By  Jennifer (Jennie) Latson

Jimmy Disch is an associate professor of sport management at Rice, where he teaches a popular course called “Moneyball,” a reference to the 2003 book about Billy Beane’s use of sabermetrics — statistical analysis applied to baseball — to make the Oakland A’s a competitive team on a shoestring budget.

The Astros were early adopters in the sabermetrics revolution, and they continue to invest heavily in statistical analysis — and to apply its findings on the field. Take the defensive strategy of infield shifting, for example, which they use more than any other MLB team. Rice Business senior editor Jennifer Latson talked to Disch about how the field of sabermetrics has evolved, and how the Astros use it to their advantage.  

Q: How has data analysis changed the way baseball is played? 

A: Any sport is always looking for ways to modernize and become more competitive. One thing that’s been a major factor in baseball is that analytics has shown how shifting is a supreme advantage to the defense. Some players’ careers have been drastically affected by this, like [Los Angeles Angels first baseman Albert] Pujols specifically. Now that everyone’s shifting him, it’s a lot harder to get a hit.

As far as hitting styles go, the big thing now is launch angle — trying to develop a swing that helps you get the ball in the air more. That has increased the number of strikeouts for hitters, but it’s also increased the number of home runs.

Q: What are some examples of game-changing findings that a statistician was able to observe while a coach could not?

A: Recently, teams have started applying the data they have to trying to improve pitching styles. It used to be you really didn’t want to throw high in the strike zone, but now you’ve got pitchers doing what they call “tunneling,” where they can start their fastball up high. Then they can start their curve ball in the same “tunnel” and make it harder for the hitter to decide the type of pitch. In the old days, most coaches wanted the pitchers to keep the ball low and just work it in and out. But the Astros were ahead of that trend. [Astros pitching coach] Brent Strom has been preaching that for a long time, well before there were statistics to back it up.

Q: What are some surprising facts or anecdotes you share with the students in your “Moneyball” class?

A: When the Owls won the College World Series in 2003, we had a pitcher, David Aardsma, who went on to play professionally. After he left Rice to play, he took my sports analytics class. And for his final project, he took a scientific look at his best pitches in terms of outs. He hypothesized that his slider was his best out pitch against right-handed batters, and his changeup was the best for left-handed batters. The data showed that the slider was best for right-handed batters — but it was also the best for left-handed batters. If he’d known that earlier, he would have changed his approach.

Q: What do people tend to misunderstand about sabermetrics?

A: What I try to emphasize in my class is that you’ve got to start with a theory; you can’t just throw a bunch of numbers into an analysis and come up with something meaningful. It’s also not the case that sabermetrics is a replacement for scouting and coaching. Today you have a blend of analytics and traditional scouting. If the scouts and the numbers agree that a player is worthwhile, you draft him, and if they agree that he’s not, you don’t. But when the scouts say one thing and the numbers say another, that’s when you have to dig more deeply — you have to take a closer look.

Q: How has sports analytics changed in recent years, as technology has evolved? What are some of its newer applications?

A: Instead of player acquisition, the focus is now getting into the area of player development. Everything’s more quantifiable now; you know exactly the spin rate on pitches and how much the ball deviates. Improved video technology has given coaches and players tools where they can immediately analyze what just happened. But at the same time, all the low-hanging fruit is gone — all the easy answers have been found. So now you’ve got to really dig to find out what’s going on.

Q: Why hasn’t data analysis played as big a role in other sports?

A: Baseball has always been a sport that measured everything, but the fact that the pitcher puts the ball in play is what makes the difference. You always know where the ball’s going to start, and in order for something to happen, the batter’s got to put it in play.

Basketball is also highly analytic, and the Rockets are trendsetters in the NBA with data analysis, just like the Astros are trendsetters in the MLB. There’s also a lot in soccer, but there the scoring is so low that it’s hard to find valid predictors. In football, the size of the field and the nature of the beast makes it hard — there are still a lot of measures that aren’t predictable. A lot more comes down to coaching in football.

Q: Which do you think would be more helpful to the Astros: all the data in the world or Jose Altuve?

A: That’s a good question, because it goes back to the value of traditional scouting. All the numbers say no on Altuve. He’s too small; no one expected him to have nearly the power he has. But fortunately, one of our scouts looked at him and gave him a chance. They’d sent him home from tryouts, thinking he’d lied about his age because he was so little, but he got his birth certificate and came back and they let him play — and he was so skilled that they signed him. In the end, all the numbers can do is maximize the paradigms that you have to work from. You still have to use your judgement.

Based on research by Vikas Mittal, Xin He and J. Jeremey Inman

• Men are more prone to take risks for personal financial gain than women, and women are more likely than men to take risks to protect themselves from financial loss.
• Past research suggests that women are more influenced by “communion” goals related to loss minimization and men are more influenced by self-oriented goals related to gain maximization.
• Male investors who believe they are highly capable are more likely to take a risk than female investors with the same belief about their own capability.

When motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel leapt over cars, vans and fountains, it was little surprise that the person pulling those stunts was a man. That’s not to say women never partake in high-risk behavior (Danica Patrick, anyone?). But decades of research confirm that men really are more inclined to take risks (Byrnes, Miller, and Schafer 1999). 

Snake River Canyon and the Indy 500 aside, economic life offers plenty of risk as well. When these risks involve investing, men under certain circumstances are more likely than women to take dangerous leaps (Jianakoplos and Bernasek 1998). But why?

Rice Businesses professor Vikas Mittal joined Xin He of the University of Florida and J. Jeffrey Inman of the University of Pittsburgh in three studies to examine why men and women engage in risky business. Specifically, the team wanted to test whether each gender’s risk-taking was moderated by a trait called issue capability: a decision-makers’ belief that he or she can solve an issue. (Mittal, Ross, and Tsiros 2002, p. 455).

The team grounded their work in agency-communion theory. This posits that men are more driven by goals that further self-interest (“agentic” goals) and women are more driven by goals that further coexistence (“communion” goals).

Based on this theory, the researchers hypothesized that men making investment decisions would take greater risks as their issue capability rose. This would occur because men, who are more focused on maximizing gains, would become more risk-seeking as their self-capability perceptions increased.

Conversely, the researchers theorized, women who faced similar investment decisions would focus on avoiding loss — even when their issue capability rose. This fundamental difference in investing perspective — men trying to maximize any gain versus women trying to minimize any loss – would be at the heart of a diametrically opposite stance on financial risk-taking.

All three studies proved the theory to be correct.

In the first study, the researchers asked men and women to wager money on Daily Double questions in “Jeopardy!” The male contestants with higher issue capability (i.e. demonstrated knowledge of the category) took the biggest risks. The women contestants showed equal levels of betting behavior regardless of whether they had high issue capability or not. 

In the second study, the researchers dove into the psychology underlying gender and issue capability. First, the researchers primed male and female participants to believe they had either good or bad track records with risky investment decisions. Then they asked both groups to imagine they could invest $20,000 at varying levels of risk.

When it came to investing for gains, the researchers found, the women’s beliefs about their issue capability made no real difference in their financial choices. Even after they had been primed to think they were highly capable investors, the women participants were less prone than the men to focus on the upside potential.

And the men? Those who believed they were “capable” made the riskiest investment decisions. They also reported the highest number of thoughts about the positive potential of the various investment scenarios. Statistical analysis proved that these gain-maximization thoughts egged them on in their risk-taking.

On the other hand, those male participants who weren’t primed to feel capable showed risk-taking patterns identical to that of the female participants. The results, in other words, suggest that the key difference between men and women’s risk-taking is not innate — but stems from their self-conviction in investment competence.

The third study examined these processes in yet another way, by giving female and male participants the chance to maximize gains through making investments in stocks, or to minimize losses through buying insurance. Once again, the men primed to see themselves as ace investors made the riskiest investments. The women who felt themselves especially capable kept their risk-taking steady.

The women’s behavior only changed when they thought they were subpar investors. When both women and men were told they were stock market duds, the women were more likely than the men to buy insurance — in other words, to take traditional measures to defend against loss.

Risk-taking choices, in other words, can no longer be written off as just boys being boys or girls being girls. More accurately, boys will be boys when a male investor thinks he is especially capable and that taking a risk will benefit him personally. That’s not always a good thing. A female investor, who will typically focus on minimizing potential loss, can contribute a lot to investing decisions. Taking a big risk, as many an investor knows, isn’t always the best move.

Mittal’s findings inspire a list of possibilities for future research. What will happen to these behaviors as more women assume leadership jobs and more men get to show their skill as caregivers? Should senior management teams have both male and female representation to balance out the upsides and downsides of investment decisions? What about at home: Would household decisions change for the better if both the man and the woman contributed their perspective?

Vikas Mittal is the J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Marketing at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Xin H., Inman, J. J., & Vikas Mittal (2008). Gender jeopardy in financial risk taking. Journal of Marketing Research, 45(4), 414-424.

Based on research by Erik Dane

• Traditional academic writing is dense and inaccessible.
• Writing for nonacademic audiences can help scholars bring life to their professional writing.
• Writing in plain English matters: Accessible language broadens the reach of research and generates social change.

Academic research is a powerful force.

It deepens understanding of daily life. It undergirds laws. And, in an era poisoned by “fake news,” it can provide a desperately needed barometer to gauge what’s real and what’s not.

No one would accuse the academy of taking such duties lightly, exactly. Academics hold their work to strict account, typically basing their utterances on empirical evidence, rigorous peer-review and conceptual precision. Little wonder that the media constantly seek interviews with them or opinion pieces buttressed by their research.

