The players form a handshake line on the infield, then sign autographs in front of the first-base dugout, thrilling a cluster of kids who don’t understand how far away these uniformed giants are from being big leaguers. Sam and I, our smiles equally wide, shake hands with Feh and walk back to the clubhouse, where we wait for the team to file in. For us, success is usually a solitary experience measured in Twitter mentions. After years of internal, intellectual battles—trying to beat blank pages by filling them with words—it’s a real release to triumph (even by proxy) in a physical contest and to celebrate as part of a loud, smelly, sweaty team.
When everyone is inside, Theo calls for the team’s attention and gives us the floor. Whatever words I spontaneously say—some brief sentiments to the effect of “You guys are great!”—are forgotten instantly when I add “… and we bought you beer.” I open the freezer and lift out the actually ice-cold Coors, which earns us a reception as raucous as the one the players got from the satisfied fans. Paul, the winning pitcher, is rubbing up the pristine game ball awarded to him as a memento from his first Pacific Association victory. He sees us and crosses the clubhouse. “Did they get you a game ball?” he asks. “Hang on.” He walks over to a bucket, finds another pearl, and brings it back to us. “Nice job.” Sam takes it and almost cries.
There’s no way Opening Day could have been better. We aren’t worried about Walker, or the fact that Hibbert, batting ninth, was the only player not to make four plate appearances, or anything else in the world. We’ve seen Kristian’s bat commit murder-suicide, and we’ve seen Feh get three hits and steal two bases, making Sam’s .380-average projection seem smart. We’ve seen Hurley, from whom neither of us expected big things, go 3-for-4, and we’ve seen Carranza show off the power we’d previously seen only in his slugging percentage. We’ve seen Paul zero in on the strike zone, and we’ve seen Sean look like slider-spinning Astros closer Luke Gregerson (except 5 mph slower, because this isn’t the big leagues). Pittsburg’s pitchers threw 147 pitches in eight innings, 59 percent of them strikes; ours threw only 116 pitches in nine innings, 64 percent of them strikes.
Unlike Sam, I’m not a father, so I don’t have to pretend that a crying baby’s arrival was better than this moment. “Let’s walk away now,” Sam suggests. It’s tempting: Our guys were good, we’re in first place, and we’re rocking a 1.000 winning percentage. But now that we’ve taken one hit, we want to chase the high.
8
TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES
In the first game of the season, Nick Oddo—“oh-doe,” as it turns out; Ben was right—grounded a ball to the second baseman and lined one right to the first baseman. Oddo sat out game two. He’s back in the lineup for game three, and I’m back in the dugout, while Ben is in the press box running the PITCHf/x system. Oddo lines a double down the right-field line in the first inning, then lines a double to the wall in right field in the second. In between was a foul ball just wide of first base. It’s not just that he’s pulling balls, but that three of the four he put in play were pulled at almost identical angles.
There’s a reason why Bill James defined sabermetrics as the search not just for knowledge about baseball, but for objective knowledge. Months later, I will skim a list of cognitive biases and realize that, at this moment in the dugout, I was suffering from at least a half dozen of them.
Availability heuristic, where we overestimate the likelihood of events that have greater “availability” in our memories. I noticed the landing spots of Oddo’s hits largely because I was so focused on Oddo, surprised as I was to see him here and regretful as I was that we hadn’t signed him.
Confirmation bias, where we focus mostly on new evidence that supports our existing beliefs. I assumed that Oddo, a left-handed hitter with a long swing, probably pulled the ball a lot. When he pulled the first four, I used that tiny sample to convince myself he was an extreme pull hitter.
Clustering illusion, where we underestimate the likelihood of “clusters” of events happening by chance. Even if Oddo directed baseballs with total randomness, the odds of getting four balls pulled in a row by luck alone wouldn’t be that long—about one in sixteen. But it didn’t occur to me that what I was watching could be a fluke.
Focalism, where we put too much weight on the first piece of information we acquire.
Base rate fallacy, where we ignore universal truths (like “lefties pull a lot of grounders”) in favor of narrow, specific data.
And, perhaps, the Dunning-Kruger effect, where unskilled individuals overestimate their own abilities.
The point is this: I know that it takes about thirty batted balls to draw conclusions about a player’s batted-ball tendencies. Russell Carleton has published work demonstrating this, and we cite it regularly when we want to make true and honest points. But after seeing Oddo hit four times, I’m ignoring it completely. I’ve convinced myself this is the moment when we stop being observers and get into the game. I text Ben.
“We’re shifting Oddo.”
Ben is excited. We’re making an in-game decision and doing something associated with sabermetrics, and we’re setting an important precedent before the players forget about our day of defensive drills in spring training. But he’s apprehensive, also: We don’t have the data. We’ve always planned to shift, but only once we’d had a chance to see our opponents enough times to learn their habits. We’re betting on four ground balls, and the knowledge that most hitters have at least some pull tendencies on ground balls, so the chances are good that Oddo won’t embarrass us. Unless …
I take my phone back out.
“How worried about a bunt are you?” I text Ben.
“Oddo bunt? Not very,” he answers.
