The other thing that invariably happened was an unsystematic rethink in the engine room about this quixotic course the captain has set all season long. Coaches, players, reporters: everyone at once starts to worry that the Oakland A’s don’t bunt or run. Especially run. Billy Beane’s total lack of interest in the stolen base—which has served the team so well for the previous 162 games—is regarded, in the postseason, as sheer folly. Even people who don’t run very fast start saying that “you need to make things happen” in the postseason. Take the action to your opponent. “The atavistic need to run,” Billy Beane calls it.
The regular season is all but forgotten, but it shouldn’t be. Any way you looked at it, it had been a miracle. In all of Major League Baseball only the New York Yankees won as many games as the Oakland A’s. All but written off when they let Jason Giambi leave for greener pastures, the A’s had won 103 games, one more than they had the year before. Maybe more astonishingly, at least for economic determinists, the teams in baseball’s best division, the American League West, finished in inverse order to their payrolls.
Wins Losses Games Behind Payroll*
Oakland 103 59 — $41,942,665
Anaheim 99 63 4 $62,757,041
Seattle 93 69 10 $86,084,710
Texas 72 90 31 $106,915,180
The payroll figures are Major League Baseball’s on August 31, 2002. The wacky funhouse mirror quality of the 2002 season, in which several poor teams made the play-offs and no very rich teams made the World Series, had no discernable effect on Major League Baseball’s view of the role of money in baseball success. Commissioner Bud Selig continued to insist that the Oakland A’s—who also had turned a slight profit—were doomed. “We’re asking them [the Oakland A’s] to compete in a stadium they can’t compete in,” he said, in February 2003. “They’re not viable without a new stadium.”
The more money the teams spent on players, at least in the American League West, the less able those players were to win baseball games. The same wasn’t exactly true in every other division, but there had been plenty of other astonishing endings: big-budget disasters (the Mets, the Dodgers, the Orioles) and low-budget successes (the Twins).
In spite of the Oakland A’s fantastic success, there was a subtle pressure to change the way they did business. Most of it came from the media. About the fifteenth time he heard some TV pundit say that the Oakland A’s couldn’t win because they didn’t “manufacture runs,” Billy began to worry his coaches and players might actually believe it. He printed out the 2002 offensive statistics for the Oakland A’s and the Minnesota Twins and sat down with the coaches. The Twins team batting average was 11 points higher than the A’s, and their slugging percentage was 5 points higher. And yet they had scored thirty-two fewer runs. Why? Their team on-base percentage was a shade lower, and they’d been caught stealing sixty-two times, to Oakland’s twenty, and had twice as many sacrifice bunts. That is, they’d squandered outs. “They were trying to manipulate the game instead of letting the game come to them,” said Billy. “The math works. But no matter how many times you prove it, you always have to prove it again.”
The moment the play-offs began, you could feel the world of baseball insiders rising up to swat down the possibility that the Oakland A’s front office actually might be onto something. The man who spoke for all insiders was Joe Morgan, the Hall of Fame second baseman, who was in the broadcast booth for the entire five-game series between the A’s and the Twins. At some point during each game Morgan explained to the audience the flaw in the A’s thinking—not that he had any deep understanding of what that thinking entailed. But he was absolutely certain that their strategy made no sense. When the A’s lost the first game, 7-5, it gave Morgan his opening to explain, in the first inning of the second game, why the Oakland A’s were in trouble. “You have to manufacture runs in the postseason,” he said, meaning bunt and steal and in general treat outs as something other than a scarce resource. Incredibly, he then went on to explain that “manufacturing runs” was how the New York Yankees had beaten the Anaheim Angels the night before.
