Optimism of professional baseball managers and team performance

Comparison of their winning rates and their explanatory style by using Content Analysis of

Verbatim Explanations (CAVE) technique.

Takehiko Ito & Yuta Futagawa(Wako University)

Fourth World Congress on Positive PsychologyIndividual Presentation IPS15.2

June 27 (Saturday) 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM Room: Monterey, Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort

Lake Buena Vista, Florida, USA 1

Summary ：Manager optimism vs. team winning rate

• Study 1: In the same year (Correlation)• Yearly Optimism(r = .469) and Pessimism (r = -.377) of the

managers (n = 12) correlated to team winning rate (Of course!).

• Monthly Optimism/Pessimism synchronizes identically with team winning rate (New finding!).

• Study 2: To the next year (Prediction)• Optimism (r = .392) and Pessimism (r = -.178) of the managers (n =

8) correlated to team winning rate(Yes, but weak---).

• Prediction rates of Optimism (β = .295) and Pessimism (β = - .505) are stronger than the batting rate (β = - .108) but weaker than the ERA(earned run average) (β = - .638*) (Yes, although non-significant・・・).

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Studies on optimism in the field of sports

• Rettew & Reivich (1995): Baseball team performance and optimism of managers and players are associated.

• Seligman (1991) : Optimism and performances in sports are strongly related, thus optimism is also an important factor in the field of sports.

• Rettew, D.& Reivich, K.(1995) Sports and explanatory style. G. M. Buchanan & M. E. P. Seligman (Eds.). Explanatory style. New York, NY: Routledge Pp.173-185.

• Seligman, M. E. P. (1991) Learned optimism. New York: Knopf.

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The Relationship between Optimism and Game Score: Previous Studies by Seligman et al.

• Seligman concluded:

• (1) the teams with highly optimistic managers and players perform better than the teams with highly pessimistic managers and players in the same year.

• (2) the highly optimistic teams perform better in the following season, and optimism can be a predictor of the game results.

• How about Japanese professional baseball teams?

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Professional Baseballin Japan

• In Japan, baseball is popular among many sports.

• Professional Japanese baseball is consisted of two leagues, the Central League and the Pacific League.

• Six teams belong to each league: total of 12 baseball teams in Japan.

• Each of these baseball teams plays 144 games in one season, which is held from April to mid-October. 5

General Purpose of the Present Study • The main purpose of the study is to empirically investigate the

relationship between optimism and team performance.

• The following two purposes are concerned:

• (1) The first purpose is to clarify the relationship between the explanatory styles (ES) of managers and the win rate by analyzing the comments made by managers after games.

• (2) The second purpose of the study is to explore whether the optimism of managers are related to the team performance in the following season, that is to investigate whether the optimism of managers could predict the win rate of the next year. 6

Definition of Terms: Optimism and Pessimism

• According to Seligman (1991/1994), optimism is the explanatory style that individuals take bad circumstances as out of their responsibility, temporary, and the cause of circumstances being specific to the current situation. Optimistic individuals think failure is not attributed to themselves rather to external causes such as the specific circumstances, lack of luck and other factors. On the other hand, they take good circumstances as ever lasting, generalizable to other things, and attribute the circumstances to internal causes.

• Pessimism is the explanatory style that individuals think bad circumstances are attributed to themselves, and they think that other things would be as bad. They tend to think that they cannot do things right and that is their fault. They think good things are external, temporary, and it is specific to the context that is not generalizable to other situation.

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The Explanatory Styles of Professional Baseball Managers After Games

• Optimism and pessimism expressed in narrative including in newspaper articles and essays are operationally defined by the CAVE method (Shulman, Castlellon, & Seligman, 1989)

• The rating of the ES of the comments made by managers after the game is based on three dimensions :

• (1)Internal-External

• (2)Global-Specific

• (3)Stable -Unstable

• Shulman, P., Castellon, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (1989). Assessing explanatory style The content analysis of verbatim explanations and the attributional style questionnaire. Behavioral Research and Therapy, 27(5), 505-512. 8

(1) Internal-External• [The ES of the winning game] In the winning game, optimism is to

internally explain (attributing to the own team) the win.

• Internal (optimistic): “Our team is in a good condition”, “Our team is strong”, “My command succeeded”.

• External (pessimistic):“The opponent team was in a bad condition”, “The judge helped us”, “The weather helped us”.

• [The ES of the losing game] In the losing game, optimism is to externally explain the loss.

• External (optimistic): “The opponent team was in a good condition”, “Weather failed us”, “We were disadvantaged because we are away from the home”.

• Internal (pessimistic): “xx player was in a bad condition”, “We made many mistakes”.

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(2) Global - Specific• [The ES of winning game] In the winning game, optimism is to

take the win as global, and pessimism is to take the winning factor as specific.

• Global (optimistic): “Everyone in the team did a great job”, “The team became one”, “Everyone worked hard”.

• Specific (pessimistic): “xx did a good job”, “The pitcher did a great job”, “that batting was good”.

• [The ES of losing game] In the losing game, optimism is to take the loss as specific, and pessimism is to take the losing factor as global.