The shift is one of Ben’s baseball obsessions. He has watched with interest as the frequency of shifts in the major leagues has skyrocketed by 750 percent since 2011, and—even more intriguingly—as most hitters have refused to respond by bunting toward the vacated side of the infield. A fair bunt with the infield overshifted is a free single, if not extra bases. But whether out of pride, the conviction that bunting is counterproductive, or a lack of bunting experience, few hitters attempt it regularly, even though it would dissuade defenses from shifting again.
So when I ask where Ben would put third baseman Kristian Gayday—in the standard shortstop position or in his regular third-base position to protect against the bunt, with only shortstop Gered Mochizuki shifted—he recommends the former.
“Oddo’s first time seeing shift, probably isn’t going to adjust immediately.”
Oddo comes up with two outs in the fourth and a runner on first. The shift is on—Moch moves slightly to the right of second base, and Kristian slides over to the normal shortstop position. And what do you know: Oddo squares around and bunts the first pitch down the third-base line, a perfect bunt, hugging the edge of the infield grass.
“Sheeeeit,” Ben texts.
“Worrrrrrrst,” I respond.
“Guess we should’ve signed him,” Ben concludes.
I’ve got nowhere to hide from any accusing eyes in the dugout. I stare straight ahead, and I kick the dugout netting when the next hitter singles, driving in a run that will be charged not to us, but to Jon Rand. When he returns to the dugout, I tell him I’m sorry. That one was on me.
Much later, we will ask Oddo what he was thinking right before he embarrassed us. “Before I step into the box I always look at the defense,” he says. “I’ve never had a shift to that extent played against me. So that was a first for me. When I watch MLB games and see those severe shifts I always tell myself if that ever happens to me I’m going to drop a bunt down. And that’s what happened.” Just our luck: The first time we try to intervene in an actual game, we run right into the rare hitter who shares our beliefs about bunting to beat the shift.
I spend the fifth inning hiding in the bullpen, where Jerome Godsey is my only company. I’m not sure whether I need advice, reassurance, or a scolding, but I need to hear something from
somebody who understands the game from the dugout perspective.
“If it’s the right move, you can’t worry about it,” Godsey says. “You have to do it again.”
“Have to?”
“Have to. And if I’m out there, I hope he bunts. Because I’m a kitty cat on the mound, and I’ll throw him out.”
As it turns out, with Oddo due to bat again sometime in the sixth, Godsey is in the game. Not only that, but the stakes are suddenly high again—the Stompers scored five runs in the fifth to pull within two. Godsey walks the leadoff man in front of Oddo, and we know that even an accidental squib against the shift would crush our perceived momentum: We might never convince the team to try a shift, or anything else, ever again. So Ben, who’s still in the press box, is surprised to see the shortstop, second baseman, and first baseman all move into a shift, playing Oddo to pull. Yes, we’re risking our reputations. But I’m more worried about how we’ll look if we don’t do this, if we show so little conviction in our tactics that we flee after one failure. We make one concession: Kristian stays in the vicinity of third base, cutting off the possibility of another gimme bunt. To be extra safe, I yell out to Jerome: “Kitty cat!” which makes me sound like a madman. A few Stompers look at me skeptically.
Oddo, expecting to be pitched inside, has moved way back from the plate so he can slap one the other way. His first swing produces a pop foul to left field. Then he swings at a 1-1 fastball and scorches a grounder straight up the middle. With a normal defensive alignment, the ball would easily scoot into center—for 150 years, that was the surest single in the sport. Instead, Moch gloves it, steps on second, and throws to first to complete a double play. “Fuck!” Oddo yells, and I finally embrace the casual loud profanity of baseball dugouts: “Motherfucking shift!” I yell in Oddo’s direction as the batter hauls down the line. Godsey points to me as he returns to the mound.
“!!!!!!!!” I text Ben.
“Score one for sabermetrics,” says Tim Livingston, broadcasting in the press box.
* * *
For the first week of the season, nothing can stop the Stompers. After sweeping Pittsburg, we head to Vallejo, where we sweep the Admirals for a 6-0 start. But the better things go for the Stompers, the more our advance-scouting efforts unravel. Even the most basic tasks, the ones we assumed would be simple, prove challenging. Our cameras’ batteries allegedly last for four hours, but they definitely don’t last for four hours of filming: They keep cutting out anywhere from the fourth to the sixth inning. We buy bigger batteries, but even those require one midgame switch. We buy long outdoor power cables, and we scout for power outlets within one hundred feet of the league’s four fields. We never do find one in San Rafael, so the best place to put the camera is in center field, where there’s a small, fenced-in area with a nonworking water fountain. This enclosure can be accessed only by jogging across the outfield, which we do between innings once a game, ignoring the glares from Albert Park officials. The wind in San Rafael is usually a small step below gale force, so at times the tripod topples over for an inning or two.
Even worse, we’re unable to import video to our laptops, which means that for the first few weeks of the season we can’t show footage to players. That’s not great, given that we talked a big game in spring training about all the advantages our know-how would bring to the team. Very quickly, our incompetence—and the time it takes to organize our efforts—takes a toll on our volunteers. On June 3, Zak resigns as advance scouting coordinator. “After reflecting on the last week or so, I have concluded that I’ve vastly underestimated both the amount of time required to properly study for the bar exam and the amount of time needed to manage this project correctly for you,” his email begins. We don’t blame him. In fact, we envy his ability to bail out.
