I am both an academic and a big baseball fan. So when a friend sent me a link to the first tweet in this X thread from former professional baseball player Josh Gessner, and suggested I might want to post about it, little did he realize that I’d already been thinking for a long time about that very topic. Namely, the similarities, and also differences, between two seemingly very different professions: academia, and professional baseball.*
Often on this blog, I write about stuff I only know a little about. But not today. Today I am writing about two of the only four things I know a lot about.** 🙂
The comparison between professional baseball and academia turns out to be more illuminating than you might think. This is a light, fun post–but it’s not just a light, fun post.
If you don’t know anything about professional baseball in North America, click the linked X thread above to learn the essentials.
At first glance, you might think that professional baseball and academia are totally unlike one another as professions. And indeed, there are many obvious differences. In academia, you’re mostly using your mind to do your work. In baseball, you’re mostly using your body. Academic careers can last for several decades. Professional baseball careers rarely last even 20 years, and most are much shorter than that. Most academics do their work in private, or else for small and specialized audiences (the students in their classes, the readers of their papers, etc.) Professional baseball players do the most important part of their job (playing baseball games) in public, for in-person, radio, and television audiences totaling hundreds of people (at the lowest minor league levels) up to hundreds of thousands or even millions of people (at the major league level). Professional baseball players are more diverse than academics on some dimensions, but much less diverse on others (quite diverse in terms of race/ethnicity/national origin; exclusively male at the major league level, and in the minor leagues affiliated with the major leagues). Professional baseball players below the major league level have little or no choice of which team to play for, whereas academics at all levels are free to apply for any open position they wish. Etc.
But academia and professional baseball also have some important things in common:
A strongly pyramidal structure. In both academia and professional baseball, the majority of people who want to reach the top level of the profession (professor or major league baseball player) will fail to do so. In both academia and professional baseball, the people at the lowest level of the profession (graduate students, or low level minor league players) substantially outnumber the people at the top, with levels of intermediate size in between (postdocs and other postgraduate professionals, or high level minor league players).
The strongly pyramidal structure of both academia and professional baseball implies a lot of competition to move up from one level of the profession to the next. If you’re on a lower level of the profession, then you’re in competition with others on your level to move up to the next level. Whether you like or not, or even whether you realize it or not. Each level of the pyramid is smaller than the one below, which means that not everyone who wants to move up a level will get to do so, and everyone who moves up a level is taking a spot that could’ve gone to someone else who wanted it. Further, some of your competitors to move up the pyramid will be your friends and colleagues. Such as people in your lab group, or your teammates in the case of baseball players.
If you don’t make it to the top of the pyramid, you generally can’t stay in the profession long term. Usually (not always), you have to keep climbing, or else find another profession.
The people on the lower levels of the pyramid tolerate much lower pay, and poorer working conditions, than the people at the very top. They tolerate these things for at least a couple of reasons. One is the substantial rewards (both financial and non-financial) for making it to the top. Another is that they absolutely love at least some aspects of the profession, and so are willing to put up with a lot in order to keep doing something they love.
In order to climb the professional pyramid, you have to work very hard. You have to put in long hours day after day, for many years, often on pretty tedious tasks. Whether those tasks are things like “pipetting liquid from one container to another, over and over,” or “doing the same hitting drill, over and over.”
In order to make it to even the lowest level of the pyramid, never mind move up to the top, working hard probably won’t be enough. You’ll likely need to have a lot of advantages and fortunate circumstances working in your favor. Whether that’s a parent who was an academic or professional baseball player. Or parents who could afford to pay for a private college, or for travel to youth baseball tournaments. Or good teachers or coaches. Or the good fortune not to get seriously injured. Or sheer inborn talent. Etc. (Which isn’t to say that many people who make it to the lowest level of the pyramid, or even the top of the pyramid, didn’t also have to overcome serious disadvantages and unfortunate circumstances. For instance, physical handicaps of various sorts.)
Whether or not you move up the pyramid depends in large part on how your work is evaluated by others, some of whom will be known to you and others of whom will be total strangers. In professional baseball, they’re people like scouts, coaches, and data analysts. In academia, they’re people like graduate supervisors, peer reviewers, hiring committees, and tenure committees.
As you climb the professional pyramid and advance in your career, your work as an academic or professional baseball player will create many financial and non-financial benefits for others. Including others whom you might wish wouldn’t receive so many benefits. Such as highly profitable journal publishers, or ultra-rich major league baseball team owners.
Failing to advance up the pyramid, and so having to leave the profession, is extremely disappointing and hard to accept, for both trainee academics and professional baseball players. Relatedly, it’s fairly common for people in both professions to keep trying to climb the pyramid, even after the point when it’s become extremely unlikely that they’ll ever climb higher. Say, after they’ve been a postdoc for a decade, or after they’ve been let go (“released”) by their baseball team.
