Moneyball

by Lewis, Michael

  Paul DePodesta was an intern for the Cleveland Indians when he met the former Wall Street traders turned baseball analysts, making their first sales trip around Major League Baseball. He remembers his reaction to their presentation: Oh my God. “It opened my eyes for me,” said Paul. “The biggest thing that AVM does is extract the element of luck. Everyone in baseball knows how much luck is involved in the game but they all say, ‘The luck evens out.’ What AVM was saying is that it doesn’t. It’s not good enough to say, ‘Aw, it just evens out.’”

  An insight born in the financial markets took root in the minds of a young man who would soon have the power to put it to use inside Major League Baseball. Not long after Billy Beane had hired Paul DePodesta, in 1998, Paul persuaded Billy to hire AVM Systems. “They were still interesting to me,” Paul said, “because they weren’t churning conventional statistics in unconventional ways, which is what everyone else does.” AVM Systems was a luxury only a rich team could afford but that only a poor team, desperate for any edge, would think to use. Billy and Paul used the AVM system for a couple of years and then, to save money, copied what AVM did. Once Paul finished replicating the parallel world of derivatives, he and Billy could begin to answer more accurately the question about Johnny Damon’s defense.

  Every event on a baseball field Paul understood as having an “expected run value.” You don’t need to be able to calculate expected run values to understand them. Everything that happens on a baseball field alters, often very subtly, a team’s chances of scoring runs. Every event on a baseball field changes, often imperceptibly, the state of the game. For example, the value of having no runners on base with nobody on base and no count on the batter is roughly .55 runs, because that is what a baseball team, on average, will score in that situation. If the batter smacks a double, he changes the “state” of the game: it’s now nobody out with a runner on second base. The expected run value of that new “state” is 1.1 runs. It follows that the contribution of a leadoff double to a team’s expected runs is .55 runs (1.1 minus .55). If the batter, instead of hitting a double, strikes out, he lowers the team’s expected run value to roughly .30 runs. The cost of making that out was therefore .25 runs-the difference between the value of the original state of the game and the state the batter left it in.

  But those calculations really only scratch the surface of the problem. If you want to strip out the luck and get to a deeper understanding of the value of a player’s performance you have to pose the baseball equivalent of existential questions. For instance: what is a double? It really isn’t enough to say that a double is when a runner hits a ball and gets to second base without a fielder’s error. Anyone who has seen a baseball game knows that all doubles are not alike. There are doubles that should have been caught—just as there are balls that are hit that should have been doubles but were plucked from the air by preternaturally gifted fielders. There are lucky doubles and unlucky outs. To strip out the luck what you need, really, is something like a Platonic idea of a double.

  A set of Platonic ideas is one of the gifts the Wall Street traders gave to Paul DePodesta. The precision of the AVM system, copied by Paul, enabled him to think about every event that occurred on a baseball field in a new and more satisfying way. Any ball hit anyplace on a baseball field had been hit just that way thousands of times before: the average of all those hits was the Platonic idea. Call it a line drive hit at x trajectory and y speed to point #968. From the ten years worth of data, you can see that there have been 8,642 practically identical hits. You can see that 92 percent of the time the hit went for a double, 4 percent for a single, and 4 percent it was caught. Suppose the average value of that event is .50 of a run. No matter what actually happened, the system credits the hitter with having generated .50 of a run, and the pitcher with having given up .50 of a run. If Johnny Damon happens to get one of his trademark jumps and makes a sprawling catch, he is credited with saving his team .50 of a run.

  The beauty of the value of that hit (or catch) was that the game gave it to you; the game told you how valuable every event was, by telling you how valuable it had been, on average, over the past ten years. By listening to what the game told him about the value of events, Paul could take every ball hit between in the area broadly defined as center field and determine its “expected run value.”

