Alderson hadn’t set out to reexamine the premises of professional baseball but he wound up doing it anyway. For a long stretch, his investigations were largely academic. “You have to remember,” he said, “that there wasn’t any evidence that any of this shit worked. And I had credibility problems. I didn’t have a baseball background.” The high payroll Oakland teams managed by Tony La Russa had done well enough in the late 1980s and early 1990s that Alderson felt he should “defer to success.” For more than a decade he could afford to do this. Since the late 1970s the A’s had been owned by Walter A. Haas, Jr., who was, by instinct, more of a philanthropist than a businessman. Haas viewed professional baseball ownership as a kind of public trust and spent money on it accordingly. In 1991, the Oakland A’s actually had the highest payroll in all of baseball. Haas was willing to lose millions to field a competitive team that would do Oakland proud, and he did. The A’s had gone to the World Series three straight seasons from 1988 to 1990.
Deferring to success became an untenable strategy in 1995, when Walter Haas died. His estate sold the team to a pair of Bay Area real estate developers, Steve Schott and Ken Hofmann, who were, by instinct, more businessmen than philanthropists. Schott and Hofmann wanted Alderson to continue running the team but on a much tighter budget. “We had new owners who weren’t going to spend any money,” said Alderson. “They made it clear that this had to be a business. And so we suddenly were put in the position of: we can only afford a one-tool player. Which tool is it going to be?” What—and this is what the question amounted to—was the efficient way to spend money on baseball players? The first, short answer, according to a pamphlet commissioned by Alderson, was to spend it on hitters. The pamphlet was written by a former aerospace engineer turned baseball writer, Eric Walker. Fielding, Walker wrote, was “at most five percent of the game.” The rest was pitching and offense, and while “good pitchers are usually valued properly, good batters often are not.” In Walker’s words:
Analyzing baseball yields many numbers of interest and value. Yet far and away—far, far and away—the most critical number in all of baseball is 3: the three outs that define an inning. Until the third out, anything is possible; after it, nothing is. Anything that increases the offense’s chances of making an out is bad; anything that decreases it is good. And what is on-base percentage? Simply yet exactly put, it is the probability that the batter will not make an out. When we state it that way, it becomes, or should become, crystal clear that the most important isolated (one-dimensional) offensive statistic is the on-base percentage. It measures the probability that the batter will not be another step toward the end of the inning.
Alderson’s reference point for running an organization was the time he’d spent as an officer in the Marine Corps. He approached the A’s farm teams the way the Marine Corps approached its boot camps. The individual star was less important than the organization as a whole, and the organization as a whole functioned well only if it was uniformly disciplined. Once he decided that hitting was the most important tool and everything else was secondary, Alderson set about implementing throughout the organization, with Marine Corps rigor, a uniform approach to hitting. The approach had three rules:
Every batter needs to behave like a leadoff man, and adopt as his main goal getting on base.
Every batter should also possess the power to hit home runs, in part because home run power forced opposing pitchers to pitch more cautiously, and led to walks, and high on-base percentages.
3. To anyone with the natural gifts to become a professional baseball player, hitting was less a physical than a mental skill. Or, at any rate, the aspects of hitting that could be taught were mental.
By 1995, Alderson had created a new baseball corporate culture around a single baseball statistic: on-base percentage. Scoring runs was, in the new view, less an art or a talent than a process. If you made the process a routine—if you got every player doing his part on the production line—you could pay a lot less for runs than the going rate. Alderson was building a system with Marine Corps intolerance for exceptions to the rules. “Sandy produced this long paper about the pros and cons of selective hitting,” recalled Karl Kuehl, who was in charge of implementing Alderson’s rules. “He wanted to really push the kids coming up through the minor leagues. No one had ever heard of on-base percentage, but when your being called to the major leagues depends on your on-base percentage, it gets your attention.” The system’s central tenet was, in Alderson’s words, “the system was the star. The reason the system works is that everyone buys into it. If they don’t, there is a weakness in the system.” The unacceptable vice in a minor league player was a taste for bad pitches. The most praiseworthy virtue was the willingness to take a base on balls. No player was eligible for minor league awards, or was allowed to move up in the system, unless he had at least one walk in every ten bats.
The effect of Sandy Alderson’s new rules was interesting to anyone who believed the pitcher, not the hitter, was chiefly responsible for the base on balls. More or less overnight, all of the A’s minor league teams began to lead their respective leagues in walks. To ensure they never lost that lead, Alderson routinely reviewed the batting statistics of the teams, and leaned on managers whose teams were not walking. He noticed, for instance, that the Oakland Double-A affiliate was the exception in the organization: its players weren’t drawing walks at the same frantic rate as the A’s other minor league teams. “I got my reports,” he said. “I can see they aren’t taking any walks. I called the manager and said, ‘They go up or you’re fired.’ And they went up. Quickly.”
