by Seth Mnookin
That night, a ticketed event was held to benefit The Jimmy Fund, a Boston-based juvenile cancer charity in which Williams had been active. After a Marine sang the national anthem, the large American flag was lowered, revealing three banners that read, THE GREATEST RED SOX PLAYER OF THEM ALL, AN AMERICAN PATRIOT, and A PIONEER IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE JIMMY FUND. John Henry and Tom Werner announced that the exclusive, glassed-in luxury seating area behind home plate, which had been called the 600 Club (for the number of seats located there), was being rechristened the .406 Club in honor of Williams. Finally, a collection of past and present Red Sox players took the field, including Dom DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, Dwight Evans, Jim Rice, Luis Tiant, Jim Lonborg, Jason Varitek, Tim Wakefield, Johnny Damon, and Nomar Garciaparra. With the players assembled, former Red Sox broadcaster Curt Gowdy re-enacted his call of the Williams’s home run in his final at-bat. That night, twice as many people—20,500 fans—heard Gowdy re-enact Williams’s last at-bat as had been in Fenway to witness the actual event.
These were thrilling days for the Sox’s new management. “When we got [to Boston], people kept telling us what we couldn’t do,” says Steinberg. “That whole first year, there was a continual sense that we were crazy for proposing ways to bring fans into more intimate contact with Fenway. Father’s Day? No way, we were told. The Williams tribute? Won’t happen. But I knew that we could make these things happen and that they were important, both for the fans and to establish ourselves in the community.”
Steinberg’s approach wasn’t just evidenced in large-scale efforts, either. His staff hired Fenway ambassadors to answer fan letters and welcome people to the park.* In Steinberg’s office, there are thick, three-ring binders full of special requests: from the sick veteran who always wanted to walk on Fenway’s lawn, or the eight-year-old girl who broke her arm and wants her cast signed by a player. On almost every one, Steinberg scribbles, “Can we do something about this?” or “Let’s make this happen” and then hands it off to one of his employees to take care of.
Less than six months into his stewardship of the team, Larry Lucchino had begun recrafting Boston’s relationship with the Red Sox. The fact that the Sox of old had taken their fans for granted had almost been part of the identity of the team, and it seemed to add to the Calvinistic faith required to be a true believer. Other stadiums might have clean toilets and friendly ushers, but Red Sox fans were tougher than that. Urinal troughs and surly ticket takers would do just fine.
Now, Lucchino’s acolytes were working to show Boston fans that they were an important and valued part of the Red Sox experience. “[In San Diego] we had this anti-arrogance campaign,” says Mike Dee. “We’d return every phone call, answer every letter. We needed to do that there because we were trying to fill a 60,000 person stadium in a region without a lot of baseball history. Those experiences really helped us [in Boston].” With Dee and Sam Kennedy drumming up corporate sponsors and Steinberg creating a warm, feel-good aura around the team, the Red Sox made more strides in the first six months of John Henry and Tom Werner’s ownership than they’d made in the previous decade. By expanding the pregame and postgame shows on NESN, Werner had even made the experience of watching the team on television more inviting—and profitable.
Unfortunately, as the season progressed, the team’s performance on the field did not continue to mirror the new front office’s accomplishments. After Ramirez fractured his pinkie finger sliding headfirst into home plate in May, he began what would become the annual Manny soap opera in Boston. Instead of recovering with the team, Ramirez chose to rehab in Florida; initially, the team’s trainers were worried he wouldn’t even get the finger set. When he joined up with the Red Sox’s Triple-A affiliate for some tuneup games before coming back to the big-league club, Ramirez made headlines when he dove headfirst into third base, a play in which the slugging left fielder not only risked further injury to his finger but managed to lose a large diamond earring worth $15,000. (“Don’t worry about it,” Ramirez said when asked later if the earring had ever been found. “I’ve got money. I can buy another one.”)
Still, when Ramirez returned to the team late in June, he picked up where he had left off, proving once again that he was the most dangerous kind of batter: one who could hit for both average and power. (He’d ultimately win the 2002 batting title with a .349 average, and was ninth in the league with 33 home runs despite missing more than a quarter of the season’s games.) All the while, Ramirez kept on making news for reasons other than his on-field prowess. On September 9 in Tampa Bay, with the Red Sox’s slim playoff hopes slipping away, Ramirez failed to run out a routine grounder. Larry Lucchino got used to answering publicly for his churlish superstar.
