Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  “We knew he had breakout potential,” says Epstein. “He was a guy that brought more than just raw power—he used the whole field, he seemed to be closing up some of his holes, just knew how to hit. You put that all together in a ballpark that will reward those tendencies, and yeah, there was always the possibility that he’d become a star.” Still, not long before the Sox signed Ortiz they had inked former Yankees pitcher Ramiro Mendoza to a two-year deal worth $6.5 million and, as Bill James notes, “We weren’t any more excited about the one than we were about the other.”

  While Epstein was pleased with his first offseason’s acquisitions, Boston’s writers were not impressed.* The Globe compared the Ortiz signing to the equivalent of “shopping at Wal-Mart” instead of spending the big bucks for luxury goods. The paper noted disapprovingly that Ortiz, Giambi, Walker, and Mueller would make only $8.8 million in combined salary in 2003, “probably less than what the Sox would have had to pay Cliff Floyd” had he accepted arbitration. (Floyd signed a four-year, $26 million contract with the New York Mets in the offseason.) And Ortiz, the Globe noted, had “uncannily” similar career numbers to the recently departed and still popular Brian Daubach, who was, the Globe made a point of noting, newly engaged and unemployed. The Herald highlighted the fact that while Ortiz referenced fellow lefty Mo Vaughn when asked about hitting in Boston, Ortiz’s Fenway average was just .212. One rabble-rousing Red Sox fansite ran a headline on the day of Ortiz’s signing that read, “Frustration Nation: Many Sox fans disgruntled about hot stove* turning to cold shoulder, big names turn to small moves.”

  Even with Ortiz on board, the Red Sox weren’t quite done. By mid-February, the Kevin Millar saga had worked itself out, as the Dragons agreed to release Millar back to the Marlins, who then sold him to the Sox for $1.5 million, $300,000 of which the Marlins donated to charity. Millar soon signed a two-year, $5.3 million deal, with a $3.5 million option for a third year, which vested after a certain number of plate appearances.

  As spring training began, the Red Sox brass found they needed to answer for Epstein’s financial calculations. For the first time in memory, the team’s payroll had significantly decreased, from around $110 million in 2002 to just under $100 million in 2003. That was still the sixth highest payroll in baseball, behind only the Yankees, Mets, Atlanta Braves, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Texas Rangers. Nevertheless, John Henry was forced once again to assure the locals that yes, he did have enough money to keep on running the team, and that the smaller payroll did not signify any less of a dedication to winning. Henry explained that rather than make a big flashy trade that would appease the fans—at one point in spring training, there was a proposed deal that would have sent pitcher Casey Fossum to Montreal for All-Star Bartolo Colon—Epstein and the Sox were committed to making moves that made the most sense for the long term. It’s true that Epstein was told to cut payroll; the team hadn’t made the playoffs in three years and revenues were stagnant. Just as important, Epstein believed he could assemble a winning team at that payroll level.

  For many general managers, simply following this type of careful plan would have been enough of an achievement for their first offseason. Epstein, though, also vowed to transform the way the team used its staff of relief pitchers. Building on Bill James’s much-discussed “bullpen ace” model, Epstein announced that, in 2003, the Red Sox would not use a traditional closer (a highly paid, highly specialized pitcher brought in to record the final outs of a win when the lead was three runs or less), but would match up the team’s bullpen pitchers with the situations they were most equipped to handle.

  Under James’s model, this means that the “closer”—generally the best pitcher in the bullpen—is called on to pitch in the most crucial situations, whether those come in the seventh inning of a tie game with the opposing team’s best hitter at the plate or in the ninth inning of a one-run game with two men on and nobody out. The rest of the bullpen pitchers are used situationally—left-handed pitchers can take advantage of left-handed batters, say, or a curveball pitcher can be used to neutralize a fastball hitter. The logic of this approach is stunningly simple: If one of your less-than-great pitchers has blown the game in the seventh inning, there will be no victory to close out in the ninth. Such logic is rarely used, however, both because baseball players and managers are creatures of habit and because closers have come to love the “save” statistic they receive when they’re on the mound at the end of a victory.* There are no glamour statistics for keeping a game tied in the seventh inning, no matter how tough the batters you’re facing.