• Specific (optimistic): “xx did a bad job”, “the batter did not do well”, “xx of the opponent team did a great a great job”.

• Global (pessimistic): “Everyone on the team was in the bad condition”, “No one could hit”, “Every throw was hit”.

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(3) Stable–Unstable• [the ES of winning games] In winning games, optimism is to take

the win as stable situation.

• Stable (Optimistic): “Always in this season”, “We are always in the good condition”, “We can continue to be like this”, “as usual”, “We are always active”

• Unstable (Pessimistic): “It is not always like this”, “Today was special”, “We were lucky”

• [The ES of losing games] In the lost game, optimism is to think the loss as unstable.

• Untable (Optimistic):“They were tired today”, “We are not in the good condition this week”, “It didn’t work out today”

• Stable (Pessimistic): “We may be in the strings of losing games”, “It has been always”, “We have been in the bad condition since the season has started” 11

[Study 1] The relationship between optimism of professional baseball managers

and team performance in the same year

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[Purpose]

• The purpose of the study is to empirically investigate the relationship between optimism and pessimism of managers and the win rate in the same year.

• We measured them from the comments that were reported on the newspapers and analyzing the causal attribution of the game results.

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[Method]• The objects were the comments of the managers of 12 teams

after the game. The sources of the comments were four different sports newspaper, Sports Nippon Newspaper, NikkanSports News, The Hochi Shinbun, and Sankei Sports. The data was collected from April 13, 2011 to October 26, 2011.

• The CAVE technique is a seven-point scale that assesses the ES style from three perspectives, internal-external, stable-unstable, and global-specific. Each perspective is scored from one to seven points. The sum of points of three perspectives is the total score.

• Range of the scores 3-21 (point 12 as neutral).

• Sample exercises were conducted in order to strengthen the agreement of three investigators and to get used to the assessments.

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[Results]• Total of 5454 comments were obtained from 4

newspapers.

• 373 comments were excluded from the analysis since the comments were made after the evengames.

• 2379 comments for the winning games and

• 2702 comments for the losing games

were analyzed.

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Optimism in the winning games

• Ochiai and Akiyama, who are the managers of the champion teams in the central and pacific leagues, showed the highest optimism.

• A team with highly optimistic manager tended to be a higher winning rate = good results.

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Central League

Pacific League

#6 #6#1#1

#6

(2) Pessimism in Losing Games

• The managers of bottom-ranked teams were more pessimistic and the managers of the top-ranked teams tended to be less pessimistic.

• Considering the case of Ochiai as a special case, teams led by highly pessimistic managers tended to have lower winning rate and their game result was bad.

• Ochiai is exceptional.

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Central League

Pacific League

#6 #1#1#6

The correlation coefficients of winning rate

• r = .469 for optimism in the winning games

• r =-.377 for pessimism in the losing games

• r = .452 for batting rate

• r = .526 for home runs

• r = .573 for scores

• r = -.847* for runs

• r = -.818* for earned run average18

Monthly performances and monthly optimism (Central League only)

• We intended to clarify the relationship between the changes in the winning rate and the changes in the optimism by comparing monthly winning rate and monthly optimism.

• The graphs showing the monthly winning rate of each team and monthly CP-CN, which can be calculated subtracting the pessimism score from the optimism score, were created.

• CP= composite positive ES

• CN= composite negative ES19

#1

20

#2 #3

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#5 #6#4

[Discussion] Yearly Positive relationship between optimism and team performance

• Optimism and Pessimism of the managers showed the strong positive relationship to team performance.

• It should be noted that the association observed in the study was a trend; it was not a definite relationship.

• For example, the manager such as Ochiai, who had the highest winning rate internally talked about his team regardless of game results.

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[Discussion] Monthly Positive relationship between optimism and team performance

• The relationship between monthly winning rate and optimism/pessimism revealed that optimism/pessimism tended to fluctuate along with the changes in the winning rate in both Leagues.

• It can be interpreted that the optimism contributed to the good game results and the pessimism contributed to the bad game results.

• However, on the other hand, it can also be interpreted that good game results resulted for the managers to be optimistic and bad game results resulted for the managers to be pessimistic.

• Thus, optimism and performance can be a cyclic relationship rather than causal relationship.

• Rettew & Reivich (1995) proposed the model that the ES and performances are bidirectional and circular relationship.

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Rettew & Reivich (1995)Model

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[Study 2] The Relationship Between the

Optimism of the Professional Baseball Managers and the Team Performance

in the Following Season

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[Objective]

• The purpose of the second study is to investigate whether the ES of the managers regarding the game results could predict the future team performance.

• We assessed the ES of the managers after the game (Rettew & Reivich, 1995) by analyzing with the CAVE technique (Watanabe et al., 2010) and clarified the relationship between the optimistic/pessimistic ES of the managers and the winning rate of the teams in the following season.

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[Method]

• The relationship between the optimism/pessimism score in the 2011 season assessed in the first study and the winning rate of eight teams (Ochiai in the Dragons, Mayumi in the Tigers, Obana in the Baystars, and Nashida in the Fighters resigned after the 2011 season) in the 2012 season was examined.

