Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  Throughout high school and college, James continued to spend much of his spare time thinking about and analyzing baseball. He’d start with the question general managers had been pondering since the early 1900s: What are the characteristics of winning teams? Then, unlike many GMs, James set out to examine why these things are the characteristics of winning teams. The answers he came up with were often surprising. By the mid-1970s, when James was in his twenties, he’d begun to compile some of his findings.

  In 1977, he self-published the first Bill James Baseball Abstract, an 80-page, mimeographed compendium of analyses gleaned from his study of box scores. Within a couple of years, James’s word-of-mouth operation had become successful, as talk of his work spread from early readers like the author Norman Mailer and journalist and baseball writer Daniel Okrent to a more general audience. James began adding humorous essays and observations to the Abstracts, which were published professionally beginning in 1982.

  By 2002, baseball could be said to be in the beginning stages of a Jamesian revolution. James had helped come up with new and more effective ways to analyze just about every aspect of the game. Instead of looking at batting average, or even on base percentage or slugging percentage or OPS,* James devised a “runs created” formula, which quantified the number of runs a given player contributed to his team during a season.† Instead of using fielding percentage—the number of fielding plays a player makes without making an error divided by his total number of fielding plays—as a way to measure defensive prowess, James devised “range factor,” which took into account the fact that better fielders will be able to reach more balls and should be rewarded accordingly.‡

  Not surprisingly, James’s work piqued the interest of player agents long before the slow-moving big-league clubs began to take notice. After the 1979 season, the agent duo of brothers Alan and Randy Hendricks wanted to put together statistically based arguments on behalf of their clients as they headed into arbitration hearings. Alan saw one of James’s two-inch Sporting News ads for that year’s Abstract—James was selling the books out of his house at the time—and the Hendricks hired James to work with them as a consultant. That year, the Hendricks won a $213,000 arbitration case for Houston Astros reliever Joe Sambito, at the time the largest arbitration award ever.

  Over the years, as James’s renown grew, he was hired as a consultant by several major league clubs, but for the most part, the baseball establishment ignored him. Despite the clear utility of sabermetric thinking, the front offices of many baseball organizations were still staffed with lifers—longtime scouts or ex-players who were wary of, or simply didn’t understand, the intricacies of sabermetrics. There was some lip service paid to James and his allies, but big-league clubs were only hesitantly utilizing their thinking.

  By hiring James, the Red Sox gave notice that was about to change. Immediately after making the hire, Henry explained why James’s work fit so well with the philosophy Henry used to guide his business decisions. “Usually when making investments, it is implicit that investors believe they have some degree of knowledge about the future,” Henry told ESPN’s Rob Neyer, a James protégé. “I’ve had an advantage over the years because I am clear about a couple of things: 1) it is part of the nature of life itself…to trend, and 2) I will never have a complete or full understanding of anything. Therefore, all investment decisions should be based on what can be measured rather than what might be predicted or felt. People in both baseball and the financial markets operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage…. [M]any people think they are smarter than others in baseball, and that the game on the field is simply what they think it is, filtered through their set of images and beliefs. But actual data from the market means more than individual perception/belief. And the same is true in baseball.”

  At the time of James’s hiring, some observers predicted the Red Sox would be transformed into a team that relied on the computations of pasty, number-crunching geeks and completely ignored the tobacco-chewing wisdom of traditional scouts. James found this viewpoint comical. “I believe in a universe that is too complex for any of us to really understand,” he says. “Each of us has an organized way of thinking about the world—a paradigm, if you will…. But the problem is the real world is vastly more complicated than the image of it that we carry around in our heads.” Baseball was roughly divided into the analytical camp and the traditional camp, or the sabermetricians and the scouts. “I created a good part of the analytical paradigm,” James says, “but at the same time, the real world is too complicated to be explained by that paradigm.” He would never advocate ignoring characteristics like leadership or focus, even if those qualities can’t be neatly measured. “It is one thing to build an analytical paradigm that leaves out leadership, hustle, focus, intensity, courage, and self-confidence,” he says. “It is a very, very different thing to say that leadership, hustle, courage, and self-confidence do not exist or do not play a role on real-world baseball teams. The people who think that way, not to be rude, but they’re children. They may be 40-year-old children, they may be 70-year-old children, but their thinking is immature.”

  *For example, if player A has 100 hits and they’re all singles, while player B has 80 hits that were accumulated by hitting 50 singles, 20 doubles, and 10 home runs, player B has accumulated 130 total bases (50*1) + (20*2) + (10*4) while player A has only accumulated 100 (100*1). If all of these bases were collected in a single inning, player B would have scored 32.5 runs, while player A would have only scored 25.

  *OPS is an acronym for “on base percentage plus slugging percentage.” Since it combines a measure of how effective a hitter is at reaching base with a measure of his power, it is one yardstick by which to judge a hitter’s overall offensive ability.