I had seen that game. Down 5-4 in the eighth inning, Yankees second baseman Alfonso Soriano had gotten himself on base and stolen second. Derek Jeter then walked, and Jason Giambi singled in Soriano. Bernie Williams then hit a three-run homer. A reasonable person, examining that sequence of events, says, “Whew, thank God Soriano didn’t get caught stealing; it was, in retrospect, a stupid risk that could have killed the whole rally.” Joe Morgan looked at it and announced that Soriano stealing second, the only bit of “manufacturing” in the production line, was the cause. Amazingly, Morgan concluded that day’s lesson about baseball strategy by saying, “You sit and wait for a three-run homer, you’re still going to be sitting there.”
But the wonderful thing about this little lecture was what happened right under Joe Morgan’s nose, as he was giving it. Ray Durham led off the game for Oakland with a walk. He didn’t attempt to steal, as Morgan would have him do. Scott Hatteberg followed Durham and he didn’t bunt, as Morgan would have him do. He smashed a double. A few moments later, Eric Chavez hit a three-run homer. And Joe Morgan’s lecture on the need to avoid playing for the three-run homer just rolled right along, as if the play on the field had not dramatically contradicted every word that had just come out of his mouth. That day the A’s walked and swatted their way to nine runs, and a win—in which Chad Bradford, returned to form, pitched two scoreless innings. Two days later in Minnesota, before the third game, Joe Morgan made the same speech all over again.
As it turned out, the A’s did everyone in baseball a favor and lost to the Twins, in the fifth game.* The two games they won the scores were 9-1 and 8-3. The three games they lost the scores were 7-5, 11-2, and 5-4. These were not the low-scoring games of Ray Durham’s play-off imagination. And yet virtually all of the noisy second-guessing after their defeat followed the line of reasoning laid down by Ray Durham and Joe Morgan. One of the leading Bay Area baseball columnists, Glenn Dickey of the San Francisco Chronicle, explained to his readers that “The A’s don’t know how to ‘manufacture’ runs, which kills them in close games in the postseason. Manager Art Howe, who believed in ‘little ball’ before he came to the A’s, has become so accustomed to the walk/homer approach that he can’t adjust in the postseason.” In late October, Joe Morgan will summarize the Oakland A’s problems in print: “The A’s lose because they are two-dimensional. They have good pitching and try to hit home runs. They don’t use speed and don’t try to manufacture runs. They wait for the home run. They are still waiting.”
In the five-game series, Scott Hatteberg went 7-14 with three walks, no strikeouts, a home run, and a pair of doubles. He scored five runs and knocked in three. Chad Bradford faced ten batters and got nine of them out, seven on ground balls. The tenth batter hit a bloop single. Bradford snapped out of his slump after the twentieth win. His confidence returned about the same time Scott Hatteberg started telling him what the hitters said on the rare occasions they got to first base against him. After Anaheim’s second baseman, Adam Kennedy, blooped a single off Bradford, he turned to Hatty and said, “Jesus Christ, there’s no way that’s eighty-four miles an hour.”
All of the commentary struck the Oakland A’s front office as just more of the same. “Base-stealing,” said Paul DePodesta, after the dust had settled. “That’s the one thing everyone points to that we do. Or don’t. So when we lose, that’s why.” He then punched some numbers into his calculator. The Oakland A’s scored 4.9 runs per game during the season. They scored 5.5 runs per game in the five-game series against the Twins. They hadn’t “manufactured” runs and yet they had scored more of them in the play-offs than they had during the regular season. “The real problem,” said Paul, “was that during the season we allowed 4.0 runs per game, and during the play-offs we allowed 5.4. The small sample size makes that in
significant, but it also punctuates the absurdity of the critiques of our offensive philosophy.” The real problem was that Tim Hudson, heretofore flawless in big games, and perfect against the Minnesota Twins, had two horrendous outings. No one could have predicted that.
