The Nerd Who Knew Too Much

Speaker 1 Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

Speaker 2 Barbie and Phil, he addressed it to both of us. I hope this is the first you are hearing of it.
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Speaker 1 Look, we have two Pepsi.

Speaker 8 When's the last time you had Pepsi out of a two-liter bottle?

Speaker 10 God, sixth grade?

Speaker 9 Yeah, I was going to say a birthday party at Pizza Hut or something.

Speaker 1 Pre-pubescent.

Speaker 1 I might even venture.

Speaker 12 We kept Mountain Dew in the fridge at home in high school.

Speaker 10 You used to drink a lot of Mountain Dew. I did.

Speaker 13 Then diet, and then I was just, then I was done.

Speaker 8 It was

Speaker 14 my 20s, long time.

Speaker 1 Mountain Dew is

Speaker 1 so diet Mountain Dew, total side note, is the juice that so much of the sports nerd world runs on.

Speaker 8 I was addicted.

Speaker 10 Oh, he showed up at the office every day with a Diet Mountain Dew.

Speaker 17 And I would walk home from work not being able to wait to get inside and open a cold one from my fridge.

Speaker 21 I understood what it's like to be addicted to a beverage.

Speaker 1 So the reason why I marvel at that as we get into this now, completely of course spontaneously, is that the man

Speaker 1 who is most addicted to Diet Mountain Dew, who I have interviewed while he has been chugging Diet Mountain Dew with his feet kicked up on a table in a conference room watching at the time Houston Rockets James Harden highlights.

Speaker 1 And thank you both for being here, by the way.

Speaker 23 Thanks for having us.

Speaker 1 Rich and Nick is, was, remains Daryl Maury.

Speaker 1 I am the guy who thought he knew everything.

Speaker 1 About the world of sports nerds and the Daryl Maury cinematic universe. He's a friend of the show.
He's been on here a bunch of times.

Speaker 1 But it turns out that when I was at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference presented by MIT in Boston this past spring, you guys were there too.

Speaker 25 We looked for you.

Speaker 1 We did not meet up.

Speaker 10 No.

Speaker 1 Because you guys were on a parallel but very different path.

Speaker 1 And you guys had a question for the people I thought I knew everything about.

Speaker 1 What was the question that you were there to ask?

Speaker 11 Do you know the name Martin Manley? Have you ever heard the name Martin Manley?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 10 Have you heard the name Martin Manley?

Speaker 26 Have you ever heard the name Martin Manley?

Speaker 27 Martin Manley?

Speaker 22 No. Martin Manley.

Speaker 28 It was a very consistent response,

Speaker 28 we should say.

Speaker 10 Have you ever heard of Martin Manley?

Speaker 29 I have not.

Speaker 10 That's the right answer, by the way, for us.

Speaker 1 I should say I had no idea who Martin Manley is.

Speaker 8 By the way, Daryl Maury.

Speaker 30 No idea. No idea.

Speaker 26 Martin Manley.

Speaker 26 Manly.

Speaker 26 I'm actually struggling to even find Martin Manley when I look on the internet.

Speaker 26 Sorry, did I ruin the podcast already?

Speaker 1 And that's embarrassing.

Speaker 4 For who?

Speaker 1 Well, for me, for Daryl.

Speaker 1 For most everybody who it turns out owes something of, I don't know if the word is dead. I don't know if the word is courtesy, but just some recognition.

Speaker 15 I think it's fair to say this.

Speaker 27 He was the first person to write in a book, the NBA should shoot more three-pointers. Like, I think I feel very comfortable making that argument.

Speaker 9 He was the first to have a book to say that.

Speaker 10 Yeah, the first one to point out three is more than two, and why aren't professional shooters shooting these?

Speaker 1 In other words, the thing that Daryl Maury, the proprietor of this Lowell and Sports Athletics Conference, has made his entire career on is actually first established by this guy he did did not know about.

Speaker 27 For this guy, the math was so simple, but no one else wanted to listen.

Speaker 1 His legacy, his identity has been buried like a tepid Pepsi bottle in someone's closet for decades.

Speaker 10 He would apply math to basketball as he did, but he applied it to everything.

Speaker 10 He came obsessed with efficiency in everything, efficiency in basketball, and then efficiency in like what he had for lunch.

Speaker 10 He just had to watch every local news channel every day to get the weather report from each one and see which like forecaster was the most accurate and would just keep data on that he had to log and keep data on the efficiency of life

Speaker 1 and so the question then at the top here is why

Speaker 27 why has nobody heard of him you know he's always doing doing the numbers and he made a calculation that's like oh wait i think i can figure out how to have the most efficient death

Speaker 16 And our story kind of goes behind the scenes of how he actually did that.

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Speaker 1 This smooth, flavorful cognac is crafted from the finest grapes and aged to perfection, giving you rich notes of oak and caramel with every sip.

Speaker 1 Whether you're celebrating a big win or simply enjoying some cocktails with family and friends, Remy Martin 1738 is the perfect spirit to elevate any occasion.

Speaker 1 So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

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Speaker 1 So you should know that I'm numb to pretty much every story about statistics in sports. And that's largely because the war is over.

Speaker 1 The nerds have gone from being stuffed into lockers to owning the entire building.

Speaker 1 Famous jocks are now a constant presence at CES, for instance, the Consumer Electronics Show, every summer, because their side gig now is investing in tech startups.

Speaker 1 The star of Moneyball, which got six Oscar nominations in 2011, was Brad Pitt.

