Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  Kim’s reputation, combined with his odd workout regimens—he’d obsessively exercise for hours a day, and often stayed up until the early morning hours shadow pitching in front of a mirror to study his mechanics—and the fact that he didn’t speak English meant he had a difficult time penetrating baseball’s fraternity. Baseball players, for all the many millions of dollars they make, still exhibit the crude tribalism found in high-school locker rooms around the country. Kim already had a hard time fitting in, and few came to his defense when he hit a rough patch.

  That made him just the kind of player Epstein was inclined to be interested in: one whose stock was artificially low based on factors that didn’t accurately reflect his on-field performance. Kim’s 2003 salary was $3.25 million. If the exact same pitcher—a hard-throwing right-hander who could either start games or come on in relief and who almost completely suppressed right-handed batters’ power numbers—was on the trading block but was, instead of a sullen Korean, a skinny farm boy from Texas who threw overhand instead of sidearm, he’d have been one of the most sought-after players in baseball. As it was, the Red Sox were able to pick him up for what was essentially a redundant player on their roster.

  Kim fit almost perfectly with the Sox’s plans. He began as a replacement starter for the injured Martinez. In July, he was moved into the bullpen, taking over as the team’s closer and anchoring the team’s relievers for the rest of the season. “I didn’t do a good job of choosing the pitchers before the season started,” Epstein says. “But the whole bullpen thing in 2003—it’s not that we didn’t want a closer. We wanted to use our closer more aggressively, and we also didn’t want to overpay for that closer. We offered [Ugueth] Urbina what we thought was fair, and he didn’t take it. We tried that winter to find a closer, but it was a really bad market. So at that point we figured, maybe one will emerge out of this group. Chad Fox had closed very recently. Timlin might have worked. And if not, well, we’ll have to trade for one.” And that, says Epstein, is exactly what happened. “It worked out, but not without a lot of controversy,” he says. “We got our closer. We got our relief ace. But it took until May, and it took Hillenbrand, who was only available because we signed Bill Mueller to a two-year deal when other teams didn’t seem to want him. We ended up with relatively cheap contracts for Bill Mueller, David Ortiz, [Kevin] Millar, and Kim, which helped us that season and also gave us the flexibility we thought we’d want in that offseason.”

  *One member of the team’s baseball operations staff said of that night, “That’s when I had a feeling Grady wasn’t going to work out.”

  Chapter 22

  “You Want Me to Hit

  Like a Little Bitch?”

  WITH KIM ON BOARD AND HILLENBRAND GONE, the 2003 Red Sox truly began to take shape. Millar quickly became the clubhouse leader and offensive catalyst Epstein was hoping he’d be, hitting timely home runs and helping keep the team’s clubhouse relaxed. “We play a game for a living,” he said that spring, as Martinez’s contract negotiations and health and Garciaparra’s brooding threatened to take center stage. “I think sometimes people lose perspective of that. If I didn’t make a dollar out there on that field, I’d still be out there playing. I love it.” Millar’s attitude was infectious, and in time, the divisive, bitter team that imploded in 2001 seemed a distant memory.

  Certainly, it was easier to relax and have fun while hitting the ball the way the Sox were doing. By midseason, it was clear the 2003 team was an offensive powerhouse on par with baseball’s all-time best. For the month of June, the Red Sox had four of the top 10 batting averages in the league: Garciaparra (.398), Millar (.373), Trot Nixon (.356), and Manny Ramirez (.351). The Sox led all of baseball that month with a teamwide .315 average. Combined with the teamwide .308 average in May, the entire roster had compiled one common benchmark for batting excellence over the course of two full months. In June, the team hit more home runs—42—than in any month since 1998 and scored more runs than in any month since 1961.

  Perhaps most incredibly, they were doing this largely without the offensive firepower of David Ortiz. Ortiz began the year platooning at first base and designated hitter and hit only one home run in April, one more in May, and two in June. Halfway through the season, Ortiz had a total of only four home runs, half as many as Todd Walker, the team’s second baseman.

