For pretty much the whole of 2000 Voros McCracken, as he put it, “went looking for a reason Maddux got hit in 1999, and to this day I’m still looking for it.” At length, he penned an article revealing his findings for baseballprospectus.com. Its conclusion: “There is little if any difference among major league pitchers in their ability to prevent hits on balls hit into the field of play.” ESPN columnist Rob Neyer saw Voros’s piece and, stunned by both the quality of the thought and the force of the argument, wrote an article about Voros’s article. Several thousand amateur baseball analysts wrote in to say that Voros’s argument, on the face of it, sounded nuts. Several suggested that “Voros McCracken” might be a pseudonym for Aaron Sele, a well-hit pitcher then playing for the Seattle Mariners.
Bill James also read Rob Neyer’s article. James wrote in, and said Voros McCracken’s theory, if true, was obviously important, but that he couldn’t believe it was true. He—and about three thousand other people—then went off to disprove it himself. He couldn’t do it, and the three thousand other guys couldn’t either. About the most they could suggest was that there was a slight tendency for knuckleballers to control hits per balls in play. Nine months later, on page 885 of his mammoth Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, James laid out Voros McCracken’s argument, noted that Voros McCracken “is NekcarCcM Sorov spelled backwards,” then went on to make four points:
Like most things, McCracken’s argument can be taken too literally. A pitcher does have some input into the hits/innings ratio behind him, other than that which is reflected in the home run and strikeout column.
With that qualification, I am quite certain that McCracken is correct.
This knowledge is significant, very useful.
I feel stupid for not having realized it 30 years ago.
One of the minor consequences of Voros McCracken’s analysis of pitching was to lead him to Chad Bradford, Triple-A pitcher for the Chicago White Sox. Voros had developed a statistic he could trust—what he called DIPS, for defense independent pitching statistic. It might also have been called LIPS, for luck independent pitching statistic, because the luck it stripped out of a pitcher’s bottom line had, at times, a more warping effect than defense on the perception of a pitcher’s true merits. At any rate, Chad Bradford’s Triple-A defense independent stats were even better than his astonishingly impressive defense dependent ones. (Chad pitched a total of 202% innings in Triple-A, with an earned run average of 1.64.) And so Voros McCracken snapped up Bradford for his fantasy team, even though a player did a fantasy team no good unless he accumulated big league innings. “Basically,” said Voros, “I was waiting for someone to see what I’d seen in Bradford and put him to use.”
He waited nearly a year. Inadvertently, Voros McCracken had helped to explain why the White Sox thought of Chad Bradford as a “Triple-A guy.” There was a reason that, in judging young pitchers, the White Sox front office, like nearly every big league front office, preferred their own subjective opinion to minor league pitching statistics. Pitching statistics were flawed. Maybe not quite so deeply as hitting statistics but enough to encourage uncertainty. Baseball executives’ preference for their own opinions over hard data was, at least in part, due to a lifetime of experience of fishy data. They’d seen one too many guys with a low earned run average in Triple-A who flamed out in the big leagues. And when a guy looked as funny, and threw as slow, as Chad Bradford—well, you just knew he was doomed.
If one didn’t already know better, one might think that Voros McCracken’s article on baseballprospectus.com would be cause for celebration everywhere inside big league baseball. One knew better. Voros knew better. “The problem with major league baseball,” he said, “is that it’s a self-populating institution. Knowledge is institutionalized. The people involved with baseball who aren’t players are ex-players. In their defense, their structure is not set up along corporate lines. They aren’t equipped to evaluate their own systems. They don’t have the mechanism to let in the good and get rid of the bad. They either keep everything or get rid of everything, and they rarely do the latter.” He sympathized with baseball owners who didn’t know what to think, or even if they should think. “If you’re an owner and you never played, do you believe Voros McCracken or Larry Bowa?” The unemployed former paralegal living with his parents, or the former All-Star shortstop and current manager who no doubt owned at least one home of his own?
