hitting triples. We are (in some cases old) men playing a kid’s game.

The town league I am in only plays 16 games per year over the summer, (we have limited field capacity and can’t start our season until the kids are done) but the season really gets going two months before the first game when registration opens up. In an attempt to keep some competitive balance, new players are drafted. We hold a mandatory tryout about a week before the season starts, and the team with the worst record takes the first pick, with the second-worst drafting next, continuing to the last two picks of the first round which are taken by the two teams that played for the championship in the prior season.

Don’t worry: It’s a recreational league so everyone gets on a team. I won’t bore you (anymore than I may have already) with the minutia around how undrafted players are assigned to teams, but I can tell you that it’s wild how much time grown men will spend trying to uncover the details about some random 42 year old’s ability to play sports.

I’ll use my team as an example. I’m the manager, but two guys (who are both engineers — this is relevant only because it’s a very engineer-mind thing to do) take on the responsibility of researching rookies ahead of the tryout and draft. The league sends us a list of signups each week during the registration period, and new players are added to a Google sheet managed by my two engineers (who are both very good outfielders — not relevant but I thought you’d find it interesting) and shared out to the entire team.

On this sheet, there are no less than 15 columns of data we collect, including useful things about their athletics history (college sports experience is a big plus — any sport) along with obscure, and semi-invasive details including home addresses and links to spouse’s social media accounts.

That reads creepier than it is. We are looking for nice backyards (postgame BBQs are a big deal) and pools (this is a tie-breaker consideration when choosing a player), and shared social connections. We want good softball players, but we also want good people and families, too!

Needless to say, this is time consuming. By my estimation, my team spent about 100 person-hours researching the 15 new players this year before the tryout and draft even happened. We even had a two-hour pre-draft war room session two days before the draft with six people involved.

Okay, it was mostly just bros hanging out having a few beers. But we spent a lot of time talking about middle-aged guy’s relative athletic capabilities.

We aren’t an aberration. I would say we are along the lines of a median team; a few do a lot more (bordering on pathological) while one or two show up on the Saturday of the draft and that’s it.

The point? The combined input of time made across the softball teams in my town ahead of the draft each year is at least 1,500 man hours. That’s almost 38 weeks spent researching middle-aged dudes who’ll play 16 softball games a year.

I realize the whole concept of spending this much time on something like “which dad should we pick to play on our sports team?” sounds crazy to many of you. That’s the point. It never fails to amaze me what we will spend our time on, and the power of incentives on our behaviors.

In the case of my softball league, adding a new person to your dynamic can change things for the better or the worse, both on and off the field. Getting this decision right feels really important.

At the same time, people fall on a bell curve; there are outliers who are exceptionally great and exceptionally awful — both athletes and people — but most of us fall somewhere in the middle. As Danny Kahneman wrote in Thinking, Fast and Slow, “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it.” This is just as true with our individual investing decisions as it is with a rec league team’s softball draft picks.

I’d love to hear some things that you spend a lot of time on that others might think are nuts. Share in the comments below, or if you’re a member of our Starter Position on Patreon, hop over to our Discord server and join in the conversation there! Not a member? It’s only $5 per month. We’d love to have you join us!

Jason

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