  Still, the 6-foot-4-inch slugger had already become one of the most popular people in the Red Sox clubhouse. He was, along with Millar, one of the team’s unrepentant cutups. His pendulous swagger and his ribald, needling sense of humor helped shift attention away from the increasingly sulky Garciaparra. When he arrived at the ballpark the afternoon of a game, Ortiz would stride into the Sox clubhouse wearing fluorescent polo shirts and wrap-around sunglasses and shout, to no one in particular, “What up, bitches!”*

  Even before he started playing every day and hitting for power, Ortiz was happier in Boston than he’d been in Minnesota. His six seasons with the Twins had been difficult ones. There had been the injuries, sure—the Minneapolis Metrodome’s artificial turf is punishing on players’ knees—but just as frustrating to Ortiz was the way in which the Twins coaching staff had tried to turn a proud home run hitter into a singles batter who slapped balls over infielders’ heads.

  “When I first came to Minnesota, that’s when I was told, ‘Stay inside the ball…hit the ball the other way,’ ” Ortiz said after coming to Boston. “I was always a power hitter in the minor leagues. Everything changed when I went to Minnesota. Whenever I took a big swing, [the coaching staff would] say to me, ‘Hey, hey, what are you doing?’ ” Ortiz tried to go along with the Twins plan, but he wasn’t happy about it. “I said, ‘You want me to hit like a little bitch, then I will.’ But I knew I could hit for power. It was just a matter of getting the green light.”

  Watching Ortiz, it seems hard to believe any coaching staff had ever asked him to cut down on his monstrous swings. As big and strong as Ortiz’s upper body is, it’s his lower body that is most impressive. As the ball approaches the plate, his back hip remains stationary, while his front hip closes slightly as he cocks his leg to time his swing. Then, using his flattened front foot as an anchor, he whips his bat through the strike zone in a motion one writer describes as “torquing like a motherfucker.” When Ortiz connects squarely, it is an inspiring sight, perhaps to no one more than the slugger himself: Ortiz admires his clouts in a style Todd Walker once compared to “pimpin’.” Ortiz makes no apologies. “If they don’t like it,” he said of opposing pitchers, “don’t let me hit it out.”

  The Red Sox didn’t want to see this power go to waste. During Ortiz’s first at-bat during spring training, he came to the plate with a man on first base. He tried to do what he had been taught in Minnesota: move the runner along to second. When he returned to the Red Sox dugout after his at-bat, Grady Little told him, “Hey, you’ve got to bring that guy in.”

  “OK,” Ortiz replied, a smile breaking out on his expansive face. “I guess I’ve got the green light to swing.”

  With Jeremy Giambi ahead of Ortiz on the Sox’s depth chart and the emergence of Kevin Millar as Boston’s clutch-hitting mascot, Ortiz didn’t get a chance to build up momentum during the season’s first half. In April and May, he rarely played two full games in a row. Even in June, he only played sporadically.

  That pattern was about to change. When Giambi—who, much to everyone’s disappointment, was batting only .173—landed on the disabled list, Ortiz got his chance. He’d soon emerge as one of the game’s premier power hitters, and one of the best clutch performers in all of sports. Even before becoming a starter, he’d shown a penchant for coming up big when the game was on the line: His first home run of the season was a game-winning blast in the 14th inning of an April 27 game against the Anaheim Angels in which Ortiz had been sent in as a pinch-hitter for Giambi.

  By July, Ortiz began to truly show Boston fans what he was capable of. In a July 3 game against the Devil Rays, he hit his fifth home
run of the year. The next day, the Sox began a three-game trip to Yankee Stadium. On Friday, July 4, Ortiz, hitting in the sixth spot behind Kevin Millar, smacked a pair of solo home runs in a lop-sided, 10–3 Boston win. The next day, he hit two more homers in another easy Boston victory. In three days, he had more than doubled his home run total from the season’s first three months. More—much more—was yet to come.