Speaker 1 But today's episode is an exception because this story, brought to us by these two guys,

Speaker 1 really got me.

Speaker 8 Nick Alchuler, Thank you.

Speaker 23 Rich Levine.

Speaker 1 Those are the two voices that in audio, if you're not watching on YouTube, you'll be tracking. So Nick, say hello again.

Speaker 15 Hello.

Speaker 1 And Rich, say hello again.

Speaker 8 Hey there.

Speaker 1 Rich and Nick are two journalists, two friends, and lifelong NBA obsessives who spent months reporting the strange, lost story of Martin Manley.

Speaker 1 And they titled the results of their full investigation, Chasing Basketball Heaven, which now lives as a multi-part audio series brought to you by 30 for 30 podcasts and MetalArc Media, which I highly encourage you to check out, by the way.

Speaker 1 There's a link in the show notes. Because the thing about history, in all of its fogginess, is that it does tend to be written by the victors.

Speaker 1 And Martin Manley wasn't a victor.

Speaker 1 And also,

Speaker 1 both writing and history these days

Speaker 1 are hard sells. We're at the point where I just don't know if the kids out there even know when the three-point line showed up in the NBA.

Speaker 16 I think a lot of adults probably

Speaker 30 don't even know that.

Speaker 1 Because it wasn't, I mean, for us, I guess, it wasn't that long ago. For the kids,

Speaker 1 it's impossible to imagine a game that didn't have it's World War II to us when we were growing up.

Speaker 7 It's like the same difference in time.

Speaker 29 That's right.

Speaker 1 Let me tell you a little bit about a Boston Celtic named Chris Ford. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Ooh.

Speaker 8 Good pull.

Speaker 1 Well, it's one of the great great calls.

Speaker 22 Archibald takes one.

Speaker 22 Pulls it up, tops the four, and a step back, pop. It's bird.
It's a three-point play.

Speaker 22 Chris Ford, a three-point play.

Speaker 1 That moon-landing ass call was Chris Ford hitting the first three in the history of the NBA after the three-point line got inserted in 1979.

Speaker 1 And if you follow that trajectory, it turns out, you don't just get to Steph Curry and Daryl Maury and modern basketball.

Speaker 1 You also get to Kansas

Speaker 1 and the uniquely efficient trajectory

Speaker 1 of Martin Manley.

Speaker 21 He had grown up in Topeka, which was sort of like a, you know, like a Pleasantville kind of upbringing a bit.

Speaker 17 And then when he was 11 or 12 years old, his dad took a job and they moved like three hours outside of Topeka.

Speaker 27 Like we drove out there.

Speaker 25 It's nothing.

Speaker 10 This is a field. A field and a granary.

Speaker 10 And I don't think he ever recovered. Like he went from, yeah, kids next door for as far as the eye can see, even though that wouldn't be next door.
Kids down the street.

Speaker 4 To moose.

Speaker 10 To yeah, just the middle of nowhere. And I don't think he, he just like shut down at that point.
And I don't think he ever like really had much of a social life beyond like two, three friends.

Speaker 23 Man. The Kansas you're picturing.

Speaker 15 Yes.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 23 Castaway Kansas.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's a house on top of a pair of red slippers. You know, there's what else? What else happens in Kansas? Bill James

Speaker 30 happened in Kansas. I mean, talk about luck.

Speaker 4 I mean, like, it it was in the middle of nowhere, but it was like a couple hours away from the guy that you want to live near if you want to have a future in analytics.

Speaker 1 A couple of fun facts about Bill James. Number one, Bill James blocked me on Twitter.

Speaker 15 Oh, I can see that.

Speaker 8 I believe it.

Speaker 1 That's most people who know this world.

Speaker 8 Having nothing to do with you, but I don't know.

Speaker 1 I immediately was horrified. Because his name is like on the lecture hall at Sloan.
Like the Bill James Lecture Room. It's what they rename it at the Boston Convention Center.

Speaker 1 And then I'm asking around, I'm like, why did Bill James block me? And they're like, that makes total sense.

Speaker 3 I'm like, okay.

Speaker 18 That's a podcast, by the way.

Speaker 22 Yeah.

Speaker 1 My investigation on that front continues.

Speaker 1 But for those not initiated into the cult of Bill James, please explain. Bill James was a

Speaker 10 night watchman at a baked beans factory.

Speaker 29 Great lead-in.

Speaker 28 We're going to do a Scar Brothers thing.

Speaker 7 Finish your sentences.

Speaker 10 Big baseball fan,

Speaker 10 English major, but somehow awesome at math as well. And he dug into the numbers to see what actually goes into winning beyond the stats that were provided at the time.

Speaker 1 By the way, Bill James is the guy you know if you're a sports nerd with any credibility. Like, that's the guy who you credit as this is the forefather of

Speaker 1 exactly of sports advanced statistics in any vague sense.

Speaker 25 Football, hockey, Aussie rules football.

Speaker 10 Who's the big guy? It's Bill James.

Speaker 12 If anyone owns

Speaker 30 the Moneyball, the actual book, Money Ball on Your Phone, go to the index or just search Bill James and see how many times he has references to it.

Speaker 1 Don't look up

Speaker 1 Mark Mulder.

Speaker 15 Not a lot in the index. No.

Speaker 28 But Bill James, chapters.

Speaker 1 So Martin Manley, though, as he's growing up in Kansas and Bill James somehow lives geographically as close as you could have dreamed.

