David Seaton's Inside Baseball article/podcast reminded me of something I wrote on rec.sport.swimming back in 2003:

I just read three books in a row. One involved a boy wizard with a scar on his forehead. The other two were about men taking a new approach to their sports using ideas that were not new, but that had languished because they challenged the conventional wisdom. In both cases, their teams showed significant success due to the contributions of athletes that were not obviously gifted.

Moneyball, the bestseller by Michael Lewis, concerns the application of the Bill James' sabermetrics to the big money team sport of baseball. Briefly, "working with either the lowest or next to lowest payroll in the game, the Oakland A's had won more regular season games than any other team, except the Atlanta Braves. They'd been to the playoffs three years in a row and in the previous two had taken the richest team in baseball, the Yankees, to within a few outs of elimination."

The Yanks out-spend the A's three-to-one; they can afford to pay top dollar to get the best free agents available. The A's use James's ideas to find less expensive and overlooked players that have succeeded in ways that many scouts overlook. Unfortunately, the featured players from the 2002 draft (where A's GM Billy Beane, a failed "can't miss" prospect himself, completely embraces James' ideas) have yet to mature and really prove the premise. It is possible that A's have chosen a course that will always bring them a sound team but will never provide the players for a great team. I don't know squat about baseball, but given that they cannot match the Yankees payroll, the A's are definitely doing something right.

Long Strokes in a Short Season, by Art Aungst, concerns the application of Bill Boomer's ideas about technique and streamlining to the no money sport of girls' swimming at a public high school. For twelve weeks each winter, Coach Aungst coaches a mix of gifted swimmers, less-gifted swimmers and athletes that are simply swimming during the offseason between their primary sports. There is no recruiting, so he doesn't face teams with enormously greater or lesser talent, but he does face teams whose coaches still adhere to 'more is better' training philosophies (How do we do it? Volume!).

Already one of the better teams in the league, Aungst's team improved markedly in the six seasons following his addition of Terry Laughlin's Boomer-inspired, Total Immersion-style training to his regimen. His greatest competition seems to come from two teams whose coaches have followed his lead in using TI-style technique with their teams.

Orchard Park has great depth because even their seasonal swimmers, who might be kayakers or lacrosse players for the rest of the year, do learn to swim fast. Orchard Park does particularly well in the relays at the NY State Championships, finishing first or second at all eighteen relays over those six years with significant contributions from those seasonal athletes.

Like others at TI these days, Aungst is clearly fascinated with Eastern philosophy. There are quotes from the 'I Ching', 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' and a description of Japanese rock gardening from the novel 'Shibumi'. But he doesn't wallow in profundity; he can also be very funny, whether at his own expense or quoting Homer Simpson.

Coach Aungst was kind enough to answer a few of my questions:

Q - How does your Win-Loss record compare before and after 1997?

A - "... I don't mention this much, but in the last 5 years we lost one meet, and that was by a combined total of .14 seconds in three races. We have always been very successful and have only lost 5 divisional meets in the last 20 years, but ... I think the only valid comparison of program is us to us."

Q - What else might explain the better results since 1997? A particularly gifted swimmer? Better funding, better facilities, sunspots, or anything else that you changed? A decline at other schools?

A - "I really have examined this from every angle I can, and objectively there is no other explanation other than the new path we took. I have always had great kids who worked hard, were easy to discipline and who came in knowing how to swim, which makes my job a piece of cake. ... A prime example is that our medley relay had the same four girls in it and won the states in '98 and '99. All four graduated and we won again in '00 and '01, and finished second this year only because our backstroker slipped off the blocks. As far as the athletes go, they are by far the best I have ever coached, but I attribute that to technique-based programs."

"I used to coach age group and had many kids all year round, and I had lots of kids who identified themselves as swimmers, and that was their main focus in life. I think I squandered many opportunities with these kids in my earlier days. Now, (our) athletes see something that challenges their athletic ability, and not just their ability to endure."

"I left much of the book purposely vague, because I don't think I have many answers to things. I wrote it mostly anecdotally because to me it is much more about mindset, and how the nuts and bolts come together are going to differ from program to program based on all the variables you mention. To me it has been a much more rewarding process, and I think it has been for the kids as well. I only included times in the book to give people some frame of reference so that people can see that it also produces some very fast swims as this was the big reluctance for me to move to a technique based program. It is a hard leap for an old-school, grind-it-out guy like me."

"The main thing I would like coaches to carry away is that while it does make really good athletes very fast, it also makes terrible swimmers become so much better even if they will never be fast and it makes kids so much more involved in the process while giving so many more positive accomplishments than just times or championships."

I still don't follow baseball, but I believe a lot of baseball teams, notably Boston, and even teams in other sports have taken a serious look at sabermetrics.

In a related vein, Malcolm Gladwell just wrote a piece on a successful girls basketball team made up of relatively short and inexperienced players. The coach decided to have them defend the entire court, the "full-court press," against every opponent on every play, rather than let taller teams easily move upcourt into positions to execute their carefully-practiced scoring plays. His team made it to the national championships, where they ran into an official that decided any sort of defense was a foul.

All of which makes me wonder if we are entering an era in which, like Obama, we will have to pay a lot more attention to fundamentals, teamwork, small advantages and efficiency over swagger, individualism, overwhelming superiority and cheap energy - if we want to be successful.