  Which brings us back to Johnny Damon. Over the 2001 season many hundreds of balls had been hit by opponents of the Oakland A’s in the vicinity typically covered by the center fielder. By totaling up the outcomes when Johnny Damon was in the field, and comparing them to the average, Paul was able to see how many runs Damon had saved the team. He was also able to estimate how many runs Damon’s likely replacement, Terrence Long, would cost the team. Some of this you could see with the naked eye, of course. You could see Johnny Damon break the instant the ball left the bat. You could see Terrence Long freeze, or even take off in the wrong direction, when the ball was in midflight. You didn’t really need Wall Street traders to tell you which one was the better center fielder. The system born on Wall Street simply helped Paul to put a price on the difference. There was no longer any need to guess. There was no need for gut instinct, or conventional fielding statistics. The total cost of having Terrence Long, rather than Johnny Damon, in center field was fifteen runs, or about a run every ten games.

  Fifteen runs was not a trivial number. In the end, Paul concluded that Johnny Damon’s fielding was more important than Billy Beane believed—the first pamphlet Billy had read on the subject had said that fielding was “no more than 5%” of baseball—but not so much more that you wanted to pay Johnny Damon the $8 million a year his agent was asking for. And the truth was that you still couldn’t make perfectly definitive statements about fielding. “There was still no exact number,” Paul said, “because the system doesn’t measure where a defensive player started from. It doesn’t tell you how far a guy had to go to catch a ball.” What looked like superior defense might have been brilliant defensive positioning by the bench coach.

  There was one other big glitch: these sorts of calculations could value only past performance. No matter how accurately you valued past performance, it was still an uncertain guide to future performance. Johnny Damon (or Terrence Long) might lose a step. Johnny Damon (or Terrence Long) might take to drink, or get divorced. Johnny Damon (or Terrence Long) might decide that he’d made enough money already and lose his middle-class enthusiasm for running down fly balls. In human behavior there was always uncertainty and risk. The goal of the Oakland front office was simply to minimize the risk. Their solution wasn’t perfect, it was just better than the hoary alternative, rendering decisions by gut feeling.

  Of one thing they were certain: their system brought you a lot closer to the true value of a player’s performances than anything else like it. And it reinforced the Oakland A’s working theory that a guy’s hitting ability had a far greater effect than his fielding ability on a team’s performance. Albert Belle missed more fly balls than any other left fielder in baseball, but the system proved that he more than made up for it by swatting more doubles. Or as Paul put it, “The variance between the best and worst fielders on the outcome of a game is a lot smaller than the variance between the best hitters and the worst hitters.” The market as a whole failed to grasp this fact, and so placed higher prices than it should on defensive skills. Thus the practical answer to the question about Johnny Damon’s defense: it would probably cost more to replace than it was worth. Anyone who could play center field so well as Damon was either a lot worse offensively than Damon, or overpriced. The most efficient way to offset the loss of Johnny Damon’s defense was to add more offense.

  The Blue Ribbon Panel Report believed that a poor team could never survive the loss to free agency of its proven stars. But the business was more complicated than that. The departures of Johnny Damon and Jason Isringhausen, both proven stars, were not great blows to the Oakland A’s. The loss of Isringhausen was not really a loss at all but a p
iece of ruthless profiteering. Damon’s was a loss but nothing like the $32 million for four years the Red Sox had guaranteed him. If the Oakland A’s had lost just those two players Paul’s computer might have predicted that the team in 2002 would win as many games as they had in 2001. But they’d also lost Jason Giambi, and Jason Giambi was another matter. Giambi was maybe the worst defensive first baseman in the big leagues but he was a machine for creating runs, one of the most efficient offensive players in the game. Worse, Giambi was back in Oakland, playing for the other team.

  Chapter VII

  Giambi’s Hole

  We’re going to run the organization from the top down. We’re controlling player personnel. That’s our job. I don’t apologize for that. There’s this belief that a baseball team starts with the manager first. It doesn’t.