Speaker 1 Realistically, what was Martin Manley like in high school, growing up?

Speaker 10 His friend Charlie told us,

Speaker 10 well, they were in church one Sunday and they both had girlfriends.

Speaker 10 And Martin's trying to come up with a way, because they're good boys and they're in church, they don't want to have premarital sex.

Speaker 10 And he's trying to figure out like how far he can go without having sex and still be like a good Christian.

Speaker 10 So he was like, I think if I like, if we neck this way and like she does like one button on her blouse, like that's because he tried to figure out like an efficiency model for a teenage like making out.

Speaker 10 And Charlie's telling us this and then this. And then the next Sunday, he says Martin sits down and he goes, well, that's not going to work.

Speaker 1 I love the idea of like Vorp.

Speaker 29 Yes, exactly.

Speaker 1 Value over replacement, you know, fill in the blank. Exactly.

Speaker 15 As it were.

Speaker 10 So even back then, he was applying his math, his own brain to everything.

Speaker 1 So his intelligence. Yes.

Speaker 15 There you go.

Speaker 1 How do you, how does one measure that?

Speaker 30 Well, Martin measured it by taking an IQ test in the back of a science fiction magazine.

Speaker 9 Yes. And this was like, he was kind of lost.

Speaker 18 He dropped out of college.

Speaker 12 I think he was mid-20s.

Speaker 27 He dropped out.

Speaker 18 He was just driving around the country.

Speaker 17 He was reading his book.

Speaker 9 On the back, he sees the IQ test, like the silly IQ. The world's hardest IEQ test is how he remembered it.

Speaker 19 Filled it out, sent it in.

Speaker 11 Six weeks later, I think it was 156.

Speaker 10 186.

Speaker 15 156, I believe.

Speaker 27 And for him, that was the catalyst to think that he could

Speaker 22 smart.

Speaker 10 So from that point on, or before then, he just like, I'm the smartest.

Speaker 1 Like how he saw colors.

Speaker 15 Oh, yes.

Speaker 10 His synesthesia.

Speaker 18 Is that how you said we had to work really hard on pronouncing that word?

Speaker 1 I've been obsessed with synesthesia.

Speaker 10 Yes.

Speaker 23 I kind of want it.

Speaker 1 I think I want it too, just because I can't wrap my mind around how one who has synesthesia actually like

Speaker 1 does perceive everything around him.

Speaker 10 Well, for Martin, what threes were yellow?

Speaker 17 I'm saying like this is like a

Speaker 15 numbers.

Speaker 10 Do you have synesthesia now with the wall of numbers you look like this.

Speaker 8 Like I'm like, what a beautiful way to go through life.

Speaker 10 You should taste the song I'm listening to.

Speaker 4 Right. It does.

Speaker 1 It's a condition, affliction, I guess is a term that he has sort of like turned over.

Speaker 10 But to speak to how closed off he was from other people, because I think he was just wired that way,

Speaker 10 he didn't really realize other people didn't have that for like decades, decades.

Speaker 1 You know, he had that classic, we've all had it.

Speaker 10 I don't even have to ask you if you had it, that dream where like you're back in college and oh, you forgot you had signed up for like this economics class the first day

Speaker 10 showed up and you have the exam.

Speaker 5 I mean, a terrible, terrible I have it once a month.

Speaker 10 He had still, oh, easily, easily.

Speaker 9 Have you talked to your therapist about that?

Speaker 10 I feel like at this point, that it's a cliche, and I want to bring it up. I got to be interesting for my therapist.

Speaker 10 But he had that dream once and like had it and Googled it and was like, oh, I guess everyone else had like, you had no idea other people had that.

Speaker 1 Not everybody sees the number three as yellow. Yes.

Speaker 1 What did he do for work then, this guy?

Speaker 10 What was his day job?

Speaker 21 He was like

Speaker 10 a couple credits away from his business degree after he'd gone back to college. And then his friend, millionaire Joe, founded a satellite TV business.
And he went to work for Joe.

Speaker 10 So this was early 80s. So satellite TV was like a booming business.
And it did boom for a while.

Speaker 27 And by the way, one of the benefits of working for a satellite TV business was that Martin got his own dish.

Speaker 27 And And when he was up late at night, not spending time with his wife, he watched NBA games from across the country.

Speaker 28 So this is where he kind of, he'd always been a college troops fan.

Speaker 6 Like he was a KU guy, like most people in Kansas.

Speaker 16 But this, with this dish, up late, he's getting games from all over the country.

Speaker 30 He was like the first league pass owner among the first.

Speaker 15 Yes.

Speaker 27 And he's like, oh, wait, I kind of love this game. And he, but again, starts noticing these inefficiencies.
And he's also reading Bill James, seeing what's happening to Bill James.

Speaker 18 He's like, this is a market that needs to be fixed.

Speaker 10 He sees Bill James finally break through in 85, get famous, start making some money.

Speaker 18 Finally, he says the satellite business, I think HBO started scrambling in like January of 86 or something, tanked the business.

Speaker 17 He's got this new passion for basketball.

Speaker 16 So he goes to his friend Joe and says, here we go.

Speaker 27 Bill James is doing this.

Speaker 8 Yeah, there's a making a kill.

Speaker 10 There's no efficiency in this.

Speaker 12 No one's doing this for basketball.

Speaker 21 I can do it.

Speaker 1 We just say that when Martin Manley is writing this book in the 80s, this would-be seminal text to shape the future of sports analytics and sports itself as a result.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he calls it basketball heaven.