  Epstein thought the approach could work with the 2003 Red Sox. He had offered a deal to the team’s 40-save closer, Ugueth Urbina, but Urbina had turned it down. For only a little more than it would have cost to retain Urbina, Epstein picked up a trio of pitchers, all of whom he thought had the potential to emerge as stars. Along with Ramiro Mendoza, he signed veteran right-hander Mike Timlin, who had worked as a closer with Toronto, Seattle, and Baltimore, to a one-year, $1.85 million contract, and inked Chad Fox, who had been injured for most of 2002, to a $500,000 deal that could be worth as much as $2.3 million with incentives. Epstein and the Red Sox were most optimistic about Mendoza, who, in his seven seasons with the Yankees, had proven himself to be a versatile and dependable pitcher who could start, pitch in long relief, or even close games.

  Even before the season began, Epstein’s bullpen strategy was drawing scrutiny. In March, he explained his approach to Sports Illustrated. “The fact that we don’t have a high-profile, proven, late-inning relief pitcher is probably a financial decision,” Epstein said. “Using our best relievers to get the most critical outs, that’s purely philosophical. We could have had closer X, but we would still be committed to using him in the seventh inning on a given day if it was appropriate.” Epstein went on to say he thought the new approach would actually be good for morale. “Whatever you might lose intangibly, you gain from a sense of unity and cohesion in the bullpen,” he said. “By forgoing conventional roles and individual stats and replacing them with the common goal of getting the last out and getting a win—not a save or a hold but a win—I think that builds a certain esprit de corps in the bullpen.”

  The biggest flaw in this plan was the fact that, without a bullpen ace, there was no clear stopper to rely on in those crucial situations. Just as important, the Sox manager, Grady Little, was not capable of dealing with this degree of flexibility and creativity. Little was a genial, soothing man who unquestionably helped the team relax in 2002. But it frequently seemed as if the game moved too quickly for him, and he often appeared frozen when faced with the inning-to-inning challenges of a given game.

  *Secondary average measures a hitter’s ability to produce bases independent of batting average. Where batting average is a ratio of hits to at-bats, secondary average is a ratio of bases achieved in other ways to at-bats. It is achieved by taking a player’s total number of bases, subtracting his number of hits, adding his walks and his stolen bases, and subtracting the number of times he was caught stealing and then dividing that number by at-bats. (Or: Sec=(TB-H+BB+SB-CS)/AB.) While secondary averages vary more widely than batting averages, the league average is usually similar, somewhere between .250 and .280. A player with a secondary average that is considerably higher than his batting average may be a player who is undervalued or who has a high likelihood of breaking out.

  *The North Andover Eagle-Tribune’s John Tomase did note at the time that while the Yankees “pumped $50 million into the global economy,” the Red Sox, “relying on some obscure stat known as ‘on base percentage,’ signed a bunch of no-names…. [H]igh profile signings and high impact signings are two different things. One looks good before the season. The other looks good after it.”

  *The baseball offseason is commonly known as the “hot stove” season, a reference to fans gathering around a stove during the cold winter months to discuss their favorite team’s plans and prospects for the upcoming year.

  *A pitcher ea
rns a save when he satisfies three conditions: 1) He is the last pitcher on the mound in a game won by his team. 2) He is not the winning pitcher (for instance, a starting pitcher who pitches a complete game does not earn a save). 3) He fulfills one of the following: a) he enters the game with his team leading by three runs or fewer and pitches at least one full inning; b) he comes into the game with the tying run either on base, at bat, or on deck; c) he pitches at least three “effective” innings. So, to give some quick examples, a pitcher who pitches the entire ninth inning with his team leading 6–3 would earn a save, because he pitched a full inning with his team leading by three runs or less. A pitcher who came in with his team leading 8–3 with one out and the bases loaded would also get a save, because he came in with the potential tying run on deck. Finally, a pitcher who pitches the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings of a game in which he preserves his team’s 10–3 lead would also earn a save, because he pitched three effective innings. The use of the term “save” as a baseball statistic did not begin until 1969.