• Based on the obtained data from the first study, optimism/pessimism scored obtained using the CAVE technique in the 2011 season and the game results in the 2012 season were compared

• in order to investigate whether it is possible to predict the game results of the following season from the managers’ optimism score of the previous season.

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Change of managers in 2011 and 2012, and the game results of new managers

• In the 2012 season, four managers out of 12 managers from the 2011 season were newly assigned.

• In the central league, Takagi replaced Ochiai in the Dragons, Wada replaced Mayumi in the Tigers, and Nakabata replaced Obana in the Baystars.

• In the pacific league, Kuriyama replaced Nashidain the Fighters. Four out of 12 managers being replaced were detrimental to our study.

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Ranking change for professional baseball in the 2011 and the 2012 seasons

• Table 2-1 shows the ranking change of professional baseball in the 2011 season and 2012 season.

• The Baystars, which is the sixths in the central league, changed the name to the DeNA, 29

Optimism of managers in 2011 and the winning rate in 2012• In Figure 2-1, optimism and

the winning rate of the team within the same year were positively related.

• In Figure 2-2 Akiyama of the Hawks and Okada of the Buffalos were the highly optimistic managers in the winning games in 2011; however, their team winning rates were not high in 2012.

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r = .469(p > .1).

r = .392(p = .208).

Pessimism of managers in 2011 and the winning rate in 2012

• Figure 2-4 shows the relationship between pessimism in the losing games in the 2011 season and the winning rate of each the team in the 2012 season. Akiyama from the Hawks and Watanabe from the Lions were low in pessimism in the losing games in the 2011 season, but their winning rate was not high. Only Hara, who is the manager of the Giants and showed slightly low pessimism in the losing games, produced higher winning rate in 2012. 31

r = -.178(p = .673)

r = -.312(p = .323).

Manager Optimism2011 and the Team Performance 2011 &2012

• There was a significant correlation between CP-CN, which is the total optimism score, and the winning rate within the season of 2011,r = .619 (n =1 2, p = .032)

• however, no correlation was found with the winning rate of 2012,r = -.105 (n = 8, p = .805).

• CP= composite positive explanatory style• CN= composite negative explanatory style

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Predictors of the winning rate 2012• Considering multicollinearity, the independent variables

were BR, ERA, optimism, and pessimism. The dependent variable was the game result of the 2012 season.

• R2 = .802, standardized R2 =. 689 (n = 8)

• #1 : the earned run average (ERA) (β = -638, p = .023),

• #2: the pessimism in the losing game (β = -505, p = .166)

• #3: the optimism in the winning game (β = .295, p = .246)

• #4: the batting rate (β = -.108, p = .739).

• ERA had the largest variance to explain WR2012

• Optimism and pessimism were better predictors than batting rate though there was no significance.

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[Discussion] • Our study results indicated that the managers’

optimism and pessimism are related with the winning rate of the same season.

• However, the Study 2 did not provide statistical support for the studies conducted by the Seligman (1991/1994) and Rettew & Reivich(1995)

• Optimism and pessimism of the mangers was the second best predictors of the future team performance next to ERA (pitchers’ power) and was a better predictor than the batting rate.

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Summary ：Manager optimism vs. team winning rate

• Study 1: In the same year (Correlation)• Yearly Optimism(r = .469) and Pessimism (r = -.377) of the

managers (n = 12) correlated to team winning rate (Of course!).

• Monthly Optimism/Pessimism synchronizes identically with team winning rate (New finding!).

• Study 2: To the next year (Prediction)• Optimism (r = .392) and Pessimism (r = -.178) of the managers (n =

8) correlated to team winning rate(Yes, but weak---).

• Prediction rates of Optimism (β = .295) and Pessimism (β = - .505) are stronger than the batting rate (β = - .108) but weaker than the ERA(earned run average) (β = - .638*) (Yes, although non-significant・・・).

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The implication of the present study• (1) the implication of the present study is that it

empirically revealed the tendency in which a team with an optimistic manager can perform better in games.

• (2) it was revealed that optimism/pessimism was changeable factor depending on the team performance. We found this by examining the relationship between the monthly winning percentage and the optimism/pessimism of managers.

• (3) we relatively revealed the degree in which the ES of the managers can predict the performances in the following season in comparison to objective indices of the team performances (ERA and batting rate).

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The limitation of the study

• (1) We limited our study subject to the managers and did not examine players. Thus, the relationship between optimism/pessimism of the players and game performances are still unknown. (2) The data collection was collected for a year, thus the reliability of the result should be concerned.

• (3) In the 2012 season, four out of 12 managers were replaced making our findings less power statistically.

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Thank you for your attention.

Optimism of professional baseball manegers and team performance

Comparison of their winning rates and their explanatory style by using Content Analysis of

Verbatim Explanations (CAVE) technique.

Takehiko Ito & Yuta Futagawa(Wako University)

Fourth World Congress on Positive PsychologyIndividual Presentation IPS15.2

June 27 (Saturday) 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM Room: Monterey, Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort

Lake Buena Vista, Florida, USA 39