Speaker 6 Martin Hand wrote the entire basketball heaven.

Speaker 1 Of course, he did.

Speaker 15 This book, the first book that says shoot more threes.

Speaker 7 And he puts out an ad for a software developer who can help him crunch some of these numbers.

Speaker 19 And this guy, Todd, who would go on to become one of his best friends and poker buddy for years and years, walks in to meet Martin for the first time to interview for this situation.

Speaker 33 We're sitting there discussing

Speaker 17 probably

Speaker 33 details of what he wanted, and he's sitting there eating with a letter opener,

Speaker 33 you know, like a silver letter opener, these brownies, and cutting them off and eating it. And then all of a sudden, he does this where he.

Speaker 14 Which is what?

Speaker 33 He scratches the back of his butt, you know, butt crack or whatever, and then continues to eat with it. And I look at him kind of funny and he just kind of looks at me like, what?

Speaker 33 But that was Martin.

Speaker 10 He's the friend that you have that you always kind of apologize for. Or like you bring your friend to a party and you're like, just give him, just give him an hour.

Speaker 10 Like you're not going to like him at first.

Speaker 15 Three or four times. He means well.
Yes, exactly.

Speaker 27 The insights in the book, right, which he decides to write at age 34, 1987, inspired by Bill James, fellow Kansan, the statistic that he comes up with is called what efficiency rating so eff is the the shorthand how martin was hoping that it would catch up and he took this into consideration it's like what is going to actually catch on with other folks like what how can i make this the easiest for the nba fan he wanted it's like the iphone he wanted every nba fan that to have this in their pocket to understand who actually was the most effective player in any given game beyond just who scored the most points.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 So the statistic, the formula, EFF equals bracket, open parentheses, points plus rebounds plus assists plus blocks plus steals, close parentheses minus open parentheses, missed field goals plus missed free throws plus turnovers, close parentheses, close bracket, all that divided by games played.

Speaker 1 So actually kind of intuitive in that regard, but also in the name, not dissimilar from, you know, what.

Speaker 1 PER, player efficiency rating, a statistic I have heard about, attempted to do as well, which was made by John Hollinger, who is also a zillion times more famous than Martin Manley.

Speaker 15 Yes.

Speaker 19 And I think the thing is that if you then, if you now read the equation for PER, it would probably take about 20 times as long.

Speaker 10 I can do Martin's math. And I was an English major, and I'm very bad at math.

Speaker 1 Yes, it's good things minus bad things divided by number of

Speaker 10 Hollinger stuff, I would dissolve into a puddle.

Speaker 1 Oh, there are, it's, you know, there's a lowercase U.

Speaker 23 I don't know what that signifies.

Speaker 15 probably an upside down letter too i imagine

Speaker 1 is an unadjusted version and then there's yeah there's so many more parentheses and brackets and lgft and lgpf and yeah nobody actually understands how and there's like decimals there decimals difference between like someone's eff so he would show his top 10 lists like oh according to my ranking barkley is seventh most efficient according to this one barkley's eighth most efficient.

Speaker 10 Like, it's what's the big difference?

Speaker 1 But Martin over here, yeah, again, did not know that there was a competitor at the time.

Speaker 10 No, he was a close the office door and just do what I think is right kind of guy. Like, he was not looking for outside input.

Speaker 1 I want to bring the book in

Speaker 1 so we can look at it. It's the first edition.

Speaker 14 Oh,

Speaker 14 yeah.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 25 It's classic, man.

Speaker 25 The artifact.

Speaker 1 This is a genuine artifact, a museum piece that I'm holding in my hand to describe it for those who cannot see it. I'll smudge it.

Speaker 10 That's mine.

Speaker 18 By the way, how much are you going to sell this for once this once this?

Speaker 1 We can get this authenticated.

Speaker 1 It is.

Speaker 1 That's not him.

Speaker 23 That is him, though. That is Martin.

Speaker 10 See, he's a stud.

Speaker 1 Dude, so this red cover, but in set, photo, portrait.

Speaker 10 He's in cotton candy heaven.

Speaker 1 He's sitting in a cloud, a lazy boy in a cloud. There is a Pepsi bottle

Speaker 1 dude on a small side table. He's wearing a Magic Johnson, a pretty snugly fitting Magic Johnson Lakers jersey, holding USA Today's sports section on his lap.

Speaker 8 Can we talk about the t-shirt tan that he's got?

Speaker 29 Like underneath it, incredible.

Speaker 1 Incredible. The thing underneath his t-shirt has not seen the sun ever.

Speaker 3 It's been cloudy as well in that regard.

Speaker 1 And he has just a gooseneck snapping wrist with a tiny basketball that he is.

Speaker 22 There's no way that. He's not went in, by the way.

Speaker 15 No one shooting into a mini hoop.

Speaker 28 So put yourself on the cover of what.

Speaker 16 Dude, like what, like, I don't know if you can, I imagine maybe you couldn't get the rights to like a Jordan or any basketball player.

Speaker 10 Well, the first thing on top, it says it's basketball heaven, but it's Martin Manley's basketball.

Speaker 1 Right. Martin Manley's basketball heaven, 1987, 88.
And the stash, the bangs, dark hair,

Speaker 1 utter self-confidence.

Speaker 18 That's the word for Martin. Just like, like, I am jealous of the self-confidence that this guy had.

Speaker 1 The back cover, the inside photo, is the basketball hall of fame.