  †James’s initial formula for runs created was to multiply a batter’s total bases by his hits plus his walks and divide that by his total number of plate appearances. (Or RC=[(total bases)*(hits+walks)]/plate appearances.) This formula has since been refined to include everything from grounding into double plays to park factors for different ballparks.

  ‡In other words, a defensive player who could cover very little ground and only made it to 10 balls hit in his direction but who properly fielded nine of those balls would have a fielding percentage of .900, while a defensive player with much greater range who made it to 20 balls and correctly fielded 18 would also have a fielding percentage of .900. In fact, the second player made twice as many plays as the first, and range factor helps quantify this.

  Chapter 18

  Red Sox General

  Manager Billy Beane

  WHILE JAMES’S HIRING helped demonstrate the direction in which the Red Sox front office was heading, the team still was faced with finding a permanent general manager to replace Mike Port. Port, who had been given the position on an interim basis before the season started, had done a fine job and was both respected and liked, but it was no secret that the team was looking for a new type of leader. Even while the search process was in its early stages, Henry was forced to answer questions about whether a top-tier candidate would feel comfortable reporting to the strong-willed Lucchino. In San Diego, as reporters kept pointing out, Lucchino had hired the young and untested Kevin Towers as the Padres general manager. Lucchino’s admirers argued that this meant that Lucchino was good at recognizing and promoting new talent. His detractors had a less benign interpretation: They said that Lucchino had been unable to hire a more experienced hand because so many people had reservations about working under him.

  Henry took pains to make it clear that, in the team’s search for a new GM, Lucchino would not be undermined. “Larry is president and CEO of the Red Sox,” Henry told reporters at the end of the 2002 season. “Everyone within the Red Sox reports to him directly or indirectly. The GM reports directly to Larry. That won’t change.” That doesn’t mean, Henry said, that whomever was hired wouldn’t have a large am
ount of autonomy. “We all participate in the process one way or another because we are trying to instill a certain philosophy here and we’re all on the same page,” he said. “We have a wonderful working relationship on the baseball side—all of us. There is a lot of dialogue, but the GM is the GM.”

  By October, the Sox had asked for permission to speak with Toronto Blue Jays general manager J. P. Ricciardi, a Worcester native and former protégé of Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane. The Jays, instead of taking any chances, quickly signed Ricciardi to a five-year contract extension. The Red Sox next turned their full attention to Beane himself, the man Henry had been interested in all along.

  Henry had first met Beane several years earlier, when, as the owner of the Marlins, he heard Beane give a speech to baseball executives about competitive balance between large- and small-revenue teams. “He just seemed brilliant to me,” says Henry. “Not just his presentation, but how he approached problems. It was very well done, well organized. And after I got to Boston, I began to think that maybe we could work together some day.” A brash former top prospect who had failed as a player and excelled in the A’s front office, Beane had, by 2002, led the revenue-starved A’s to the playoffs three years in a row largely by snapping up players that other teams didn’t properly value.

  In 2001, the A’s won 102 games, but lost three of their best players to free agency: 2000 American League MVP Jason Giambi, who signed with the Yankees; Johnny Damon, who signed with the Red Sox; and closer Jason Isringhausen, who signed with the St. Louis Cardinals. The 2002 season was widely predicted to be the one in which the high-flying A’s would return to earth. Instead, Beane’s team, with a $41 million payroll, among the lowest in all of baseball, won more games than it had the year before, going 103-59. In the spring, Beane signed a contract extension that would keep him in Oakland for six more years and would eventually pay more than $1 million per year.

  Because he was under contract, Beane needed the approval of his boss, A’s owner Steve Schott, to interview with the Red Sox. Beane asked for weeks before Schott finally granted him that permission in early November. On Thursday, November 7, Beane flew to Florida and met with Henry and Lucchino at Henry’s Boca Raton mansion.

  Two days later, Beane had left Florida and arrived back home in Northern California as the new general manager of the Boston Red Sox. After nonstop negotiating, the Red Sox and Beane had come to an agreement on a five-year contract worth around $13 million. His $2.5 million annual salary would make him the best-paid general manager ever. To help assuage Beane’s concerns about the toll the job would take on his family, Tom Werner had girlfriend Katie Couric call Beane’s wife, Tara, a huge Today show fan, to sing “Happy Birthday” on her answering machine.

  Beane and the Red Sox owners both had reason to be elated. “We were jumping up and down,” says Henry. “We opened champagne. We were celebrating. We were thinking, you know, we just made the deal that’s going to win us a World Series.” In return for allowing the Red Sox to hire one of their employees while he was still under contract, the A’s had a right to compensation, and that night, Beane and Theo Epstein negotiated with A’s assistant general manager Paul DePodesta, the man who would almost surely be named Oakland’s new GM. DePodesta wanted minor league prospect Kevin Youkilis, a young, balding, not particularly athletic-looking third baseman who had been ignored by most of the baseball world but was highly prized by both the Red Sox and the A’s for his unerring batting eye and his amazing ability to get on base,* as well as one of the Red Sox pitchers. “Don’t worry, there’ll be other Youkilises,” Beane told Epstein. “We’ll get our Youkilises.”