  —Billy Beane, quoted in the Boston Herald, January 16, 2003

  The Oakland A’s clubhouse was famously the cheapest and least charming real estate in professional baseball and the video room was the meanest corner of it. Off-limits to reporters, just a few yards down the hall from the showers, the video room was where the players came to hide from newspaper reporters, and to study themselves. One wall was stacked with old tapes of A’s games, the other with decrepit video equipment. Stained Formica desks, a pair of old video screens on each one, squatted on either end of the room. The only decoration was a plastic map of the United States—because occasionally the players wanted to see which states they’d fly over on the next road trip—and two pieces of a bat split against one of the Formica desks by former A’s outfielder Matt Stairs. About six baseball players could fit inside the room at once, and often did.

  Between Matt Stairs’s broken bat and the U.S. map usually sat a young man named Dan Feinstein—Feiny, everyone called him. Twenty minutes before game time all that was left of the players in the video room was Miguel Tejada’s Fig Newton wrappers. Feiny spotted them and shook his head. The A’s shortstop was one of those people who had to be told to clean up his own mess, and Feiny was one of those people who wouldn’t hesitate to do it.

  Feiny was putting his college degree in medieval European history to work preparing videotapes for the Oakland A’s. He took pride in his decrepit little space. Feiny argued that while rich teams had far more expansive and tasteful facilities, they paid a price for their luxury: their players never had to share close quarters. They weren’t forced to get to know one another by smell. Feiny came to know all of the Oakland players, by smell and swing, and he was determined that they should also know themselves. The night I arrived, the A’s were playing the New York Yankees, for whom David Wells was scheduled to pitch. Next to Feiny there was a long row of tapes: Tejada vs. Wells. Menechino vs. Wells. Chavez vs. Wells. I looked at the tapes, and then at Feiny, who said, “I don’t have a good feeling about tonight.” “Why not?” I asked. “They’re better than us,” he said.

  Next to Feiny, at one end of the video room, sat David Forst, twenty-five-year-old former Harvard shortstop. Two years earlier, after he’d graduated with an honors degree in sociology, Forst had been invited to the Red Sox spring training camp. Dismissed in the final cut, he sent his resume around big league front offices and it caught Paul DePodesta’s eye. And so, surely for the first time since the dead ball era, the Harvard Old Boys’ network came to baseball. Paul himself sat at the desk on the other end of the room. I ask them if it ever troubled them to devote their lives, and expensive educations, to a trivial game. They look at me as if I’ve lost my mind, and Paul actually laughed. “Oh, you mean as opposed to working in some deeply meaningful job on Wall Street?” he said.

  It wasn’t hard to see what Billy had seen in Paul when he’d hired him: an antidote to himself. Billy was an undisciplined omnivore. He let everything in and then worried about the consequences later. He ate about ten thousand calories of junk food each day on the assumption that he could always run them off. Ideas he consumed as rapidly and indiscriminately as cheese puffs. He had been put on this earth to devour all of it; Paul, on the other hand, seemed to be trying to establish some kind of record for fuel efficiency. Food he treated with suspicion, as if the world’s chefs were conspiring to poison him. He’d somehow gotten through a private prep school and college without ever allowing a sip of alcohol to pass his lips, not because he had any conventional moral objection to drinking but because research had established that alcohol killed brain cells. About his career he was fantastically deliberate. He’d already turned down one lucrative offer, from the Toronto Blue jays, to become, at twenty-eight, the youngest general manager in the history of baseball, and he was prepared to turn down more until exactly the right one came along. Paul was finicky about ideas, too, but he had let in one big one: that there was still such a thing as new baseball knowledge.

  Paul was obviously a creature of reason but, beneath his reason, other qualities percolated. He’d played sports in high school, and then proved that a young man with the build of St. Francis of Assisi could play wide receiver for the Harvard varsity football team. (“He had the big heart,” said his former coach, Mac Singleton.) Paul wasn’t the sort of person who typically rises to power inside a big league organization, and yet he had. He was an outsider who had found a way to enter a place designed to keep outsiders out. Billy Beane had turned himself into a human bridge between two warring countries—the fiefdom of Playing Pro Ball and the Republic of Thinking About How to Play Pro Ball—and Paul was dashing across it. Under his arm he carried both the toolkit and the spirit of Bill James. “The thing that Bill James did that we try to do,” Paul said, “is that he asked the question why.”