Speaker 10 Yep, in all its brutalist black and white glory.

Speaker 29 Absolutely.

Speaker 27 But why not put that in the cover?

Speaker 1 The text above, it kind of explains the question that you have because it says, finally, exclamation point, the ultimate book for the ultimate fan. And the blurbs.

Speaker 24 These are legitimate.

Speaker 23 They're big time blurbs.

Speaker 1 Can you please pass this around and read the blurbs? He knew how to hawk a book.

Speaker 11 Again, shameless.

Speaker 10 Basketball Heaven is thorough, fresh, and occasionally brilliant.

Speaker 10 Manly's systematic analysis of basketball from the time of George Mikin to the present is unlike anything I've ever seen about the sport.

Speaker 10 His research is massive, his writing lucid, and his approach novel. And that is from Mr.
Bill James.

Speaker 1 How does one get a blurb from the guy who blocked me on Twitter?

Speaker 22 Love them.

Speaker 34 When he started doing Basketball Heaven, he... He wrote to me and I said, sure, come on out and see me.
And, you know, we went to a couple of baseball games together.

Speaker 29 Oh, wow.

Speaker 27 So do you remember those games?

Speaker 32 What do you remember about Martin?

Speaker 30 Very bright young man.

Speaker 34 I thought his book would succeed to an extent that it did not.

Speaker 34 I thought his book would catch on.

Speaker 18 That's getting nighted right there.

Speaker 11 I mean, you can say whatever you want about Martin.

Speaker 6 We've kind of been making some jokes about him.

Speaker 27 Bill James never said either of us is a

Speaker 27 smart young man.

Speaker 10 If Bill James says you're good at sports analytics, you're probably pretty good at it.

Speaker 16 One thing, though, I will say is that, so second edition, you got a blurb from David Stern.

Speaker 1 The commissioner of the NBA himself.

Speaker 11 The third edition, it is no longer there.

Speaker 10 But the NBA did adopt his stat as an official stat.

Speaker 1 Well, I was going to say, so these endorsements, these blurbs happened. This book is a thing.
As much as we didn't remember it, it was a thing. What did they do for Martin Manley?

Speaker 10 The sales figures were not what he wanted, but they did give him opportunity that perhaps he didn't capitalize on fully. Like, he was invited to the the NBA All-Star Game in 89 in Houston.

Speaker 36 The Astrodome in Houston, Texas, the site of the 39th annual All-Star Game. And there you see the immense crowd here.
The record attendance was in Indianapolis four years ago, 43,146.

Speaker 36 And we could approach that or surpass it this afternoon.

Speaker 8 The officials weren't.

Speaker 15 I mean, this is the Bad Boy Pistons.

Speaker 1 88, 89. It's Magic Johnson of the Jersey and the Tan.

Speaker 17 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on his farewell tour.

Speaker 1 Michael Jordan is the scoring leader. And what does Martin Manley get to do?

Speaker 16 He's on national TV at the NBA All-Star Game, being introduced by Fred Hickman to a national TV audience as the Bill James of basketball.

Speaker 37 Joining me now is a legend in his own time, and he's got a book to prove it. This is the book, Basketball Heaven.
It is penned by Martin Manley. Martin Manley is a statistician extraordinaire.

Speaker 37 He has done for basketball what Bill James has done for baseball. And Martin, let's talk about it right now.

Speaker 9 So he sits down for a 10-minute segment, just breaking down the league.

Speaker 10 That's a big invite.

Speaker 1 Oh, I didn't know they invited a stats nerd on inside the NBA at any point.

Speaker 8 It was the crack.

Speaker 27 It was the moment that analytics, I think that was the first call.

Speaker 3 Oh, 88, 89.

Speaker 1 Look, this is before I thought any of this

Speaker 31 happened.

Speaker 1 And in terms of how that appearance goes as a television concern,

Speaker 1 what was a scouting report like on how Martin did on TV?

Speaker 10 Martin Manley was a singular human being who,

Speaker 10 unlike many other people, he had his own distinct personality. And after he was set up by Fred, he kind of just became this like boring shell of a man instead of the man

Speaker 10 he is in his books.

Speaker 1 He is on this cover.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 19 He didn't say the word efficiency once in the entire appearance.

Speaker 37 Surprises on the Eastern Conference. Cleveland because they're so good, Indiana because they're so bad.
Well, definitely those two are true.

Speaker 37 Along with those, naturally, Milwaukee and Philadelphia both overachieved this year somewhat. There aren't too many other teams other than Indiana that have done that much worse than anybody bought.

Speaker 37 But then there aren't that many more losses yet to be given out besides what Indiana has accomplished.

Speaker 1 It's jarring to see this cover, the personality, the utter self-confidence, and then hear

Speaker 1 something quite different.

Speaker 37 What about the Chicago Bulls, Michael and the rest of the guys? What are they ever going to be able to do to give this a good cohesive team type of look? It's difficult to say.

Speaker 37 Obviously, when you've got a player like Michael Jordan, it's extremely difficult to think what kind of pieces do you put with him to make it work out perfectly.

Speaker 37 With Magic or with Bird, for some reason or another, they have that ability to make all those other players fit into a cohesive unit.

Speaker 37 But Jordan, they're trying to fit the pieces in rather than them fitting in naturally.

Speaker 37 Okay, Martin, that takes care of the Eastern Conference, but we've got the Western Conference to talk about here as well.

Speaker 27 Didn't mention the name of his book.

Speaker 1 Which is like, by the way, that's where it's like, Martin, come on, man.

