Defeatism, responsibility, cognitive biases, you know, stuff

I was thinking about a recent Scrabble game I lost, in which there were two notable turning points:

1) I had a solid lead through the midgame, despite my opponent outbingoing me 2 to 1. I had a clunky rack, something like BEEGKIR, and a choice to either play something like IRE to block an open bingo line at the top of the board or play KEG for about the same score down low, improving my rack and hampering a less dangerous line. I had reason to think my opponent had good tiles and possibly the last remaining blank, but the line wasn't the only one on the board, and I decided that playing through the BEGK leave was asking for trouble. So I played KEG, and my opponent played TRAVOISE with a blank for 83. So I was kicking myself for that, at the time...I was behind a pace after the bingo, with maybe 20-25 tiles left in the bag.

2) I was able to battle back to almost even a couple of turns later. The tile pool was looking grim, but I was keeping the right stuff - low-point consonants to cope with the vowels I expected to draw. What I really needed was the H, since there was a 35ish spot for it. With seven tiles left in the bag, I got the H, and I had the tiles for the 35-point play. If I make this play, the only way I can lose is if my opponent bingos from an S. The pool is now AAEFINOPTUUV. If she doesn't have SANATIVE, SAPONITE or SUPINATE, I win. If I don't make the H play right away, but instead block the bingo line for about 5 points, and she plays where the H goes, I'll be really struggling, especially since my rack won't be good. She might not play there, particularly if she doesn't have the P to form UP, but it was a pretty obvious scoring spot...but she just exchanged four. Okay, so she kept something like ENT, EAT...doubt she'd keep P on an exchange there. Probably threw back OUUV or something awful. But even if I pick that junk myself, my 35-point H play will be enough - she has to bingo. So I play the 35-point play. And she had SANATIVE, so I lost.

I haven't taken a close look at the probabilities here, and I don't know what she kept when she exchanged, but that's not what I'm on about today. After the game, my first thought was, jeez, two big mistakes and a loss to a player rated much lower than I am. Whenever that happens, you always tend to think that sort of thing at first. Upon reflection, though, my first decision above wasn't wrong - there were other places to bingo, with words she probably would have found, and crippling my rack to block would have been incorrect. And the second...I could come up with ways to maybe justify blocking for 5 points, maybe it was some Nigel-like think outside the box deal, but I suspect not. I think I'd take the 35 and pray again. Sometimes decisions like that backfire, right or wrong; that's just the game.

But what I'm interested in here is the feeling I got when I realized that my plays hadn't been grievous mistakes. There was that sense of "well, there's nothing I could have done - if she's going to draw like that, I was going to lose no matter what I did" - and the weight lifted, of course: now I'm not responsible for what happened. (That isn't true in this case or in most, by the way, and I accept it now: I'm sure that I made some other decision in the game that might have been suboptimal. I almost never play a game without some leakage somewhere. You never can say what would have happened if you'd played optimally unless the evidence shows you did, so you can never know for 100% sure that a lost game was unwinnable, even though some almost surely are and this one might have been.) It's the sense of vanishing responsibility I experienced in the moment that I'm thinking about.

***

And how it applies to daily life. Life isn't a discrete series of matches - my decisions in this game had no effect on the game after it (which I won against the top seed, thank you very much), but in life, your decisions can and often do have that power. This is how an enduring sense of futility builds up: you lose a lot over time (insert your own definition of "losing at life" here), and it often seems like it wasn't anything you did or didn't do, and you perceive that that's the way the table tilts, and so when you make questionable choices you don't penalize yourself the same way. This is defeatism at its essence - I'm going to lose in the long run anyway, so I might as well do what makes me most comfortable or costs the least effort right now, even if the long-term expected value is negative. What difference does it make?

I've heard this described as "poor people thinking" - if you're poor and have no reason to think you won't be anytime soon, when you come across $5, you say, hell with it, I want a 40 and a bag of Doritos, and that's exactly what I'm going to get, even though I know why I shouldn't, because it's so damn rare I get even the smallest and most fleeting satisfactions. Doesn't matter how much you lose by if you know you're gonna lose. A rich person would never think that way - he or she might want the beer and chips and might get them if compelled enough in the moment, but the beer and chips don't offer near the same short-run stress relief, so it's much easier to make the decision to forgo the immediate gratification for larger ends.

That's the chicken or the egg. Are unsuccessful people - in any area, not just talking about money - unsuccessful because they've always thought in the ways that unsuccessful people do, or did a steady diet of losing encourage them to develop that mentality? I think it has greatly to do with the relative cost of mistakes. Everyone growing up makes plenty of mistakes, but if you're in a successful, optimistic, supportive environment, the cost of your mistakes will be minimized. Some of them will be papered over, and if that's not possible, people willing and able might bail you out, and if *that's* not possible, well, boys will be boys. You'll have room to flail until you get it right, and you'll have lots of good advice along the way.