Voros McCracken’s astonishing discovery about major league pitchers had no apparent effect on the management, or evaluation, of actual pitchers. No one on the inside called Voros to discuss his findings; so far as he knew, no one on the inside had even read it. But Paul DePodesta had read it. Paul’s considered reaction: “If you want to talk about a guy who might be the next Bill James, Voros McCracken could be it.” Paul’s unconsidered reaction: “The first thing I thought of was Chad Bradford.”
* * *
Voros McCracken had provided the theory to explain what the Oakland A’s front office already had come to believe: you could create reliable pitching statistics. It was true that the further you got from the big leagues, the less reliably stats predicted big league performance. But if you focused on the right statistics you could certainly project a guy based on his Triple-A, and even his Double-A, numbers. The right numbers were walks, home runs, and strikeouts plus a few others. If you trusted those, you didn’t have to give two minutes’ thought to how a guy looked, or how hard he threw. You could judge a pitcher’s performance objectively, by what he had accomplished.
Chad Bradford was, to the Oakland A’s front office, a no-brainer. “It wasn’t that he was doing it differently,” said Paul DePodesta. “It was that the efficiency with which he was recording outs was astounding.” Chad Bradford had set off several different sets of bells inside Paul’s computer. He hardly ever walked a batter; he gave up virtually no home runs; and he struck out nearly a batter an inning. Paul, like Bill James, thought it was possible to take Voros’s theory too literally. He thought there was one big thing, in addition to walks, strikeouts, and home runs, that a pitcher could control: extra base hits. Chad Bradford gave up his share of hits per balls in play but, more than any pitcher in baseball, they were ground ball hits. His minor league ground ball to fly ball ratio was 5:1. The big league average was more like 1.2:1. Ground balls were not only hard to hit over the wall; they were hard to hit for doubles and triples.
That raised an obvious question: why weren’t there more successful ground ball pitchers like Chad Bradford in the big leagues? There was an equally obvious answer: there were no ground ball pitchers like Chad Bradford. Ground ball pitchers who threw overhand tended to be sinker ball pitchers and they tended to have control problems and also tended not to strike out a lot of guys. Chad Bradford was, statistically and humanly, an outlier.
The best thing of all was that the scouts didn’t like him. The Greek Chorus disapproved of what they called “tricksters.” Paul thought it was ridiculous when the White Sox sent Chad back down to Triple-A, but he could guess why they had done it. Once upon a time he had sat behind home plate while Chad Bradford pitched; he’d listened to the scouts make fun of Chad, even as Chad made fools of hitters. The guy looked funny when he threw, no question about it, and his fastball came in at between 81 and 85 mph. Chad Bradford didn’t know it, but as he dropped his arm slot, and took heat off his fastball, he was becoming an Oakland A. “Because of the way he looked, we thought he might be available to us,” said Paul. “Usually the guys who are setting off bells in my office are the guys everybody knows about. But nobody knew about this guy, because of the way he threw. If he had those identical stats in Triple-A but he threw ninety-four, there is no way they’d have traded him.”
Already Billy Beane was finding that guys he wanted magically became less available the moment he expressed an interest in them. At the end of the 2000 season he finally called the new White Sox GM, Kenny Williams, who had replaced the old White Sox GM, Ron Schueler
, and said, very casually, that he was looking for “a guy who could be a twelfth or thirteenth pitcher on the staff.” Someone in the White Sox farm system. Someone maybe in Triple-A. He was willing to give up this minor league catcher in exchange for a Triple-A arm, Billy said, and he didn’t much care which one. He asked the White Sox to suggest a few names. It took Kenny Williams a while to get around to him, but finally he mentioned Chad Bradford. Said he hated to even bring Bradford up because the young man had just called in from Mississippi and said his back was hurting, and he might need surgery. “He’ll do,” said Billy.
Chapter XI
The Human Element
Earlier that historic September evening, before Chad Bradford took the mound, a traffic jam extraordinary even by Northern California standards stretched as far as the eye could see. The Oakland A’s ticket office had never experienced anything quite like the crush of the previous two days. When the Kansas City Royals came to town, the A’s sales department expected about ten thousand fans to turn up. In just the last twenty-four hours more than twenty thousand people had stopped by, in the flesh, to buy seats in advance. Before the game, an aerial view of Oakland would reveal nearly everyone in sight heading toward the Coliseum. Billy Beane alone was heading away from it.