Speaker 27 Like, he had one job.

Speaker 10 A point of pride for him was

Speaker 10 I not only want to be unlike everyone else, I don't want to be like anyone else. I am Martin Manley alone.
Watch me. And then on TV, he fades away.

Speaker 1 What is the

Speaker 1 results?

Speaker 27 Well, he never appeared on TV again.

Speaker 15 That's for sure.

Speaker 28 And I think he finished up.

Speaker 17 He was already writing his next book.

Speaker 16 And that was it.

Speaker 9 Like, basketball world never heard from him again.

Speaker 10 The third edition didn't sell very well. Double Day, I think, bought out the rest of the contract.

Speaker 10 And as a businessman, as a person looking to make profit, he was like, well, this is just not worth my time. This is an inefficient use of my time.

Speaker 23 So he stopped cold.

Speaker 1 And the stopping cold, one must imagine that this is felt. That temperature change is felt in other parts of this guy's life.

Speaker 28 So twice divorced, he wasn't happy with the second divorce.

Speaker 18 I think that that was a woman that he really would have been happy to spend the rest of his life with.

Speaker 7 I don't think he acted in a way that was deserving of that.

Speaker 13 But he's like, what am I going to do? He got to the point as he's approaching his late 50s, you know, he learns that his ex-wife is now dating someone else.

Speaker 9 And so he kind of can cross that off a little bit.

Speaker 16 And he's just like looking at himself.

Speaker 19 He's like, yep, I'm able right now to give a lot to society.

Speaker 6 I still, I still think I can be a positive asset in this world.

Speaker 16 And then he's like, as he's looking ahead, he's like, it's, but it's not going to be long before I'm inefficient, before I become a negative drag on this world.

Speaker 18 And that's where the math just kind of, again, took over a little bit.

Speaker 16 And really, he took all that efficiency that he was pushing outwards, all different things in his life, and really

Speaker 20 turned it on himself and started figuring out how to have the most efficient goodbye.

Speaker 1 The first time you heard the name Martin Manly, Rich.

Speaker 14 Hmm.

Speaker 1 Do you remember it?

Speaker 8 Oh, I do.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah. It was August 2013.

Speaker 18 So I was covering the Celtics at the time.

Speaker 18 But a few months before that, they blew up the entire team.

Speaker 17 This is when they traded Pearson Garnett on draft night.

Speaker 21 Doc Rivers leaves.

Speaker 19 They hire Brad Stevens.

Speaker 30 So I'm like,

Speaker 15 I'm irrelevant in my field of work for the next couple of years.

Speaker 27 I was not feeling great.

Speaker 18 The Boston Marathon bombing had been, it was a couple of months before that.

Speaker 16 And I see like a headline on Twitter.

Speaker 32 I think it was like a Deadspin article about Martin Manley.

Speaker 1 What was the headline?

Speaker 6 The headline was sports writer commit suicide.

Speaker 18 And here I am, a sports writer, feeling horrible about myself in general and just again the world around me and i see it comes across just doom scrolling and i see it uh

Speaker 20 sports writer commits suicide leaves website was the headline

Speaker 1 and i just got to say that martin's website which rich and nick immediately proceeded to visit is what hooked me on this entire story too.

Speaker 1 You can still go and visit that site right now. It's still up and it's sparse, just basic HTML,

Speaker 1 but also immensely ornate.

Speaker 1 You can read Martin's ranking of his favorite movies of all time. Number one, Little Shop of Horrors.
Number 18, Moneyball.

Speaker 1 And he also lays out his personal synesthesia chart, in which he lists which numbers relate to which colors. So beyond yellow being three,

Speaker 1 you can learn that green is six.

Speaker 1 But I should warn you that the reason he was doing all of this, which relates to the reason that nobody really remembers Martin,

Speaker 1 is jarring.

Speaker 10 It's essentially a suicide letter.

Speaker 23 And you read it and half of it, you're like, why would you put that in a suicide letter?

Speaker 10 Why would you put

Speaker 10 your invention for like a cat litter box in there?

Speaker 23 Right.

Speaker 1 The text of this, Martin Manley, across the top, colon, my life and death.

Speaker 1 And it's a bunch of hyperlinks, like a table of contents, and it's text and occasional images and some tables and subsections.

Speaker 30 Fun facts.

Speaker 6 Dude. There are bolded fun facts.

Speaker 25 Riddles, poems.

Speaker 1 Yeah. There's something called, I mean, a section called Mom and Dad, a section called The Heavens.

Speaker 1 Two marriages, First Two Loves.

Speaker 25 There's a link for other suicides.

Speaker 10 Just in case you you were wondering if anyone else did, he has like a list of famous suicides.

Speaker 1 There's a page devoted to

Speaker 1 X-Files.

Speaker 17 Yeah, that's about a UFO sighting he had on an airplane once.

Speaker 30 Yeah.

Speaker 10 A lingerie softball league, Kevin Johnson.

Speaker 12 Part of me thinks is that he knew that once this website was done, he was done.

Speaker 11 So it's almost like you don't want to hang up the phone.

Speaker 12 He's just trying to figure out things to talk about to keep this thing going because when he's done, he's done.

Speaker 10 A digital legacy.

Speaker 22 Yeah.

Speaker 1 By the way, it's hard not to see this itself as a map, as a series of clues.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's because I'm indulging Martin's brain, which is essentially this thing uploaded onto a website, but you know, the anagrams section.