Ramirez wasn’t the only Red Sox star who made it into the local papers for reasons other than his athletic ability. With two more full years remaining on his contract, Nomar Garciaparra began complaining to, and about, the press. In early September, he hinted that the Sox front office was hiding the truth from the team’s fans about contract negotiations. (Garciaparra was signed through the 2004 season.) “Fans are going to miss a lot of good guys,” Garciaparra said ominously. “I’ve said that all along. You like wearing a guy’s T-shirt with his name on it—maybe he won’t be here next year.” On Friday, September 13, in a game in which Garciaparra’s soccer-star girlfriend, Mia Hamm, threw out the first pitch at Fenway, the Red Sox lost 8–3 to the Baltimore Orioles. The team’s playoff hopes all but ended that day. Garciaparra had been caught leading off of second base during the game, and afterward he blamed third base coach Mike Cubbage for not warning him of the opposing pitcher’s pick-off move. When asked why the Red Sox seemed to have so much more success on the road than at home, he snorted sarcastically. “It’s a good place to play, right?” he asked. “A lot of positive vibes around here. It’s great.” The next day, he complained about how “fucking reporters” keep on “mak[ing] shit up.”
Pedro Martinez, meanwhile, who was paid $14 million in 2002 and due to make $15.5 million in 2003, said he felt disrespected by the fact that the club hadn’t picked up his $17.5 million club option for 2004. If the Red Sox didn’t act by the time the 2003 season started, Martinez said, he’d assume his career with the club was over. “It’s bye-bye once the year starts,” he told reporters. “I’m gone. I’m just going to pitch. I won’t wait until the All-Star break to talk to them.”
As Ramirez, Garciaparra, and Martinez moped and griped about their respective lots,* the Red Sox were the very definition of average for the season’s final two-thirds. From June 6, a day on which the Red Sox were in first place with a 40-17 record, through the end of the season, Boston only managed a 53-52 record. The Yankees, meanwhile, went 65-36 over that same span, and finished 2002 a full 10.5 games ahead of the Red Sox. For the third year in a row, Boston would not see any baseball in October.
Still, John Henry, Tom Werner, and Larry Lucchino had reason to look back at their first season as stewards of the Red Sox with a fair amount of satisfaction. The club had reached 93 wins for only the second time since the World Series–bound 1986 team won 95 regular season games. There was some only-in-Boston drama, to be sure, but the new owners had gotten high marks virtually across the board, and were lauded for their fan outreach, their respectful dealings with the media, and their charitable involvement with Boston. They had begun to increase revenue, and felt confident there were many more ways they could do so in the future. Despite the testy relationship they had with some of the team’s superstars, many of the other players had also grown to appreciate the new owners, who’d instituted regular round-robin meetings in which the players could air their concerns. Henry, Werner, and Lucchino seemed to have done the impossible and transformed the Red Sox into a model organization, with a front office that received adulatory praise from the press and public alike.
They’d even managed to make the Fenway experience a calmer, friendlier one. For years—decades, even—the prevailing wisdom was that there wasn’t anythi
ng that could be done about the bottlenecks that formed as fans were rushed through the park’s turnstiles, or the interminable lines for the bathrooms. The park, after all, was what it was, and there wasn’t a way to create more entrances or add more facilities if there wasn’t any space. The new ownership solved this conundrum by expanding the perimeter of the park so that it included Yawkey Way, the street that bordered Fenway’s main entrances. The street was shut off to non-ticket holders several hours before each game, turning Yawkey Way into a virtual extension of the park’s cramped concourses. Food stands and entertainment were set up along the street, which was open throughout the game. Before the start of the next season, more bathrooms were added. Even old hand Luis Tiant got in the act with El Tiante’s, which sold Cuban food. Now, with Grady Little having at least partially succeeded in calming down what had been a tension-filled clubhouse, the organization set about reworking its baseball operations crew.