Even after the Marine Corps had come to the Oakland A’s there remained a weakness in the system: the major league team. The mere presence of a free-swinging light hitter like Billy Beane on the big club in 1990 proved that Alderson’s views were not the controlling ones. Around the big league clubhouse the GM trod more gingerly than around the minor league clubhouses. Alderson didn’t march into Tony La Russa’s office and tell him, “The walks go up or you’re fired.” No one did. There was no very good reason for this; it’s just the way it was, because the guys who ran the front office typically had never played in the big leagues.
The need to treat the big league team as the sacrosanct province of people who had played in the big leagues struck Alderson, who liked the idea of order and discipline cascading unimpeded from the top, as a kind of madness. “In what other business,” he asked, “do you leave the fate of the organization to a middle manager?” But that is what the Oakland A’s, along with the rest of major league baseball, had always done. Tony La Russa was a middle manager and Tony La Russa had his own ideas about how to score runs, and those ideas guided the bats of his hitters. A player would come up through the A’s farm system being told that he needed to be patient, that he needed to take his walks; and then the moment he got to the big club, he was told to unleash his natural aggression. Even players brainwashed by Alderson’s minor league system in the new approach were susceptible to these arguments. Given the slightest opening, many of them regressed, and began hacking away. “It may have something to do with how dominant these players are as they come up,” said Alderson. “Patience and discipline at the plate has never been reinforced. They say, ‘They’re not paying me to walk.’ And so if you don’t lean on them, they don’t.”
Before it had a chance to become a proper argument, the conflict between the old and the new baseball men was resolved by the budget crisis. Tony La Russa left when the new owners renounced the old habit of bankrolling millions of dollars in losses. Alderson set out to find a manager who would understand that he wasn’t the boss, and landed upon the recently fired manager of the Houston Astros, Art Howe. “Art Howe was hired to implement the ideas of the front office, not his own,” said Alderson. “And that was new.”
* * *
Billy would say later that his wife left him because she was unnerved by his intensity—that she could even see it in his hands when he
drove an automobile. At any rate, he soon found himself out of not only a baseball uniform but a wife as well. Baseball marriages were like that: their most vulnerable moment was immediately after a player retired, and it dawned on husband and wife that they’d actually be spending time together. “They end when the career ends,” said Billy. “Until then you can put up with anything because you’re always leaving the next day.” His wife moved back to San Diego and took their infant daughter, christened Casey, with her. Billy spent his weeks scouting and his weekends speeding down, and then back up, the highway between Oakland and San Diego. He couldn’t afford the plane tickets.
His motor was still fueled less by desire than anxieties—and he now had two of them. One was that he wouldn’t know his own daughter. The other was that he wouldn’t cut it in the front office. “If baseball’s all you can do and you know that’s all you can do,” he said, “it breeds in you a certain creative desperation.” When he wasn’t speeding down some California highway he was jetting around the country watching games and listening to the other scouts talk about players. Whatever shred of doubt he’d had that most of them had no idea what they were talking about, he lost.
What he hadn’t lost was his ferocious need to win. He had just transferred it to a different place, from playing to making decisions about players. But this time he had guidance—from a graduate of not one but two Ivy League colleges—and he was willing to follow it. “What Billy figured out at some point,” said Sandy Alderson, “is that he wanted to be me more than he wanted to be Jose Canseco.” In 1993 Alderson, impressed by the creative enthusiasm with which Billy seemed to attack every task he was given, brought him into the front office, made him his assistant, and told him his job was to go out and find undervalued minor league players. And then he handed Billy the pamphlet he’d commissioned from Eric Walker.
When Billy read Walker’s pamphlet, he experienced—well, he couldn’t quite describe the excitement of it. “It was the first thing I had ever read that tried to take an objective view of baseball,” he said. “Something that was different than just a lot of people’s subjective opinions. I was still very subjective in my own thinking but it made sense to me.” It more than made sense to him: it explained him. The new, outsider’s view of baseball was all about exposing the illusions created by the insiders on the field. Billy Beane had himself been one of those illusions.
Billy wasn’t one to waste a lot of time worrying about whether he was motivated by a desire to succeed or the pursuit of truth. To his way of thinking the question was academic, since the pursuit of truth was, suddenly, the key to success. He was bright. He had a natural coruscating skepticism about baseball’s traditional wisdom. He could see that Eric Walker’s pamphlet was just the beginning of a radical, and rational, approach to the game—one that would concentrate unprecedented powers in the hands of the general manager. Where had Eric Walker come from, he wondered, and was there any more behind what he’d written? “Billy shed every one of his player-type prejudices and adapted,” Alderson said. “Whereas most of the people like him would have said, ‘That’s not the way we did it when I played.’” In answer to Billy’s question, Alderson pointed to a row of well-thumbed paperbacks by a writer named Bill James, who had opened Alderson’s eyes to a new way of thinking about baseball. Alderson had collected pretty much everything Bill James had written, including four books self-published by James between 1977 and 1980 that still existed only as cheap mimeographs. Sandy Alderson had never met, or even spoken to, Bill James. He wasn’t a typical baseball insider but he still recognized a distinction between people like himself, who actually made baseball decisions, and people like James, who just wrote about them. But he had found James’s approach to the game completely persuasive, and had reshaped a professional baseball organization in James’s spirit. That’s why he had hired Eric Walker, in the hope of “getting some Bill James-like stuff that was proprietary to us.”