Speaker 30 I mean, did you, the mother-in-law?

Speaker 1 Did you get that? Mother-in-law equals, and this is again anagram, so letters, you know, on both sides are exactly the letters on the other. Mother-in-law equals woman Hitler.

Speaker 10 I don't don't stand by that, by the way. I don't stand by that.

Speaker 1 On the record, I absolutely do not stand by that.

Speaker 17 Debit card, isn't that?

Speaker 1 Debit card equals bad credit.

Speaker 30 That one's kind of.

Speaker 1 By the way, Christians, Muslims, and the Jews equals Jerusalem stands within schism.

Speaker 1 And that is followed by, by the way, maybe the key to all of this, a skeleton key to all of this. Martin Allen Manley.

Speaker 11 Mentally linear man.

Speaker 1 So the subsection titled My Religion, he writes, quote, even though there are many reasons why I might not have committed suicide, the reasons to do it were superior.

Speaker 1 Having said that, the single biggest reason by a mile in parentheses not to do it is because suicide is considered a mortal sin by many religions and I can't fault the logic.

Speaker 1 Followed by, you know, a treatise on how he knows that God exists. And the answer is, I know because I know.

Speaker 10 So

Speaker 10 he has the section, why suicide?

Speaker 10 And he gives reasons, but you still have questions. And one thing you learn about Martin is like, he's always keeping a little something to himself.
You're never getting the full answer, perhaps.

Speaker 10 You're getting a answer, but he's not giving you all of them. And so like his parents, when they passed away, they had dementia and his sister and Martin had to clean it up.

Speaker 10 And they didn't, it sort of

Speaker 10 gave him nightmares, really. Just like, I don't want to be like that.

Speaker 12 This is what happens when you age.

Speaker 15 Yes.

Speaker 10 He was afraid of aging

Speaker 18 social.

Speaker 1 He picked the date.

Speaker 14 Yes. His birthday.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Born 8, 15, 53,

Speaker 1 died 8, 15, 13,

Speaker 1 age 60.

Speaker 29 What was that day like?

Speaker 20 One thing we're quite sure of is that he did not go to sleep the night before.

Speaker 18 He didn't sleep much anyways, but I can't imagine like setting an alarm for the next morning, knowing like what you're going to wake up and do.

Speaker 18 He had a personal blog called Sports and Review that had a fair number of readers.

Speaker 18 Yeah, he had people that read him and had a post there saying at seven o'clock tonight, I'll be posting my most important post of all time.

Speaker 12 He went on, he had this investors message board that he'd spent a lot.

Speaker 7 He was like a moderator on there.

Speaker 9 He was that guy, right?

Speaker 30 Just like finding every little wrong post and deleting it and getting into fights with all the other people about deleting their posts, that sort of thing.

Speaker 18 But posted on there and said, just so you know, on my blog, Sports and Review, I'll be posting something. It was a pleasure to know all y'all.

Speaker 6 He changes his outgoing voicemail.

Speaker 22 Hi, it's 4.30 a.m. August 15th.
Thank you for being my friend. This is the last time you'll hear from me.
I wish you great happiness.

Speaker 2 At the tone, please record your message.

Speaker 9 Drives about 10 minutes from his duplex to the Overland Park police station, goes to the back

Speaker 19 parking lot, right in front of a basketball court, by the way, an outdoor basketball court, under a tree, calls 911, I would like to report a suicide and hung up.

Speaker 4 And that was about a little before 5 a.m.

Speaker 10 Again, another thing he would break down, he broke down the best way to commit suicide.

Speaker 10 And he finally arrived at the conclusion that like, I want professionals there immediately so I can donate organs and things.

Speaker 10 And I don't want to hurt anyone else or affect anyone else that's not used to this kind of thing. So he did it at the police station.

Speaker 17 Right. Like there are drugs you can get, but I have to get them from Mexico.

Speaker 12 And you don't know

Speaker 17 if they don't work until it's too late.

Speaker 20 I could run my car in the garage, but I live in a duplex.

Speaker 7 What if it seeps into my neighbor's house and does something to them?

Speaker 12 I could kill myself in my apartment, but then my landlord is going to have to clean it up. Someone's going to have to find me.

Speaker 17 So he crossed off every box to figure out this is the neatest, most organized. And he had liquidated his life to, I think he'd been sleeping on the floor the last couple nights.

Speaker 29 of

Speaker 29 even like one room.

Speaker 10 Like

Speaker 10 his lease on his apartment was about to expire. His like registration on his car was about to to expire.
Everything was like closing, right? His life insurance was about to expire.

Speaker 10 It was just, he was gone and like any trace of him was gone. We talked to Barbie, his sister.
I don't think she has cried yet. I don't think she ever cried about it.

Speaker 9 And his sister told us it was, it was damn easy.

Speaker 2 I opened up the email and I could read some of it to you. If you want the intro, I could read it to you.
Please.

Speaker 2 Barbie and Phil, he addressed it to both of us. I hope this is the first you are hearing of it.
Today is my 60th birthday, the last day of my life.

Speaker 2 Assuming everything went according to plan, and I'm 100% sure it did, I have been dead for a few hours. Please set aside your shock long enough to read this.

Speaker 2 I'm sorry for any hurt this may cause, and I understand if you are angry. Perhaps by the time you are done reading, you will feel less so, but perhaps not.

Speaker 2 Unfortunately, I couldn't make this decision based on anyone else's feelings. I'm the only one living in my shoes.

