The invaluable David Pinto at Baseball Musings has a terrific post with a link to a great Balto Sun story about the Orioles' use of psychological testing in evaluating players. The O's believe they've "cracked the code" in determining the psychological characteristics that, when combined with talent, will yield great performance (I wonder how Albert Belle did on the tests).

Dave Ritterpusch is the Orioles' director of baseball information systems -- a job I'm pretty certain did not exist all that long ago -- and he developed the system. According to the Sun, "Ritterpusch startlingly contends drive is less important than several other qualities. 'The old cliche about 'the guy who wants it the most will get it' - it's a myth,' he said"

Former O's pitcher Mike Flanagan, one of the smartest guys in baseball, is pushing this effort with owner Peter Angelos' blessing. But the O's aren't about the let someone come in and reveal their trade secrets like Michael Lewis of "Moneyball" fame did with the Oakland A's and their use of Bill Jamesian sabermetrics. "It took 30 years to compile this, and we're not going to give it away," Flanagan said.

I think it's worth pointing out that, for all the folks who decry the high salaries and bonuses professional athletes earn, we most likely wouldn't have had the innovative use of science, technology, data crunching and evaluation in sports in recent years were it not for these salaries. Owners and GMs tired of seeing prospects get paid handsomely to go bust needed better tools to determine how to spend money. With the huge sums being spent on players, the incentive was there to try to find new ways of building better ball clubs.

That's the chief reason I think Aaron Schatz's much-discussed and excellent New Republic piece on big bucks in baseball is a little short-sighted. Schatz says that the "mainstreaming of sabermetric techniques" means the Yankees and Dodgers and other big market teams will now be able to tap into an innovative technique/technology like sabermetrics and catch up with the A's and other teams already using these methods; and then, since the big market clubs still have all the money, they'll be able to gobble up the best -- and more efficiently evaluated -- players. But as Flanagan and the O's are demonstrating, applied and useful knowledge is potentially limitless, and so teams can always be looking for something new to gain a competitive edge. Most importantly, with huge bucks on the line, they will continue to do so.

This is not an argument against salary caps or revenue sharing. It's just that the seemingly obscene dollars in baseball and other sports yield interesting developments that are perhaps not suffieintly appreciated if we can't look past the dollar signs.

(Lastly, all of this raises some interesting questions about the possible future use of mood- and personality-altering drugs and sports. Physical enhancements are, for the time being, largely verboten. But what about when psycho-chemists figure out how to monkey with brain chemistry enough to tweak a player's head to get him to perform at a more optimal level? Will this be permitted?)