For his part, Billy Beane had never heard of Bill James. “But that was the big moment,” he said, “when I figured out that all the stuff Sandy was talking about was just derivative of Bill James.” His mind had finally found an escape hatch. It led to a green field as far away from professional baseball as you could get and still be inside the park.
Chapter IV
Field of Ignorance
I didn’t care about the statistics in anything else. I didn’t, and don’t pay attention to statistics on the stock market, the weather, the crime rate, the gross national product, the circulation of magazines, the ebb and flow of literacy among football fans and how many people are going to starve to death before the year 2050 if I don’t start adopting them for $3.69 a month; just baseball. Now why is that? It is because baseball statistics, unlike the statistics in any other area, have acquired the powers of language.
—Bill James, 1985 Baseball Abstract
There is a certain kind of writer whose motives are ultimately mysterious. The writer born into a family of writers; the writer whose work is an attempt to make sense of some private trauma; the writer who from the age of four is able and willing to stay in his room and make up stories: each of these creatures is a stereotype. What he writes may be good, but why he writes isn’t something you particularly want to hear more about. The interesting case is a writer like Bill James. He grew up in a not unhappy family in Mayetta, Kansas (population: 209), and the closest he came to an uprooting experience was the move from there down the Interstate Highway to Lawrence. There, at the University of Kansas, James studied economics and literature. He didn’t know any literary types, had no apparent role models, and was not encouraged in any way to commit his thoughts to paper. After a shaggy dog story in the U.S. Army—he was the last man from Kansas drafted to serve in Vietnam but never was sent—and a fruitless layover in graduate school, he found a job as the nightwatchman in a Stokely Van Camp pork and beans factory.
It was while guarding Stokely Van Camp’s pork and beans that James stumbled seriously into putting his thoughts down on paper, in response to having things he absolutely needed to say that he was unable to convey any other way. “Every form of strength is also a form of weakness,” he once wrote. “Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.”
Even more oddly, everything James needed to say was either about baseball, or could be said only in the context of a discussion of baseball. “I’d probably be a writer if there was no such thing as baseball,” he said, “but because there is such a thing as baseball I can’t imagine writing about anything else.” He was, from time to time, aware of the absurdity of devoting an entire adult life to the search for meaning in box scores. He never seems to have resisted his instinct to do it. “Now, look,” he wrote to his readers, once he’d become an established, successful author, “both of my parents died of cancer, and I fully expect that it’s going to get me, too, in time. It would be very easy for me to say that cancer research is more important to me than baseball—but I must admit that I don’t do anything which would be consistent with such a belief. I think about cancer research a few times a month; I think about baseball virtually every waking hour of my life.”
James’s first book was self-published—photocopied and stapled together by himself—and ran just sixty-eight pages (production budget: $112.73). Its formal title was: 1977 Baseball Abstract: Featuring 18 Categories of Statistical Information That You Just Can’t Find Anywhere Else. To sell it, James took out a single one-inch advertisement in The Sporting News. Seventy-five people found it alluring enough to buy a copy. Opening its pale blue cover, they found a short opening explanatory paragraph that failed to explain anything much, followed by sixteen pages of baseball statistics. Astonishingly short and abr
upt paragraphs followed by pages and pages of numbers: that was James’s quixotic early approach to getting across what he had to say. Were it not for the author’s frequent assertion that it was one, there was no reason to think of the first Baseball Abstract as a book. (“In this next section of this book…”) And there was certainly no reason to think that the writer had the capacity to lead the reader to a radical, entirely original understanding of his subject. What little James actually wrote in his first book felt stage-frightened. The questions he posed—Do some pitchers draw bigger crowds than others? How much effect does an umpire crew have on the length of a game?—could not possibly have interested anyone but the nuttiest baseball nut and, in any case, couldn’t be answered confidently with the data James had, from a single baseball season.
It wasn’t until the end of the 1977 Baseball Abstract that James offered his cocktail party-sized readership a glimpse of his potential. The topic that finally gets him sufficiently worked up that he devotes several entire pages to it of nothing but words is: fielding statistics. The manner in which baseball people evaluate players’ fielding performance—adding up their errors, and applauding the guy with the fewest—struck him as an outrage. “What is an error?” he asked. “It is, without exception, the only major statistic in sports which is a record of what an observer thinks should have been accomplished. It’s a moral judgment, really, in the peculiar quasi-morality of the locker room…. Basketball scorers count mechanical errors, but those are a record of objective facts: team A has the ball, then team B has the ball…. But the fact of a baseball error is that no play has been made but that the scorer thinks it should have. It is, uniquely, a record of opinions.”
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