About six months before Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball would popularize a statistics-reliant, objective method of evaluating players and searching out market inefficiencies as a way to build a competitive team, Henry was already deeply committed to staffing the Red Sox front office with executives who felt comfortable with, and were committed to, combining traditional scouting with sophisticated number-crunching. Henry, with his almost religious belief in the ability of intelligently analyzed historical data to trump hunch-based suppositions, was an early believer in the use of statistics as a way to evaluate baseball players.* Since Henry and Werner had purchased the team, baseball stat geeks had been eagerly waiting for the Red Sox to implement some of the more creative analytical tools available to baseball aficionados. In November 2002, the Boston Red Sox showed just how serious they were about integrating cutting-edge baseball analysis by hiring Bill James, one of the sport’s sharpest thinkers.
*These were the rows of seats Henry had added after the dispute with Harrington over how many of the team’s old partners would be able to hold onto their season tickets.
*Dan Duquette argues that the new owners’ success with fans was a result of the work he and Harrington had done. “They inherited the team at a time when we had a mature farm system, an excellent major league roster, and fans coming to the ballpark every single night,” he says. “They had everything, and it came together for them right when they took over the club. Those things don’t just happen.”
*In November 2005, Urbina was arrested in Venezuela, his native country, and charged with attempted murder for leading an attack on five of his domestic workers. The workers were attacked with machetes and doused with gasoline in an effort to light them on fire. Urbina was reportedly upset that the workers were using his swimming pool without permission.
*When Steinberg first arrived at Fenway, he found bags of unopened fan mail in the halls.
*Combined, Garciaparra, Martinez, and Ramirez made $38.5 million in 2002. That year, the entire 25-player Florida Marlins payroll was $42 million; the San Diego Padres payroll was $41.4 million.
*For almost thirty years, from 1970 until the late 1990s, Henry was a devotee of APBA, a baseball game in which players draft a team that then plays a full season’s worth of simulated games. Henry and Kevin Koshi, a trader at Henry’s company, so dominated the competition that the two men held a dispersal draft of their players. APBA dates to the 1930s, when it was founded in Pennsylvania. The game combines dice rolls with actual on-field performances of individual players.
Chapter 17
Enter Bill James
THERE ARE, TO BE SURE , many reasons why baseball has such an intense hold on the American imagination. The game is unique in the way it seems almost to mirror the randomness and fundamental unfairness of life itself. A beautifully hit ball can happen to land directly in an outfielder’s glove, while a lame excuse of a dribbler can snake its way through the infield grass and result in a base hit. Unlike virtually every other popular American sport (golf being the obvious exception), the dimensions of each playing field in baseball are distinct. Like many other work environments, baseball players are dependent on their teammates for overall success but hold their individual fate almost entirely in their own hands. What’s more, baseball players, with their swooping potbellies and scrawny chicken legs, physically resemble the rest of the country more than, say, the 7-foot-tall giants of the National Basketball Association or the 350-pound behemoths of the National Football League.
Aside from its on-field poetry and the opportunities it holds for fans to identify with players, another fundamental reason for baseball’s vast appeal is its promise of being a riddle whose answer lies, tantalizingly, just out of reach. The game has always provided fans with a vast amount of information. Unlike almost every other team sport, baseball primarily consists of a discreet series of interactions between two individual combatants. The pitcher throws the ball and the batter tries to hit it. The batter hits the ball and the defense tries to field it. The fielder throws the ball and one of his teammates tries to catch it. Unlike basketball, football, and hockey, in which offensive players help to clear a path for the teammate with the ball (or puck), baseball players are usually on their own. There are no defensive blocks or offensive assists in baseball. Because of this, baseball seems as if it should be totally quantifiable, with everything from batting average to the number of pitches a hitter sees per at-bat available to those who are curious enough to go looking. For decades, baseball statistics have been collected and endlessly discussed, from kids swapping baseball cards to adults who go to the game with copies of the previous day’s box score in hand.
The very scope of this information seems to present a paradox: If everything in baseball is quantifiable, why isn’t it easier to predict what will happen on the field? Part of the answer lies in the vagaries of real life. Players get injured, or they slump, or they are caught cheating on their wives and sink into season-long depressions. But another part of the answer lies in the fact that, for most of the game’s existence, the information being analyzed was usually the wrong information, and the way it was used was incorrect as well.