If you're in an unsupportive, negative environment, though, your mistakes are going to cost a WHOLE lot. One night of mischief as a 17-year-old and you might find yourself homeless or behind bars for ten years, if you're unlucky enough. People won't stand up for you or whisper helpful hints in your ear, the education system will fail you, employers won't hire you, judges won't grant you leniency. Is it possible to overcome this? For a determined enough person, yes. Could most people couched in favorable circumstances pull off such a miracle if they suddenly had to? No, whether or not they're willing to admit it. But even if you start out up against it, if you get a couple or three good breaks, you might make out okay. You grow up needing too many of those turns of a friendly card to get by, and it's natural to develop the idea that you're always at the mercy of whatever comes your way - because, well, you pretty much are, in a way that people in more positive environments cannot understand. (Yeah, life isn't fair, duh, but that's something to acknowledge and work to alleviate the pain therefrom, not celebrate.)

People need at least some quantity of hope to operate - and establishing that hope is far more difficult for people whose circumstances disserve them. And in the absence of that hope, it's understandable how people develop defeatist habits of mind. It's a self-perpetuating machine. Once a Scrabble or poker player goes on "tilt", as it's called, they start not investing their energy in making wise decisions, because they've come to believe their decisions won't affect the outcome. I might as well complete this game with 20:37 left on my clock, since I'm screwed anyway. I might as well get that 40 and a bag of Doritos. So their decisions get worse, and their outcomes get worse, and they despair more, and they don't try as hard, and their decisions get worse, and their outcomes get worse...but what's the benefit of that, you ask? Well, if you start from the assumption that you're screwed no matter what, you no longer have responsibility for the decisions you make. If you feel trapped by that responsibility - with the sense that you're doing all the work for none of the reward - defeatism provides you a way out of the trap. People aren't stupid. If they see no benefit to playing ball, why would we expect them to do it? Defeatism looks completely illogical, but it is often a logical response to an illogical situation, as the defeatist is able to see it.

Which admittedly has little to do with the game I discussed before - wherever I might be defeatist, Scrabble isn't it, and I was plenty optimistic and dialed in until the loss was assured. But as important as it was for me to recognize that a great many games people think are sure losses are winnable by better players - and I think this one probably was, somewhere in there - it's just as important for me to recognize that it's a lot harder to win some games than others. That one was tough. Giving yourself, or someone else, too little credit is just as bad as giving too much.

And while Scrabble luck tends to even out in the medium-to-long run, life luck is much more complex and it's absurd to think it's anywhere close to even over as short a span as a lifetime. So while we don't want to enable bad luck as an excuse for repeated losing - if you take that approach with your Scrabble game, you'll keep losing, trust me - we can at least try to ease the worst snowball effects of bad circumstances (that is, keep people from going on tilt, as we are able) and stop blaming or crediting personal qualities so much for people's successes and failures. I think we make this mistake because humans are very narrative-driven and it's a much more engaging story if someone's a hero or zero because of what's inside him; it lets us explore these qualities, motivate ourselves with them, know ourselves through them. If it's a roll of the dice, we don't get to do any of that. Of course life isn't *totally* a roll of the dice, but this bias would lead us to underestimate how much of a roll of the dice it is. This bias might help us aim high, but it also makes us unfair as hell to each other. I'm not sure we're coming out ahead there - we might be better off accepting and working with the uneven ground rather than denying it.

The 1970 Milwaukee Brewers

Sometimes I like to pick out some random baseball team from the past on baseball-reference.com and figure out what their story was - how and why they won or lost, what the past and future must have looked like from their point of view. And it's usually some team no one ever talks about, since there's more to discover.

***

The 1970 Brewers were a second-year expansion team, but it was their first season in Milwaukee - the year before, they had been the ill-fated Seattle Pilots. Milwaukee had had the Braves from 1953 to 1965, before their move to Atlanta, but the fans there had to go only four years without major league baseball, as it turned out.

The Pilots were about as good as you'd expect an expansion team to be - they went 64-98. The new Brewers would improve on that mark...by one measly game. Not all bad teams are created alike; some shipwrecked teams start out mildly promising and are laid low by bad breaks or bad management, while others just don't have the talent to begin with. The Brewers were in the second group. Almost no one on the 1970 roster had much of a past or a future in the major leagues. The team was surprisingly old for a bad team - most bad teams play lots of youngsters, trying to sort out who might help them in the future. The Brewers' average age was 29.2, and almost no one was under 26. About everyone was a short-term solution, at best. (The Brewers went on to have poor records every year until they exploded on the league all at once in 1978; 1978 to 1983 was the best run of success the Brewers have ever had.)

The manager was Dave Bristol, who had had moderate success as the manager of the Reds before being let go in favor of Sparky Anderson. Bristol was an old-school disciplinarian type; not sure how that affected the team here, but he clashed with his players a lot during his later tenure with the Giants. Bristol managed the Brewers in 1970 and 1971, getting fired early in the 1972 season when the team started slowly once again.

The team was about equally bad in all respects. They scored 63 runs fewer than the league average and gave up 75 more than the average. From the looks of it, they weren't a good fielding team either.