  The question Paul might have been asking on this night early in the 2002 season was: why the hell did we let Jason Giambi leave? The question that he had, in fact, asked was: why does it matter that we let Jason Giambi leave?

  The A’s front office realized right away, of course, that they couldn’t replace Jason Giambi with another first baseman just like him. There wasn’t another first baseman just like him and if there were they couldn’t have afforded him and in any case that’s not how they thought about the holes they had to fill. “The important thing is not to recreate the individual,” Billy Beane would later say. “The important thing is to recreate the aggregate.” He couldn’t and wouldn’t find another Jason Giambi; but he could find the pieces of Giambi he could least afford to be without, and buy them for a tiny fraction of the cost of Giambi himself.

  The A’s front office had broken down Giambi into his obvious offensive statistics—walks, singles, doubles, home runs—along with his less obvious ones—pitches seen per plate appearance, walk to strikeout ratio—and asked: which can we afford to replace? And they realized that they could afford, in a roundabout way, to replace his most critical offensive trait, his on-base percentage, along with several less obvious ones.

  The previous season Giambi’s on-base percentage had been .477, the highest in the American League by 50 points. (Seattle’s Edgar Martinez had been second at .423; the average American League on-base percentage was .334.) There was no one player who got on base half the time he came to bat that the A’s could afford; on the other hand, Jason Giambi wasn’t the only player in the Oakland A’s lineup who needed replacing. Johnny Damon (onbase percentage .324) was gone from center field, and the designated hitter Olmedo Saenz (.291) was headed for the bench. The average on-base percentage of those three players (.364) was what Billy and Paul had set out to replace. They went looking for three players who could play, between them, first base, outfield, and DH, and who shared an ability to get on base at a rate thirty points higher than the average big league player. The astonishing thing, given how important on-base percentage was, or the Oakland A’s front office believed it was, was how little it cost. To buy it they simply had to be willing to sacrifice other qualities in a player—such as the ability to outrun the hot dog vendor in a sixty-yard dash. “We don’t get the guys who are perfect,” said Paul. “There has to
be something wrong with them for them to get to us.” To fill the hole left by Giambi, the A’s had gone out and acquired, or promoted from within the organization, three players most teams didn’t want have anything to do with: former Yankee outfielder David justice; former Red Sox catcher Scott Hatteberg; and Jason Giambi’s little brother, Jeremy. They could only afford them, Paul explained, because all were widely viewed by Major League Baseball executives as defective.

  As the Oakland A’s trot out to their positions in the field, Paul takes his usual seat in front of one of the video screens. The camera pans to left field. There stands Jeremy Giambi, shifting back and forth unhappily, like a man waiting for an unpleasant phone call. He must know that he is standing in a place where he faces almost certain public humiliation. Paul can guess what Jeremy is thinking: Please don’t hit it to me. Perhaps also: If you do hit it to me, please be so kind as to hit it at me.

  On the second pitch of the game, Alfonso Soriano doesn’t. The Yankees’ second baseman takes a fastball in the middle of the plate from A’s pitcher Eric Hiljus and smacks it deep into left field. Jeremy Giambi makes his way frantically back toward the left field wall, like a postman trying to escape a mad dog. He is the slowest man on the slowest team in professional baseball. When he runs, he manages somehow at the same time to convey personal embarrassment. He is too busy right now to wonder why he is playing left field at all, but he well might. He is playing left field not because he has any particular gift for plucking balls from the air but because he is even more gloriously inept when faced with the task of picking them up off the ground. Jeremy Giambi is in left field, to be exact, because the most efficient distribution of the A’s resources was to stick him there.