In summary so far: academia and professional baseball are both pyramids. That’s a big, important thing they have in common! As evidenced by the fact that both professional baseball players, and trainee academics, think and talk a lot about their respective professional pyramids. The knowledge that you’re trying to climb a pyramid is always at the back of your mind, and often at the front of your mind. But academics and baseball players differ a lot in their attitudes about their respective professional pyramids:
Professional baseball players invariably are very competitive people. Not just “competitive” in the sense that they enjoy competing against and defeating opposing teams. But also in the sense that they don’t mind–indeed, often embrace–competing with other baseball players to move up the professional pyramid. Professional baseball players also see competitiveness as an essential character trait. One of the worst criticisms you can level at a professional baseball player is that he’s not competitive enough–that he doesn’t care enough about winning games. In contrast, trainee academics as a group aren’t particularly competitive, although their competitiveness varies. Many of them (the majority?) are probably less competitive than the average person. And it’s rare for academics to see competitiveness as a virtue. Indeed, it’s probably more common these days for academics to see competitiveness as a vice (although I admit I don’t have data on that; it’s just an impression).
Professional baseball players all accept that their profession is pyramidal, with the very best players at the top, receiving by far the largest professional rewards. Indeed, professional baseball players wouldn’t want it any other way. In contrast, many (though definitely not all) academics, especially those lower in the pyramid, dislike the pyramidal structure of the profession. They wish it could be otherwise, and sometimes even suggest reforms intended to flatten or eliminate the pyramid.
Professional baseball players accept that their professional performance is going to be evaluated by others, and that those evaluations will determine whether they climb the pyramid. By and large, they also believe that those evaluations are fair and objective, and based on appropriate criteria. Rather than being subjective and arbitrary, or driven by personal favoritism, or based on inappropriate criteria. (aside: that wasn’t the case back in the day when black and Latin American players were excluded from major league baseball and the affiliate minor leagues, due to racism.) In contrast, it’s common for academics to complain that they’re being evaluated based on subjective, arbitrary, biased, and/or inappropriate criteria. Some academics even complain about being evaluated at all.
Professional baseball players don’t complain about how hard they work, especially not publicly. And they all admire, and try to emulate, the players who work the hardest. An elite major league player like Shohei Ohtani, who basically thinks about nothing all day besides becoming a better baseball player, is widely admired for his dedication and laser-like focus. In contrast, academics who work that hard elicit mixed reactions from other academics. That sort of single-minded dedication is viewed by some academics as unhealthy. Some academics would even say it amounts to allowing yourself to be exploited by your employer, or harms others by creating and reinforcing a toxic culture of overwork.
Professional baseball players below the major league level are all irrationally confident in their own abilities. They all believe that they can make the major leagues, even though they know that most players won’t. Not that crises of confidence are unheard of (they’re not). But as a group, professional baseball players all believe they’re capable of making it to the top of the pyramid. In contrast, it’s common for trainee academics to be pessimistic about their own chances of climbing to the top of the pyramid, and to lack confidence in their own ability to do so.
One more big difference: politics. Not all professional baseball players care about politics, of course; neither do all academics. But among the professional baseball players who do care about politics, political conservatives–including Trump supporters–are not rare. Anecdotally, professional baseball players probably are more conservative than North American adults as a whole. In contrast, in most academic fields people with right-of-center views are very rare. The distribution of academics’ political views is centered well to the left of that of North American adults. Anecdotally, the variance of political views among professional baseball players also seems higher than among academics in most fields. Political left-of-center views might be in the minority among professional baseball players, but they are far from unheard of.
It’d be interesting to speculate on the ultimate reasons for these similarities and differences.*** But this post is already long, so I’ll leave that speculation for the comment thread, if that’s the direction in which the conversation ends up going. For now, I just think the mix of similarities and differences is interesting in and of itself. I think it’s a useful reminder that it’s a big ol’ world filled with all sorts of people. Who vary a lot, even when placed in similar situations. There’s more than one possible reaction to being in a pyramidal profession (or any other situation). I say this without endorsing, or criticizing, either academics or professional baseball players for their reactions to the pyramidal structures of their respective professions.
I’ll also leave it up to commenters to rope in additional examples of pyramidal professions, about which I know less (Other professional sports. Hollywood movie actors. Professional musicians…).
p.s. Enjoy the Major League All-Star Game tonight! 🙂
Bryce Harper, who made it to the very top of the professional baseball pyramid.
*By which I mean, North American academia and professional baseball. I suspect, but don’t know, that most of this post generalizes to academia and professional baseball in other places.
**The other two are Discworld novels, and drinking beer.
***Don’t be too quick to chalk them all up to politics; I’m pretty sure that’s not the right hypothesis.