  Chapter 21

  Kim and the Committee

  THE RED SOX BEGAN THE 2003 SEASON hundreds of miles away from their Fenway home, in Tampa’s Tropicana Field, a domed stadium that housed the moribund Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The first inning of Opening Day seemed as though it could serve as a microcosm for the two teams. In the top of the first, the Sox scored three runs on two Tampa Bay errors, a pair of singles by Nomar Garciaparra and Kevin Millar, and a two-run double by Shea Hillenbrand. In the bottom of the inning, Pedro Martinez retired the Devil Rays in order, with a strikeout sandwiched between a pair of groundouts. For most of the game, that was as exciting as it got. The Red Sox scored again in the fifth, and Tampa scratched out an unearned run off Martinez in the seventh. After finishing that inning, Martinez’s night was complete, and he seemed to be in prime form. He’d thrown 91 pitches, striking out six while allowing only three hits. Ramiro Mendoza came on in relief to retire the Devil Rays in order in the eighth, and Boston was three outs away from its first victory of the season. With a three-run lead against a team that had finished in last place every year of its existence, this was the perfect opportunity to test the Red Sox’s closer-by-committee approach in a low-stress situation.

  With three left-handed batters coming up to the plate, lefty Alan Embree was the first pitcher summoned out of the Boston bullpen in the ninth. Embree, a former member of the Padres, had been picked up by the Red Sox on June 26, 2002, four days after he struck out seven of ten Yankees, including the last six in a row, in a game in San Diego. For the remainder of the 2002 season, he had thrown well, pitching in 32 games for Boston with a 2.97 ERA. Epstein was hoping that, in 2003, he’d become one of the linchpins of the Red Sox bullpen.

  Embree gave up a single to Travis Lee, the first batter he faced, prompting Tampa manager Lou Pinella to send up the right-handed Terry Shumpert to pinch-hit for the Devil Rays lefty designated hitter, Al Martin. Shumpert, in his 13-year major league career, had only 47 home runs and had batted .235 in 2002. Before the game, the Red Sox advance scouting team had prepared a report on Tampa Bay for Grady Little. With regards to Shumpert, the instructions were clear: Shumpert was all but useless at the plate so long as you don’t, under any circumstances, throw him an inside fastball. Embree soon demonstrated that Little had either never read the report or never shared the information with his pitching staff, and Shumpert hit one of Embree’s inside fastballs for his 48th home run (and the second to last of his career) to bring the Devil Rays to within a run.* After Embree gave up another single, this one to right fielder Ben Grieve, Little summoned Chad Fox to the mound.

  Fox struck out the first batter he faced. With one out and a man on first base, he induced a bouncer up the middle that looked like it would result in a routine, game-ending double play. After stepping on second base for the force out, however, Nomar Garciaparra fumbled the ball as he prepared to throw to first, leaving a man on with two out and the Red Sox clinging to a 4–3 lead. After a seemingly rattled Fox walked pinch-hitter Marlon Anderson, Carl Crawford, the Devil Rays leadoff batter, came to the plate.

  Crawford fouled off four straight pitches, putting him in an 0-2 hole. Fox’s fifth pitch was high, bringing the count to 1-2. His next pitch was low and inside, exactly where he wanted it, but Crawford got his bat around on the ball, golfing it in to the right-field stands for a game-winning, three-run homer.

  It was a tough loss, but it didn’t predict anything one way or another about the Sox’s bullpen plan. Save for Garciaparra’s bobble, Chad Fox would have been out of the inning, and the pitch Crawford hit to end the game was an excellent one. Still, the reaction in Boston was swift and harsh. After a grand total of one game, the Herald’s Jeff Horrigan dubbed the Red Sox bullpen experiment “loser[s] by committee.” The Globe said the opening night loss had given “rise to the darkest fears of the scheme’s architects” and reported that a 73-year-old woman had been prompted to call the paper for the first time in her life. She relayed this message: “I’m so disgusted. What’s with this closer by committee?” Dan Shaughnessy wanted to “start with a memo to Bill James: Perhaps the seventh inning is not the most important inning to hold a lead.” After an offseason “spent reinventing baseball,” Shaughnessy wrote, “young Theo saw it all implode in the hideous confines of Tropicana Field.”