***

Because the move to Milwaukee wasn't final until right before the season, the Brewers had to play the Pilots' schedule. This meant unusually long strings of home games and road games. This seems to have hurt the team - or at least their road record was a disastrous 27-55, while their home record was an almost-average 38-42. They started the year 3-3...and then lost 17 of 19, most of them on the road. They didn't have a winning month until September...unbelievably, they finished tied for fourth in their six-team division; the second-year Kansas City Royals had the same 65-97 record, and the White Sox really stunk out the joint, going 56-106. (The White Sox don't look near as bad as the Brewers at first glance; wonder what happened there, but that's another article.)

***

The 1970 Brewers regulars:

Catcher: Gene Roof (age 29). Had mostly started for three seasons for other teams. Very weak hitter, though he hit somewhat better in 1970 than in other years. Was a backup for the rest of his career.

First base: Mike Hegan (age 27). From the Yankees system, but never established himself there. The Pilots picked him up, and he was fantastic in 1969 in part-time play. 1970 was his only year as a true regular, and it wasn't one of his better years (.244, 11 homers). He bounced around the league for many years after that as a platoon player, and hit decently in that role.

Second base: Ted Kubiak (age 28). Played 158 games for the Brewers in 1970, but was never more than a part-time player otherwise, though he did spend ten years in the majors as a light-hitting utility infielder.

Shortstop: Roberto Pena (age 33). Barely played in the majors at all until he was 31; started for two different teams before he got to Milwaukee. Seems to have been a marginal player, a typical weak-hitting shortstop without the glove to make up for it. Played part-time with the Brewers in 1971 and was finished.

Third base: Tommy Harper (age 29). The 1970 Brewers' best player by far. A really strange career. He was mostly an outfielder; 1970 was the only year in which Harper was primarily a third baseman. (The year before with the Pilots, he'd even played second base for part of the year, though not very well.) Harper was very fast, and he had led the league with 73 stolen bases in 1969 - striking, in that he usually stole about 25 a year before then. His steals fell back to 38 for the Brewers...but he hit 31 homers, after hitting single-digit numbers of homers each of the preceding four years. His .296 average was also well above his norm - he made the All-Star team and even finished sixth in the MVP voting. The season was a huge outlier; Harper was just ordinary in 1971, and then he went to the Red Sox and had a couple of okay seasons before his career wound down.

Left field: Danny Walton (age 22). The most interesting story here. Walton had been a high draft pick by the Astros, and in 1969 he was the Minor League Player of the Year while playing in Oklahoma City. The Pilots traded former batting champ Tommy Davis to Houston to get Walton...he didn't hit well in limited action in 1969, but during the first two months of 1970, he set the league on fire, hitting near .300 and among the leaders in home runs and RBI. Walton fell into a terrible slump in June and July, but was starting to turn it around when he severely injured his knee in a late August game. He came back in 1971 but was traded to the Yankees after struggling early, and he wasn't any better there; Walton never hit as high as .200 again. You see his 1970 season and think, okay, here's a good prospect - he strikes out kind of a lot, but he's already hitting for solid power and getting on base, and he's only 22...he might become one of those young stars you build winning teams around. You'd never guess that he'd have more at-bats in that season alone than in the entire remainder of his career.

Center field: Dave May (age 26). The Brewers rescued him from the Orioles, where he wasn't going to get any playing time. He never hit in Baltimore, and he didn't hit for the Brewers in 1970 either, but it does look like he was a good athlete, some speed and power there, and good athletes naturally get more chances to find themselves. He hit well in 1971, regressed in 1972, hit REALLY well in 1973 (.303, 25 homers), stunk in 1974; an on-year, off-year pattern. Was gone from Milwaukee after that and never started again.

Right field: Bob Burda (age 31). Not really a regular, just 78 games, 222 at-bats - it was more of a committee arrangement. Burda was an extremely marginal player. His entire career was just 634 at-bats long, and he hit .224 with 13 homers, which would explain why his career was 634 at-bats long.

Starting pitchers: Marty Pattin (age 27) was the only successful regular starter, going 14-12 with a 3.39 ERA. He would go on to have a few more okay years as a starter, followed by a decent stretch as a spot starter/long man for the late 70s Royals...Lew Krausse (age 27) had been a spot starter for the A's; 1970 was his only full year in the rotation. He wasn't good in '70, was a little better in '71 with less work, and he was done after that. Skip Lockwood (age 23) was the only guy you'd call a prospect here. He was a rookie in '70 and not completely awful, and gave the Brewers three more decent years. Lockwood later had success as a middle reliever with the late 70s Mets. Bobby Bolin (age 31) had been successful for the Giants in the 60s, but was through as a starter by the time the Brewers got him (though he would rise from the dead to give the Red Sox a couple of good relief years later). The wonderfully named Gene Brabender...well, he went 6-15 with a 6.02 ERA, so that was that.

Closer: Ken Sanders (age 28). A happier story here. Sanders couldn't find his control before the Brewers got him, but in 1970 he did, and he would give the Brewers three excellent years. Didn't do much after that.

The rest of the bullpen were veterans of no particular distinction. Except for Bob Locker - he had a good relief career, though he pitched only 31 innings for the Brewers.