  *Other often-used Ortizisms include, “Shiiiiit,” “Let me tell you something, bro,” and “That’s some fucking bullllllshit.” There’s also his trademark exhortation to reporters at the conclusion of his postgame press conferences: “Now go home and get some ass.”

  Chapter 23

  The Manny Sagas, Part 1

  MICHAEL LEWIS’SMoneyball was published in May 2003. The book, which chronicled the 2002 Oakland A’s season by shadowing Billy Beane, was an instant success—The New York Times called Lewis a “terrifically entertaining explicator” and said Lewis had hit Moneyball “out of the park.”

  Most of the press attention, and most of the attention the book received inside the baseball community, focused on Lewis’s description and analysis of Beane’s approach to building a small-budget team that could rack up wins. Three decades after the founding of the Society for American Baseball Research, Beane’s interest in and use of statistics was seen as revolutionary. Journalists often summed up the sabermetric principles described in the book thusly: batting average should be ignored in favor of on base percentage. Occasionally, some other notions—the benefit that comes from stealing a base is rarely worth the risk of getting caught; a team will score more runs by swinging away than by trying to sacrifice runners along the base paths—were thrown in for good measure.

  It’s true that Beane, and sabermetric thinkers generally, believed in the importance of on base percentage, but simplifying Beane’s philosophy (or Lewis’s description of Beane’s philosophy) down to this level was akin to saying that the strategy of good investors is to buy stocks whose price will go up in the future. What was much less discussed, at least within baseball itself, was Beane’s reliance on the notion of inefficient markets. Baseball, as Beane so memorably illustrated in Lewis’s narrative, has for most of its history been inefficient: The prices players were paid didn’t accurately reflect their true talent levels because of a lack of understanding about what combination of skills most helped a team win ball games. (Put another way, too few people had figured out that the important question to ask is not, “What are the characteristics of winning teams?” but Bill James’s “Why are these the characteristics of winning teams?”) Thus, there were many factors that a general manager who was determined to run his team more rationally could take advantage of. During the year Lewis spent trailing Beane, the easiest inefficiency to take advantage of was the lack of attention paid to the importance of on base percentage. That would soon change, as Lewis’s book prompted executives and analysts around the baseball world to treat on base percentage in the same simpleminded, crude way in which they had previously treated batting average. Baseball broadcasts began showing on base percentage on screen, along with batting average, home runs, and RBIs. Instead of applying the underlying philosophy Lewis illustrated, baseball executives and journalists alike simply began replacing one statistic they didn’t understand terribly well with another, while ignoring the thinking that led GMs like Beane—and Theo Epstein—to realize that hidden value could be found in on base percentage in the first place.

  Within the Red Sox, there was considerable anxiety about Moneyball’s publication even before it was released. Just as Beane, whose 2003 payroll was around $50 million, was trying to compete with richer clubs in his division like the Anaheim Angels and the Seattle Mariners, so too were the Red Sox trying to compete with the significantly wealthier New York Yankees, their rivals in the American League East.* If Lewis disclosed the extent to which baseball players were improperly valued, one of the most potent tools the Red Sox had in their arsenal would, they feared, be neutralized.

  In the meantime, the team’s baseball operations crew searched for even more sophisticated ways to analyze players. With more accurate and nuanced information at their fingertips, they figured, they’d be able to find new inefficiencies to exploit—perhaps middle relievers were undervalued, or maybe players who could hit well but played poor defense were overvalued. In 2003, Bill James undertook two studies that attempted to build whole new sets of data to use as a means of analyzing baseball players. Both required tracking every single play of every single game for an entire season.

  The first of James’s 2003 studies calculated the incidents in which a player’s failure to hustle negatively affected his team. For as long as baseball has been played, some players have been considered showboats who never put in enough effort while others were lauded for their grit and all-out determination, but no one had ever endeavored to analyze the extent to which a lazier player negatively affected the outcome of a game. For James’s study, a player was noted as exhibiting a “failure to hustle” only if the final result of that play could have been affected by an increase in effort. For example, a player who fails to run down the first base line on a hard-hit ball to the second baseman would not be marked down—he would have been out even if he’d been running at full speed.