  The next morning, still soaring from his recent coup, Henry called Beane to iron out the final details of their deal. Unable to reach him, Henry called Steve Schott to discuss the specifics of the compensation package. He was given an unpleasant surprise.

  “I don’t think he’s going to go,” Schott said. “I just had a 45 minute conversation with Billy and I don’t think he’s going to go.”

  “What are you talking about?” Henry asked.

  “I told you,” Schott said. “He can’t make up his mind. This is the kind of guy he is.”*

  “But we have a deal,” Henry said.

  “I don’t know what your deal is,” said Schott. “But I can tell you this: I don’t believe there’s any chance he’s going to go.”

  Henry got off the phone, stunned. He tried to reach Beane again, to no avail. Finally, that afternoon, Beane called the Red Sox owner. He told Henry that he hadn’t slept in days and that he couldn’t take the job. If he did, he feared, he would never see his wife and wouldn’t be able to be a good husband or father. (Beane’s daughter from his first marriage lived in California, and the Sox had agreed to let Beane work from the West Coast for part of the year.) “If I go to Boston, I’ll nova,” Henry remembers Beane telling him. “I’ll burn out. It’s not the right thing for either of us. I’m already out of control, and this is the Red Sox. I’ll be so much further out of control in my personal life.”

  Henry pleaded with Beane to sit and think about it for at least a day, but Beane said there was no need to wait. He had made up his mind. That afternoon, Beane announced he was staying in Oakland. At his press conference the next day, he explained how he had called J. P. Ricciardi, the other candidate the Red Sox had unsuccessfully tried to woo and one of Beane’s best friends, to discuss the situation. “When I called J. P., I was talking about maybe the premier job in sports. What was going through my mind was that [the Red Sox] were incredibly generous and accommodating [about Beane’s familial situation], and the compensation was unbelievable, but I sort of wasn’t doing cartwheels. I knew something wasn’t right.”

  At the time, there was speculation in the Boston media that Beane had blanched at working underneath Larry Lucchino. Lucchino himself addressed these concerns soon after Beane had publicly turned down the job. “Issues of autonomy were not really troublesome during these discussions,” Lucchino told Boston sports-radio station WEEI. He then brought up an example that couldn’t have done much to ease the concerns of prospective candidates who wondered how much authority they’d have. “The teamwork element of the baseball side of the operation of the Yankees is a good example,” Lucchino said. “[Yankees general manager] Brian Cashman is the quarterback of good evaluators. There’s a team there.” Cashman, as baseball insiders were all too aware, was constantly being second-guessed and overruled by Yankees owner George Steinbrenner’s coterie of advisors. Lucchino was then asked whether he and Beane would have clashed over chain of command issues. “I think,” he said, “that’s a red herring and a false issue.”

  *The A’s baseball operations crew had dubbed Youkilis “The Greek God of Walks” despite the fact that Youkilis is a Romanian Jew, not Greek. Youkilis took the nickname in stride, telling a reporter, “It’s better than being the Greek God of Illegitimate Children.”

  *After high school, Beane initially committed to attending Stanford before coming to terms on a minor league contract with the New York Mets. Before signing, he wanted to change his mind again, but his father wouldn’t let him.

  Chapter 19

  Introducing the

  Boy Wonder

  WITH BEANE OUT OF THE RUNNING, the Red Sox brain trust began their search anew. Immediately, both Beane and Ricciardi began advocating for 28-year-old Theo Epstein. In an interview with ESPN’s Peter Gammons, who was by now the most visible and popular baseball reporter in the country, Beane said, “Epstein is a pillar, and in all the time we’ve spent together in this process, I’m convinced he should take the job.” Gammons, for his part, quickly concurred. Outside of Sandy Alderson, Beane’s one-time mentor with the A’s and at the time one of Major League Baseball’s executive vice presidents, Gammons surmised that the only person who was likely to fit Henry and Lucchino’s particular criteria for the job was Epstein.

  The Epstein family was already well known in Boston. Epstein’s father, Leslie, was a
respected novelist and director of Boston University’s creative writing program; his mother, Ilene, was one of three women who ran The Studio, a chic local clothing store. His grandfather, Philip, won an Oscar for the screenplay for Casablanca, which he wrote with his twin brother and Howard Koch. Epstein’s sister, Anya, was a writer on perhaps the best cop show of all time, NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street.

  The person to whom Theo would be most often compared was his fraternal twin, Paul. While Theo focused from an early age on a career in sports, his brother went into education, and by 2002, the taller (and balder) Paul was a guidance counselor and social worker at Brookline High, where he also coached the girls’ soccer team. Theo referred to his brother as his “moral touchstone.”