The postseason partially explained why baseball was so uniquely resistant to the fruits of scientific research: to any purely rational idea about how to run a baseball team. It wasn’t just that the game was run by old baseball men who insisted on doing things as they had always been done. It was that the season ended in a giant crapshoot. The play-offs frustrate rational management because, unlike the long regular season, they suffer from the sample size problem. Pete Palmer, the sabermetrician and author of The Hidden Game of Baseball, once calculated that the average difference in baseball due to skill is about one run a game, while the average difference due to luck is about four runs a game. Over a long season the luck evens out, and the skill shines through. But in a series of three out of five, or even four out of seven, anything can happen. In a five-game series, the worst team in baseball will beat the best about 15 percent of the time; the Devil Rays have a prayer against the Yankees. Baseball science may still give a team a slight edge, but that edge is overwhelmed by chance. The baseball season is structured to mock reason.
Because science doesn’t work in the games that matter most, the people who play them are given one more excuse to revert to barbarism. The game is structured, psychologically (though not financially), as a winner-take-all affair. There isn’t much place for the notion that a team that falls short of the World Series has had a great season. At the end of what was now widely viewed as a failed season, all Paul DePodesta could say was, “I hope they continue to believe that our way doesn’t work. It buys us a few more years.”
* * *
Billy Beane had been surprisingly calm throughout his team’s play-off debacle. Before the second game against the Twins, when I’d asked him why he seemed so detached—why he wasn’t walking around the parking lot with his white box—he said, “My shit doesn’t work in the play-offs. My job is to get us to the play-offs. What happens after that is fucking luck.” It was Paul who took a bat to the chair in the video room, late at night after the fifth game, after everyone else had gone home for good. Billy’s attitude seemed to be, all that management can produce is a team good enough to triumph in a long season. There are no secret recipes for the postseason, except maybe having three great starting pitchers, and he had that.
His objective spirit survived his team’s defeat a week. The fact that his team had lost to the clearly inferior Minnesota Twins festered. He never said it, but it was nonetheless evident that he couldn’t quite believe how little appreciation there was for what he’d done. Even his owner, who was getting multiples more for his money than any owner in baseball, complained. The public reaction to the thing ate at Billy. In these situations, when his mind was disturbed, he often went looking to make a trade. But there was no player on whom his mind naturally fixed; the only person in the organization whose riddance would make him happier was his manager, Art Howe. It wasn’t long before he had a novel idea: trade Art.
It took him about a week to do it. He called New York Mets GM Steve Phillips and told him that Art was a superb manager but his latest one-year contract called for a big raise, and Oakland couldn’t really afford to pay it. Phillips had just fired his own manager, Bobby Valentine, and was in a bit of a fix. Billy had thought he might even get a player from the Mets for Art but in the end settled on moving Art’s salary. Art signed a five-year deal for $2 million a year to manage the New York Mets. In Art’s place Billy installed Ken Macha, the A’s bench coach.
That made him feel better for a bit. Then it didn’t. He had the feeling he’d come to the end of some line. Here they had run this low-budget franchise as efficiently as a low-budget franchise could be run and no one had even noticed. No one cared if you found radically better ways to run a big league baseball team. All anyone cared about was how you fared in the postseason crapshoot. For his work he’d been paid about as well as a third-year relief pitcher, and Paul had been paid less than the major league minimum. Billy was worth, easily, more than any player; his services were more dramatically undervalued than those of any player he’d ever acquired. He could see only one way to exploit this grotesque market inefficiency: trade himself.
His timing was about perfect. The market for Billy Beane’s services was changing rapidly. What appeared to be a new trend had started a year ago, in Toronto. Rogers Communications, the Blue Jays’ new owner, had made it clear that the team, which had been losing more money than any in baseball, had to be self-sustaining. After the 2001 season the Blue jays’ new CEO Paul Godfrey, formerly the metro chairman of Toronto (i.e., mayor) and a man with no baseball experience, set out to run the business along rational lines. He started by firing his general manager. He then piled up on his desk the media guides for the other twenty-nine teams in baseball, and went looking for a replacement. He called just about everyone in baseball, and interviewed most of them. Buck Showalter, who had run the Diamondbacks and was now a TV announcer. Dave Dombrowski, who ran the Detroit Tigers. Pat Gillick, who had been the Blue Jays’ GM during the glory years and was now the GM of the Seattle Mariners. Doug Melvin, who just had been fired by the Rangers. John Hart, the GM of the Cleveland Indians, who would wind up replacing Melvin at the Rangers. “They all said the same thing to me,” says Godfrey. “It always came back to: give me the bucks to compete with the Yankees and I’ll do it. They didn’t understand what I was even talking about when I said I wanted someone who had a strategy going forward. I didn’t want a guy who said, ‘Give me a hundred fifty million bucks and I’ll give you a winner.’”