  Similarly, if, on that same play, the second baseman threw the ball into the dugout and the runner was safe because of an error, the batter would not be marked down; he didn’t need to run full speed in order to make it to first safely. If, however, the second baseman bobbled the ball, recovered, and threw to first in time to nail the lollygagging runner by a half step, he’d be marked down for a failure to hustle. The reason for this, like the reasoning behind much of James’s work, is wonderfully straightforward: James was only interested in the actual, real-life impact of a player’s actions. If a player didn’t run hard out of the batter’s box 100 times during the course of a season, but his slowness only resulted in three unnecessary outs, it would be safe to conclude that, as frustrating as that player’s attitude was, it didn’t really affect the outcome of a season’s worth of games. If, on the other hand, he didn’t run hard 30 times and that resulted in 15 extra outs, that was a whole other story.

  James also set about tallying and examining the team’s defensive miscues as distinct from a compendium of errors, because a player generally received an error only if he came into contact with a ball while it was in play. James also wanted to tally balls an outfielder should have gotten to but didn’t because of a poor approach to the ball, or times a catcher should have been able to apply a tag to a runner trying to score but failed to do so. Both of these studies were efforts to develop a more complete framework through which to view baseball players.

  The results of James’s studies highlighted the impact of one player: Manny Ramirez. In 2003, second baseman Todd Walker led the team in defensive miscues—he had so little range as to appear immobile at times, and infielders get far more fielding opportunities over the course of a season than outfielders—but Ramirez was not far behind. Ramirez also had about half of the team’s nearly 60 “failure to hustle” plays that James recorded during the course of the season. To the rest of the baseball world, Manny Ramirez looked like a hitting savant who was anchoring a prodigiously potent lineup. To the Red Sox, he was, with his $20 million per year price tag, looking more and more like a player making too much money for his aggregate contribution to the team.

  It would have been hard to make that argument to many Boston fans—or many baseball observers—in 2003, a year in which Ramirez led the American League in on base percentage and was in the top 10 in runs, hits, home runs, and walks. With Ramirez stroking the ball and David Ortiz blossoming at the plate, the Red Sox began to hit like the 1927 Murderers’ Row New York Yankees of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Halfway through the season, the Sox were collectively hitting .299. Bill Mueller, the gimpy-kneed third baseman to whom no one wanted to risk offering a two-year contract, led all of baseball with 30 doubles
and had a .328 batting average. By the end of July, the Red Sox, as a team, had a slugging percentage of over .500, which meant that for every two trips to the plate, the Sox would gain one base. No team in history had ever amassed a .500 slugging percentage over the course of a season.

  Perhaps as remarkable was that the Red Sox were, for the first time in years, clearly having fun. Millar, the free-spirited Texan, bestowed an unofficial motto upon the team: “Cowboy Up.” The Red Sox became affectionately known as the Dirt Dogs, with right fielder Trot Nixon, whose batting helmet was so coated with pine tar it was hard to make out its red B, personifying the team’s gritty identity. Someone unearthed an old home video of a college-aged Millar lip-syncing Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” and soon the clip was being shown on Fenway’s JumboTron during games under the heading RALLY KARAOKE GUY. David Ortiz was not only knocking the ball all over the park, he was taking his place as one of the most popular and charismatic members of the team. He strode around like a hip-hop star, but one who loved doling out hugs, and looked vaguely like an overgrown child. He constantly peppered his speech with the word “bitch,” but he did it so good-naturedly that no one ever minded. Take the time when, during one of Grady Little’s pregame meetings with reporters, Ortiz stuck his head into the manager’s office to give his take on how that afternoon’s contest would unfold. “We’re going to kick their ass, drink their beer, and rape their bitches,” Ortiz announced. From another player, such a pronouncement would have come off as an uncomfortable attempt to appear either thuggish or cool. Ortiz, with his youthful glee and broad smile, seemed more like a wanna-be pirate. The room full of reporters burst into laughter.