In the 1970s, some fans and observers joined forces to find more aggressive ways of distinguishing between more and less valuable types of data. For instance, at first blush, a pitcher’s win-loss record would seem to be a good indication of his skill relative to other pitchers; the point of baseball, after all, is to win games, and surely a pitcher with a good winning percentage is more valuable to his team than one with a poor winning percentage. On further examination, however, this line of logic becomes problematic. A pitcher who loses a string of 1–0 games is probably a much more skilled pitcher than one who wins a bunch of 8–7 games. A pitcher’s winning percentage, therefore, is not as good an indicator of his actual abilities as are any number of other statistics. Even a pitcher’s earned run average can be misleading, because many pitchers have little control over whether a ball, once hit, will be a base hit or an out. Most of the time, two of the most crucial statistics for pitchers are the number of strikeouts he racks up—those batters can’t reach base—and how many total base runners he allows per nine innings.
Similarly, two statistics—batting average and the number of hits a batter gets during the course of a season—were long thought to be reliable indicators of that player’s offensive prowess. In fact, batting average is of relatively minor importance compared to on base percentage: When a player is at the plate, his primary purpose is not to get a hit, but rather not to make an out—baseball is, after all, essentially nine distinct struggles to score runs before your team makes three outs. On base percentage, a ratio signifying the number of times a player comes to the plate and does not make an out, measures this much more precisely than batting average does. (Batting average does not take into account when players reach base due to walks. For most of baseball’s history, walks were thought to be the result of poor pitching rather than discerning hitting; in fact, they usually reflect some of both.) In this same vein, a player’s tota
l number of accumulated bases is more important than his total number of hits—the only way to score, after all, is to move one player along four successive bases, from first to home.*
It was partially to discuss and examine these types of statistics that, on August 10, 1971, the Society for American Baseball Research (known colloquially as SABR, an acronym that is pronounced like the word for a sword with a slightly curved blade) was founded. One early SABR devotee was Bill James, a lifelong baseball fanatic who was, at the time, working the overnight shift in the boiler room of a Lawrence, Kansas, pork-and-beans cannery. James coined the word sabermetrics, a general term that refers to the use of statistics in the quest for truly objective knowledge about baseball.
James was born in 1949 in Mayetta, Kansas. He didn’t become a baseball fan until age 12, but when he did, he began devouring everything he could read about the sport. Unlike many fans, who are basically passive observers, James found he had a hunger to truly understand the game he so loved.
This tendency was apparent by the time James was barely a teenager. Sometime in the early 1960s, he picked up a copy of Sport magazine from 1958, which had an article describing how a 25-year-old Chicago Cubs player named Lee Walls had discovered weightlifting in the offseason, which led to what seemed to be a breakout year. In 1957, Walls was a .237 hitter with 6 home runs and 33 RBIs; in 1958, he hit .304 with 24 homers and 72 RBIs. By the time James read the article, Walls had regressed to being the same player he’d been previously: a .250 hitter with not a lot of power.
“That fascinated me,” James says. “I puzzled a long time on why this had happened.” James, still too young to shave, eventually developed a sort of Gestalt theory of athletic progress. Highly successful players, James thought, had to be supported by “scaffolding” that was, out of necessity, built up gradually over time. It wasn’t just skill that accounted for the difference between a platoon player and a superstar: It was also self-confidence, an external support system, and proper development. “The weightlifting winter had projected Walls up to a level that the whole picture of the man would not sustain,” James says. A few years later, James’s theory was confirmed for him when another Cubs player, a pitcher named Bill Faul, had a midseason hot streak in which he let in just one run over three starts, two of which were complete games. Faul became big news when he began publicly talking about how visits to a hypnotist had helped him relax and throw strikes. James remembers thinking, “This won’t last. He’s not really that good. It will catch up with him.” He was right. Almost immediately, Faul began to struggle; he ended the season with a 6-6 win-loss record and a league average ERA, and only won one game for the rest of his career. This approach to problems became typical of James: Upon hearing of a phenomenon, James looked for evidence that would support or disprove its existence instead of simply assuming it was true.