Why is it, then, that for many readers, academic writing is useless?

Pick up an academic journal without a PhD and try deciphering it. There may be original thinking and breakthroughs in there, but they’re mostly encoded in language that researchers seem to be using to communicate exclusively with each other. How many lay people use terms such as metacritical, taxonomic, hermeneutics or polysemy?

In an article published in, yes, an academic journal, but mercifully devoid of esoteric terms, former Rice Business Professor Erik Dane argues that traditional academic writing is obscuring the very arguments, theories and insights that researchers need to explain. Academese, he writes, is so larded with jargon that it dulls the impact of the ideas themselves.

Entrenched over generations, this lexicon favors appropriateness over clarity and linguistic formula over originality. Articles resemble each other, authors sound interchangeable and yet their words are comprehensible only to other academics. “The way academics write,” Dane says, “is rooted in institutional pressures that exact conformity in exchange for membership.”

To fulfill their public duty as intellectuals, Dane writes, researchers must venture beyond their own tribe.

Failure to do so means that important ideas – often generated with the help of taxpayer dollars – are trapped in an ivory tower inaccessible to the people who need new ideas the most: decision-makers, leaders, policy-writers and voters.

The first step? Try writing for a non-academic audience, Dane recommends. “Most researchers publish their work in peer-reviewed journals where there’s a rigid formula for style,” he notes. Pitching ideas to trade books, mainstream magazines and newspapers requires brushing up on brisk, everyday language and clearly connecting the dots.

Luckily, certain exercises can make clear writing easier. Creative writing, for example, can “trigger new associations and loosen assumptions about the nature of writing itself,” Dane writes. Switching from an expository to an imaginative mindset helps the writer call established norms into doubt and triggers a creative process.

Reading widely and beyond the scope of academic literature can also remind scholars of the full expressive range of English. “Across distinct forms of writing, from rhetorical rants to poems to graphic novels,” Dane says, “our language unfurls itself in remarkable cadences and combinations.” Imagine harnessing some of those to make a reader understand and care about finance, stem cell research or discrimination research.

By injecting personality, even wit, into their writing, Dane says, academics stand to gain relevance far beyond the academy. And maybe even within it: “My hunch is that articles that have a dash of ‘deviance’ will actually fare better within the peer-review process,” Dane writes. “As academics, we advance sequentially from one point to the next, constructing a chain of logic that props up the hypothesis while acknowledging any gaps left to be explored. But introducing some flair into the way we write will make our writing sound better. Making that transition from monotone to melodious can help us make our work more memorable too.”

The impact of any research, in the end, depends on whether it sticks in a reader’s mind. Writing with life to it can introduce an academic’s hard-won findings to broader audiences that can actually benefit and act on them.

“We often bemoan the fact that business practitioners don’t read what we publish,” Dane argues. “And in many fields there’s a sizeable gap between research and practice. The more engaging our writing … the better off we’ll all be from a societal point of view.”

In an era characterized by “fake news,” hyperconnectivity and unprecedented change, it’s more important than ever for those on the front lines of knowledge to report what they know. What a waste when the truths they struggled to unearth are buried again, in their own words.

Erik Dane is a former professor and was the Distinguished Associate Professor of Management (Organizational Behavior) at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Dane, E. (2011). Changing the tune of academic writing: Muting cognitive entrenchment. Journal of Management Inquiry, 20(3), 332-336.

Rice’s Cohen House was the site of a celebratory occasion Oct. 4 as the Jones Graduate School of Business community gathered for the Rice Business Alumni Awards, which annually recognize alumni in six categories for outstanding achievements in their professional fields and exemplary leadership.

Recipients of these awards embody the school’s four pillars of alumni engagement: community, philanthropy, volunteering and lifelong learning. This means that when reviewing nominations, the selection committee took into special consideration those alumni who exemplify and consistently engage in supporting their communities in these areas.

Pictured, from left, are Peter Rodriguez, dean of Rice Business; Eric Elfman ’95, Industry Excellence in Technology Award; Rob Royall ’84, Industry Excellence in Financial Services Award; Tanu Grewal ’05, Industry Excellence in Consumer Products Award; Eleanor Putnam-Farr, assistant professor of marketing at Rice Business; Sean Ferguson ’01, Industry Excellence in Nonprofit Award; and Alessandro Piazza, assistant professor of strategic management at Rice Business.

Award winners not pictured are Robert Gaudette ’01, Industry Excellence in Energy Award, and Robyn O’Brien ’98, Alumni Community Service Award.

The awards were established by the Jones Graduate School Alumni Association.

At Rice Business, we have exceptional part-time MBA programs thoughtfully designed for those who want to advance their careers without leaving their jobs. 

If you are a professional seeking to accelerate your career or are interested in learning more about Rice Business and the application process, contact Steve or an admissions recruiter at business.rice.edu/admissions today!