In all of baseball Godfrey found one exception to the general money madness: Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s. He concluded that the A’s were playing a different game than everyone else. He decided that, whatever game they were playing, he wanted to play it too. He assumed that Billy Beane, who had a long-term contract in Oakland, was off-limits. So he’d offered the Blue jays’ top job to Paul DePodesta—but Paul didn’t want it. And so Godfrey went back into the Oakland A’s media guide and found the picture of the guy under DePodesta. His name was J. P. Ricciardi, the A’s director of player development. J.P. flew to Toronto for the interview—and had the job in about five minutes. “He had a reason for everything,” said Godfrey. “Of all the people I’d talked to, J.P. was the only one with a business plan and the only one who told me, ‘You are spending too much money.’ He basically went through the lineup and said, ‘These people are all replaceable by people you’ve never heard of.’ And I said, ‘You sure?’ And he said, ‘Look, if you can stand the heat in the media, I can make you cheaper and better. It’ll take a couple of months to make you cheaper and a couple of years to make you better. But you’ll be a lot better.’”
The first thing J. P. Ricciardi did after he took the job was hire Keith Law, a twenty-eight-year-old Harvard graduate who had never played baseball, but who wrote lots of interesting articles about it for baseballprospectus.com. That was partly Billy’s idea. Billy had told J.P. that, in order to find the fool at the poker table, “you need your Paul.” The second thing J.P. did was fire twenty-five Blue jays scouts. Then, over the next few months, he proceeded to get rid of just about every highly paid, established big league player and replace them with minor leaguers no one had ever heard of. By the end of the 2002 season J.P. had taken to watching every Blue jays game with Keith Law. By then he could turn to his pet sabermetrician in the middle of a game and gleefully shout, “Rain Man, we got a $1.8 million team out there on the field right now!”
That superior management armed with science could be had so cheaply was easily the greatest inefficiency in all of baseball, and the owner with the keenest sense of markets, and their follies, saw this. John Henry had just purchased the Boston Red Sox, and he was looking to overhaul his franchise in the image of the Oakland A’s.
In late October he hired Bill James as “Senior Consultant, Baseball Operations.” (“I don’t understand how it took so long for somebody to hire this guy,” Henry said.) Just to be sure, he also hired Voros McCracken as a special adviser on pitching. Then he went looking for someone to run the show.
Only one guy had ever actually proved he could impose reason on a big league clubhouse, and that guy, two weeks after his team had been bounced from the play-offs, was now dissatisfied with his job. One thing led to another, and before long Billy Beane had agreed to run the Boston Red Sox. He would be guaranteed $12.5 million over five years, the most anyone had ever been paid to run a baseball team. Billy hadn’t yet signed the contract, but that was just a formality. He had already persuaded his owner to let him out of his contract, and started to overhaul the Red Sox. In his mind’s eye he had traded Red Sox third baseman Shea Hillenbrand to some team that didn’t understand that a .293 batting average was a blow to the offense when it came attached to a .330 on-base percentage. He’d signed Edgardo Alfonzo to play second base, and Bill Mueller to play third. Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek was gone and White Sox backup Mark Johnson was in his place. Manny Ramirez’s glove was requisitioned by general management, and the slugger would spend the rest of his Red Sox career as a designated hitter. All in his mind’s eye.
Moneyball Page 29