  The bullpen brouhaha was just one of the distractions that would occupy the team during the first half of the season. In April, soon after his $17.5 million contract extension for the 2004 season was exercised, Martinez seemed to falter, sparking a round of hand-wringing and second-guessing. When the team’s relievers continued to struggle, the closer-by-committee experiment was more or less discarded, as Grady Little announced that Brandon Lyon and Chad Fox would, until further notice, serve as the Red Sox closers. And in late May, after Martinez landed on the disabled list with a strained muscle in his back, Epstein succeeded in swapping an increasingly bitter Hillenbrand for some pitching help, trading him to the Arizona Diamondbacks for a 24-year-old Korean pitcher, Byung-Hyun Kim.

  In 2002, Kim had been an All-Star closer for the Diamondbacks, going 8-3 with 36 saves and a 2.04 ERA. He finished the season particularly strong, with a 1.05 ERA over his final 22 games. In 2003, with Arizona’s starting pitching in shambles, the Diamondbacks were transitioning Kim to a starter’s role, and while he’d gone only 1-5 in the season’s first two months, he’d done so with a respectable 3.56 ERA.

  Normally, the acquisition of a young, hard-throwing pitcher who has shown an ability to both start and close games would be cause for celebration. But Kim was best known in baseball for being the man who served up home runs on successive nights in the 2001 World Series when the Diamondbacks blew consecutive late-game leads against the Yankees. The image of the slight, shell-shocked pitcher crouching on the mound in disbelief was burned into many baseball fans’ memories. Kim, on the basis of those two games, was labeled a pitcher who choked under pressure.

  As is often the case in baseball, the reality looked quite different if one took the time to examine it a little more closely. In Game 4 of the 2001 Series, Kim was brought into the game in the eighth inning with the Diamondbacks leading, 3–1. He struck out all three Yankees batters he faced that inning, then, with one on and two out in the ninth, gave up a game-tying home run to the left-handed Tino Martinez.

  It’s certainly true that a team’s closer is not supposed to give up a game-tying home run in a World Series game. It’s also true that, on occasion, these things happen: Baseball, as has often been pointed out, is a game built around failure, and Kim didn’t have nearly the success against lefties that he had against righties. At that point, the game was still tied, and as long as the Diamondbacks held the line, they’d have an opportunity to come back.

  They almost didn’t get the chance. A walk and a single put men on first and second. With the sold-out Yankee Stadium erupting into a frenzy, Kim, facing the most pressure he’d been confronted with in his career, struc
k out Shane Spencer to end the inning.

  By this point, it was obvious to virtually everyone watching the game that the 22-year-old, 5-foot-11-inch, 170-pound Kim was physically spent. Inexplicably, in a move that wouldn’t have been out of place in the Red Sox’s history, Diamondbacks manager Bob Brenly sent Kim out again in the bottom of the 10th inning. After retiring the first two batters he faced, Kim gave up the game-ending home run to Derek Jeter.

  The next night, heading into the bottom of the ninth inning, the Diamondbacks again had a two-run lead. Brenly, once again, summoned Kim to the mound, despite the fact that Kim had thrown more pitches—63—the previous night than ever before in his major league career. This time, Kim’s struggles were more predictable, and he gave up a two-run home run to Scott Brosius to tie the game, which the Yankees went on to win.

  In the aftermath of the Diamondbacks’ back-to-back losses, few thought to consider Kim’s exhaustion. While commentators, writers, and fans alike wondered why Brenly had allowed Kim to return to the mound in the 10th inning of Game 4 or to come in at all in Game 5, they laid most of the blame upon Kim instead of Brenly, who had asked an obviously depleted pitcher to keep throwing the ball.