Speaker 2 Nevertheless, I hope you can consider my actions with an open mind and forgive me either way.

Speaker 2 And this is, gosh, I don't even know 10 pages. It's a lot, you know, but he goes into great detail about all the planning he did

Speaker 2 and what it took. and how organized he had to be.
And I was so impressed.

Speaker 2 I mean, he did make it easy. He did make it easy.
I don't think I ever stopped stopped and cried because he was, you know, telling me how he felt and he was happy and don't feel bad.

Speaker 2 I'm not like all the other people that commit suicide when they're depressed.

Speaker 15 I'm thrilled.

Speaker 2 He said he's been thinking about it. It's somewhere in there.
He's been thinking about it most of his life.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm struggling to see the reasoning.

Speaker 1 Although, on another level, he laid out the logic. Yes.
But the idea of like, do I want to blurb this website?

Speaker 1 It is also occasionally brilliant. But the rest of it, man, I'm like,

Speaker 14 what the f?

Speaker 27 He made us say, what the

Speaker 10 every other, every day.

Speaker 1 At the end of the podcast, the way you guys conclude

Speaker 1 your series,

Speaker 1 you return to Bill James.

Speaker 1 You do what I cannot.

Speaker 1 You access.

Speaker 5 You want me to call him?

Speaker 10 I mean, I can ask him. Just, Bill, if you're listening.

Speaker 3 We're in the group chat.

Speaker 23 God.

Speaker 4 Of course you are.

Speaker 31 Bill James just left.

Speaker 1 What did

Speaker 1 the godfather of sabermetrics and basketball analytics and everything else advanced in mathematical and sports tell you about the death of the man whose book he blurped?

Speaker 10 A Bill James was like, surpassed any expectations we had. Daryl Maury, when he was, he visits, I guess, every year, he always refers to it as like climbing the mountain to meet the guru.

Speaker 10 And it does feel that way in your in his house, which is very nice. You should check it out.
Okay.

Speaker 10 But he kind of he related a lot of good stories about Martin, but he also said,

Speaker 10 you know, he had just gone whitewater rafting, or his wife did.

Speaker 38 My wife and I, we just took a vacation in New Mexico, and

Speaker 35 my wife went whitewater rafting, which I did not. I ain't doing that.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 38 her kayak or canoe turned over, and she's in the water and hits rock.

Speaker 9 And, you know, it's,

Speaker 38 I think of what happened to Martin as being like,

Speaker 38 not that he went down the wrong river, but that his

Speaker 35 kayak turned over and he hit his head on a rock and

Speaker 35 it was an end, but it wasn't an inevitable end. It was just something that happened.

Speaker 10 He kind of equates Martin's choice, Martin's life, to that. We're all in the river together.
We're all in life together. And it just so happens that Martin's kayak capsized and he hit his head.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 10 that's the way things go sometimes. It's a thing that happened.

Speaker 9 As opposed to, again, because the way Martin would kind of say it is that I was always kind of disappointed.

Speaker 10 This was my choice.

Speaker 10 I put this into existence.

Speaker 30 He was big on control, as you might guess.

Speaker 6 Like he liked to feel like he was in control of

Speaker 30 everything.

Speaker 6 And I think that's part of efficiency, right?

Speaker 21 It's controlling the circumstances so that it's as easy as possible.

Speaker 10 One of the favorite lines from the show. We were talking to Bill James, and he's telling us about the river, the river being life and all.

Speaker 10 And like the life lesson I took, he sort of ends the anecdote just being like,

Speaker 38 You're part of the river, and occasionally the river kills you, but it moves on

Speaker 28 whether you're

Speaker 38 whether you're swimming in it or pissing in it.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 10 you might as well swim, you know.

Speaker 10 Mar might have been more of a pisser at the end.

Speaker 1 Well, at the end here, it's hard not to

Speaker 1 follow this

Speaker 1 turbulent river towards yet another liquid. Because the part of this website, of course, in the food and drink section that we foreshadowed and now must, I believe, open,

Speaker 1 is sitting on our table. Because Martin Manley writes,

Speaker 23 gosh,

Speaker 1 it probably wasn't until I was in my mid-20s that I started drinking soda. Sometime shortly after that, it became the only thing I drank.

Speaker 1 No milk, no juices, no tea, no coffee, no beer, no water, no nothing except pop.

Speaker 1 For many years, I drank Pepsi exclusively. And so I can really think of no better way to end this episode than for you guys to crack open one of these things.

Speaker 4 All right, I'm going to get run a mic. Let's get that.

Speaker 23 Oh, oh, that was that was professional.

Speaker 10 That was call our sound editor. That was good.

Speaker 27 They're going to think they put that in posting

Speaker 1 SMR sound.

Speaker 1 If you wouldn't mind hopping me off as well. Oh, sure.

Speaker 1 And so as we hold these glasses in our hands, I just want to ask you guys, how should we remember Martin Manley?

Speaker 1 What do you want to say as we toast this man that I didn't know anything about, but certainly will not be able to forget? A proud forefather of sports analytics.

Speaker 10 Perhaps unfairly unrecognized, but I hope to

Speaker 10 bring him back into the limelight.

Speaker 6 And a man who believed in himself, who took some chances, for better or worse, wasn't comfortable with being average.

Speaker 1 And so I just feel like it's appropriate to raise a glass to the life and occasional brilliance of Martin Manley. Here, Martin.

Speaker 1 This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark media production.

Speaker 1 And I'll talk to you next time.