Later that night, PITCHf/x compounds our problems. The system is supposed to be easy to operate: The person manning the monitor need only set the lineups, record the outcome of each pitch, and click arrows to advance the software by an at-bat or an inning. But midway through the game, the computer gives us a blue screen of death and can’t be resuscitated for more than a few minutes at a time.
“PITCHf/x crashed, everything is awful except that the Stompers won,” Ben texts me.
“We aren’t going to have it and we are gonna have to make up data so players think we do,” I answer. The next day, Sportvision talks Ben and his screwdriver through some Apollo 13–esque desktop-tower surgery, which restores partial function, but the computer won’t be all the way back until the company can send someone out to replace a part.
There’s only one piece of positive news: Ben and I and our scouting staff now have a nickname, which Noah relays by text from Pittsburg on June 5. “I overheard the Pacifics players calling us ‘The Corduroy Crew,’” he says. It seems as if we aren’t going to live down the unintentionally identical outfits we wore to the tryout in March.
As slow as our own start has been, Ben and I are intoxicated by the Stompers’ success. The degree to which the Stompers are dominating the Pacific Association after one week is worth not one table but two. The first one summarizes our offense, which has walked more, struck out less, and hit for more power than every other team, and scored almost twice as many runs as San Rafael. The rightmost column, wRC+, stands for weighted runs created plus, which encapsulates the team’s offensive performance in a single stat, relative to a league average of 100. The Stompers’ 146 says they’ve been 46 percent better than the league as a whole.
The pitching disparity is just as significant: The Stompers have allowed fewer than half as many runs as San Rafael. It’s almost as if we’ve imported a team from a higher-level league.
Through six games, Feh’s goal of going 78-0 is still achievable. The Stompers have played 8 percent of their schedule, and thus far they’ve looked like they can’t be beaten. They’re the best. We’re brilliant. Baseball is easy.
* * *
When players ask me during dugout small talk whether Ben and I are having a good time, I shrug. I don’t want them thinking we’re here for some sort of fantasy camp, pretending for a few weeks that we’re real baseball dudes. Yes, technically, I’m having a great time. I’m having the best time of my life. I love the dust, proof of existence in this world, a thick layer of which by game three has ruined my sneakers and Stompers cap for any purpose but dugout wear. I love driving the ninety minutes to Vallejo to scout games with crowds as small as thirty, and then rushing back on silent freeways with the doomed hope that I might get home before every restaurant but In-N-Out is closed. I love cutting across the center field warning track in the fifth inning to change the video camera’s batteries, halfway done, and I love pulling the mouse cord taut at the end of the game and releasing it with a zzzzzip so that it winds itself back up for storage, done. And when Paul Hvozdovic asks to see which socks I’m wearing that day, some shades of argyle having taken on totemic value as luckier than others. And walking out to shut down the stadium lights with Theo, talking about the game the way actual front-office execs get to talk about games, the walk-and-talks that make us feel like we’re living an Aaron Sorkin script. And walking past the San Rafael dugout after one game in Pittsburg and hearing somebody call me, under his breath, and not nicely, but inadvertently the most charming compliment I could receive, “big league.” And drinking “preworkout,” the sickly sweet stimulant-powdered drink mixes the players all carry in their thermoses, “one part caffeine and two parts placebo,” which give some guys the itches. And when the Stompers score six in the first inning and Mark Hurley jogs past me to his position and says “nice scouting report.” And when Vallejo’s manager asks, “You’re the stat guy, right? You got any good shit about my players?” And when one of our guys homers deep to left field in San Rafael and I hop the fence and crawl into the space between the tennis courts and the municipal storage bins and find the ball and it’s dented, the thing is actually dented. And when I go home after games and play Tim saying “Score one for sabermetr
ics!” over and over. And the spark of aha! every time I confidently identify a pitch—for example, as a slider, not a splitter—to input into our software. This, maybe, more than anything, and this, maybe, the weirdest joy I’ve ever felt: I love logging data. Each pitch feels like our tiny contribution to the eventual organization of the entire world.
But, no, I just shrug. We’re here to work, I say. To contribute something and to stay out of the way.
By the time the Stompers roll into San Rafael for the seventh game of the season, we’re coming off the first perfect week in our franchise’s history. We’re beating teams so easily—outscoring our opponents by five runs a game, on average—that I ask Theo whether we’re in danger of being too good, whether the league might decide it’s not fair and break us up. Baps has hit safely in every game so far, and upon returning to his hometown for a series against Vallejo he scores the winning run in two of our three games there. Fehlandt is batting .357 with speed, power, and elite defense—Mike Trout on a rookie salary, just as we’d envisioned. Our spreadsheet guys are doing great, too. Our bullpen has allowed three runs in thirty innings, and our defense has committed half as many errors as the next-best team.
The Only Rule Is It Has to Work Page 15