Billy hadn’t the slightest intention of watching his team make history. It was just another game, he said, and he didn’t watch games. “All they provide me with is subjective emotion,” he said, “and that can be counterproductive.” He figured he could give a few press interviews, and then slip away in his Range Rover to Modesto. In Modesto, on the same night the Oakland A’s were trying to win their twentieth game in a row, the Visalia Oaks were playing the Modesto A’s. Both teams were Single-A affiliates of Oakland. Most of the players the A’s had drafted a few months before played for one or the other. Billy could stand to watch young men who still had time and space to fail: Nick Swisher, Steve Stanley, Mark Teahen, and Jeremy Brown. Especially Brown, the bad body catcher from Hueytown, Alabama. Everyone had laughed when the Oakland A’s drafted Brown in the first round. Every day Brown was more interesting to Billy.
And so the only moment that Billy Beane looked forward to, on a day he should have gloated through, was when he’d make his getaway. On his way out of the office, however, he’d been cut off by the team’s stunned marketing department. The people who sold the Oakland A’s couldn’t quite believe that the guy who’d built them was taking off. They explained to Billy that if he left, he might as well pile a bunch of money in the street and set it on fire: he’d be blowing the biggest chance they’d had in years to promote the Oakland A’s to the wider world. The winning streak had become a national news story. And so Billy, slightly miffed, stayed. He sat still for CBS Evening News, CNN, Fox Sports News, ESPN, and a few others, then went down to the weight room and hid, from the media and the game.
At some point between the treadmill and the stationary bicycle he noticed on his little white box that it was the bottom of the third inning and his team was ahead 11-0. For the first time in a very long while, he relaxed. Still dripping sweat, he set himself up in manager Art Howe’s empty office, with the television switched on. Nineteen games into a winning streak, up eleven-zip against one of the worst teams in baseball, with one of the best pitchers in baseball still on the mound for the Oakland A’s—this one game appeared safe to watch. It wasn’t going to violate the laws of probability; it wasn’t going to drive him mad, and cause him to do something he might later regret. At that moment, Billy Beane was so at peace with his world that he let me into it.
His feet were up on Art Howe’s Formica desk. He was feeling detached. Expansive. Delighted and delightful. This was the way he felt most of the time; this was the way he almost always handled himself away from baseball. He had, he confessed, expressed his concern when he saw that Art Howe had written John Mabry’s name on the lineup card, where Scott Hatteberg’s should have been. It was a shame for Hatteberg, I thought. Here he’s been performing these valuable and rather selfless services to the Oakland A’s offense, and the one game the world will watch, he isn’t allowed to play. Art explained to Billy that Hatteberg had never faced Kansas City’s ace, Paul Byrd. Mabry, on the other hand, not only had hit Byrd hard but claimed to be able to see him tipping his pitches—that is, Mabry could guess what Byrd was about to throw. Billy now says he deferred to Art’s judgment, as if deferring to Art’s judgment comes naturally to him. Mabry promptly made Art Howe look like a genius. He’d driven in one run with a single up the middle in the six-run first inning—and helped to chase Byrd from the game. Then, in the second inning, he’d whacked a solo home run.
With the score 11-0, and Tim Hudson still carving up the Royals lineup, the absence of Scott Hatteberg from the lineup is a distant memory. Billy Beane is right to feel his usual self: the odds of something going wrong are ridiculously small. He calls his daughter Casey, now twelve years old, and still living in Southern California.
“Hey Casey, you watching the game?”
Pause.
“American Idol? You’re watching American Idol??”
Casey is watching American Idol.
He tells Casey the news—the team is winning big, a nation of baseball fans is watching—teases her a bit, and lets her go.
