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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Warren Buffett has a picture of this in his office. He often uses it to explain how he invests.

https://omaha.com/money/buffett/warren-buffett-waits-for-a-f...

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4157066-science-of-investin...

This version from Buffet starts to hit on a piece of the original Ted Williams version that might not be apparent for non-baseball fans.

Williams is measuring batting average which is the number of hits divided by the number of at bats. Hits come on a single pitch but at bats are a collection of pitches. Therefore a pitch location for an at bat isn't really something that makes sense. This ends up biasing the results.

You see the pitches in the middle of the zone are not just red because it is easier to hit balls in that location, although that is certainly part of it. Another factor is how those pitches fit into an overall at bat. Pitches aren't thrown at random parts of the zone. There is a strategy to when they are thrown in what location. Pitchers will often only intentionally throw the ball in the middle of the zone when they are behind in the count and are trying not to walk the batter. The batter know this so he is able to anticipate pitches in the center of the zone when he has the advantage. By ignoring balls thrown to his weaker areas, he often is able to get ahead of the pitcher which creates a multiplier and allows him to hit the ball even better when it is in those locations in which he already excels.

Knowing his weaknesses allowed Williams to minimize the situations in which those weaknesses would come into play. That allows him to focus on his strengths and actually increase the number of opportunities that he had to act on those strengths. It is the equivalent of Buffett benefiting from compound interest that gives him more capital to invest the more successful his investments are.

> By ignoring balls thrown to his weaker areas, he often is able to get ahead of the pitcher...

Shouldn't this strategy tend get him behind in the count, not ahead? Since he'll be giving up more strikes. To get ahead he needs to avoid swinging at pitches outside the zone, but that's a trivially good strategy - if you can tell which pitches those are in time to not swing.

I guess what you're getting at is that pitches aimed at the edge of the strike zone are more likely to miss it. So there's a double advantage in not swinging at pitches away from the centre of the stroke zone - they might be called balls, and if you do swing you won't be very successful statistically anyway.

"low and away" is a weak spot for almost any hitter. The challenge for a pitcher is to actually hit that spot.

Ted Williams batted as a lefty. Most everything a right-handed pitcher throws has a tendency to trail leftward. A slight mistake and you've got something he will hit very hard.

The reasons are twofold. Like you mentioned a pitcher's aim isn't perfect. Also a batter isn't perfect at reading pitches. A pitch aimed at the bottom of the strike zone might miss accidentally. Or a pitch like a curveball can be aimed below the strike zone but it appears to the batter to be a strike only for it to drop and end up outside the zone. Not swinging at these seemingly borderline pitches results in a lot more pitches being called balls.

Also pitches thrown in these tough to hit locations will often result in bad contact. Bad contact is generally worse than a strike. A ball that is weakly hit into play will almost always result in an out. A strike will only result in an out when there are already 2 strikes. Therefore swinging at fewer pitches means the batter sees more pitches and gets deeper into counts. The batter will therefore have more late counts in which they are ahead simply due to fewer at bats being ended prematurely.

Notably, a bad hit can result in multiple outs.

Also, more pitches increases the chances of a bad pitch )a hanger, etc) and if you create a reputation for having a good eye, umpires will give the hitter the benefit of doubt on borderline pitches (I have no idea how this works now that they have robots calling balls and strikes, but it’d be nice if they kept some of the inexactness that “engages” people more.

>I have no idea how this works now that they have robots calling balls and strikes

They don't yet have robots calling the balls and strikes. In spring training this year they tested out a system to notify the umpires of the robotic balls and strike calls, but the umpire had the ability to overrule the automated system. That isn't used in the general season yet although many expect it is only a matter of time. Currently the umpires are graded on a regular basis compared to their performance versus a computerized system which has resulted in calls improving consistently over the last decade plus of baseball.

However you are certainly right that this approach can compound in a lot of interesting ways including an ump giving the benefit of the doubt. There is a perhaps apocryphal of a catcher complaining about a call that Williams received only for the ump to respond "If Mr. Williams didn’t swing at it, it wasn’t a strike."[1]

[1] - https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/ted-williams/

It's also worth noting that pitchers will sometimes purposely throw pitches outside the strike zone in an attempt to get the batter to swing and miss. This usually happens when the pitcher is already ahead in the count, but not always.

Not swinging at balls outside the strike zone is a trivially good idea (unless you can hit them well), but difficult to execute.

In the text he notes the importance of being within a ball's width, which requires some serious practice.

What to practice and how is the focus of his writing about hitting.

Very difficult to execute because you have to get good at reading these pitches almost while they’re still in the arm of the pitcher, often starting your swing as they get released. A fastball is in the air for about 400ms or less before it crosses the plate.

“Science of investing.” Warren Buffett is rich because he bought companies and removed redundancies / restructured management, therefore making companies more profitable at the cost of decreased diversity of ownership of businesses. It’s a similar tack as globalism, where “stuff” gets slightly cheaper while jobs are shipped away.

If he did restructure the companies he bought, he would definitely not be alone in that. I'd always heard (though I haven't looked it up) that he tried not to fiddle with the management of companies, since good management was one of the reasons he'd bought them. In any case, no other investor who sweeps out existing management and removes redundancy is the most successful investor in history, so Buffett must at least be doing something else.

There are two well researched biographies of Buffett, The Making of an American Capitalist and The Snowball. Your characterization of his investments doesn’t match the narrative in either book.

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