Billy Beane should always be so calm during his team’s games. If he believes what he claims to believe—that the game can be reduced to a social science; that it is simply a matter of figuring out the odds, and exploiting the laws of probability; that baseball players follow strikingly predictable patterns—then there is no point in being anything but calm. To get worked up over plays, or even games, is as unproductive as a casino manager worrying over the outcomes of individual pulls of the slot machines. Billy as good as makes this point now by pointing at the TV, where Eric Chavez, having just made a difficult defensive play look routine, sheepishly starts kicking the dirt in front of him. “He’s almost afraid to acknowledge how good he really is,” says Billy. “And here’s the thing. He’s twenty-four years old. You know if he’s here now”—he holds his hand at his chest—”he’ll wind up here”—he raises his hand over his head. “You could make a case that Chavvy is the most naturally gifted player in the game.”
I ask him to make the case, and, in his current, detached mood, he’s more than happy to. Up eleven-zip against a sorry club, he’s reveling in the objective, scientific spirit.
“Age is such a critical factor in evaluating guys,” he says, then plucks the Oakland A’s media guide off Art Howe’s bookshelf. “Here. Chavvy is twenty-four. The season isn’t over. He’s got 31 homers, 28 doubles, 55 walks, a .283 batting average, and a .353 on-base percentage. Who do you want to compare him to?”
“Jason Giambi,” I say.
“All right,” as he pulls out the New York Yankees media guide. “But I know the answer to this already, because I already did it.” He finds Giambi’s career statistics. “When Jason was twenty-four years old, he spent half the year in Edmonton—on a Triple-A team. In the half he was in the big leagues he hit 6 homers, drew 28 walks, and hit .256. Who else?”
“Barry Bonds,” I say. Across the Bay, Bonds is making the argument every night that he is the finest hitter who ever played the game.
“That’s hard,” he says. “Bonds has reached that level where even talent can’t take you. But okay, let’s take Bonds.” He grabs the San Francisco Giants media guide. “I know what it’s going to show because I did this with him, too. Bonds was born in 1964. In 1988, he hit .283, with 24 homers, 72 walks, and 30 doubles. That gives you some idea of how good Chavvy is.”
“Who else?” he asks. But before I can think of anyone else, he says, “Let’s try A-Rod [Alex Rodriguez]. No one had a quicker start than A-Rod.” He pulls the Texas Rangers media guide. “A-Rod was 24 in 1999. In 1999, he hit .285, with 25 doubles, 42 homers, and 111 runs batted in.” He looks up. “That compares well enough, but then there’s defense. Chavvy is the best fielding thir
d baseman in the game. A-Rod isn’t the best fielding shortstop.”
I’m still having trouble getting my mind around the notion of making such forecasts about human beings, and I say as much. My problem can be simply put: every player is different. Every player must be viewed as a special case. The sample size is always one. His answer is equally simple: baseball players follow similar patterns, and these patterns are etched in the record books. Of course, every so often some player may fail to embrace his statistical destiny, but on a team of twenty-five players the statistical aberrations will tend to cancel each other out. And most of them will conform fairly exactly to his expectations. About Eric Chavez’s career, for instance, he has not the slightest doubt. “The only thing that will stop Chavvy is if he gets bored,” he says. “People don’t understand that. He continues to frustrate people who take him out of context. He is twenty-four years old. What he’s done at twenty-four no one has done. Health permitted, his whole career is a lock.”
I mention that there are times when Billy is one of the people Chavvy frustrates. Chavvy, like Miguel Tejada, is Mister Swing at Everything. In his current mood, Billy waves the objection aside. He can’t understand how I can be so intolerant. “Chavvy’s young,” he says. “He’s good-looking. He’s a millionaire. He kind of owes it to himself to swing at everything. What were you like when you were twenty-four?”
This was the character whose behavior was consistent with the way he said he wanted to run his baseball team: rationally. Scientifically. This was the “objective” Billy Beane, the general manager who was certain that “you don’t change guys; they are who they are.” Who will describe his job as “a soap box derby. You build the car in the beginning of the year and after that all you do is push it down the hill.” To this Billy Beane’s way of thinking there was no point in meddling with the science experiment. There was no point in trying to get inside players’ heads, for instance, to reshape their approach to the game. They will be who they will be. When you listen to the “objective” Billy Beane talk about his players, you begin to wonder if baseball players have free will.
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