The Only Rule Is It Has to Work

by Ben Lindbergh

  In the Friday game, Canseco’s timing is off and he looks as old as he is, going 0-for-4 and giving the spectators only one ephemeral thrill on a fly to the deep part of the park. But after he loses to Isaac Wenrich in the Saturday derby (despite drilling the facing of the Veterans Memorial Building well beyond the Arnold Field fence), Canseco’s swing seems to be back. Setting up in the box with the same imposing physical presence and open stance he had decades earlier, he rips a single off the wall in left-center—he can’t really run—and then leads off the sixth with a solo shot that Tim Livingston estimates at 410 feet, starting a Stompers comeback that culminates in a one-run win. Canseco can still catch up to a fastball, provided it’s centered and flat: We clock the pitch he hits out, off Pacifics starter Max Beatty, at 90 mph. The team draws 680 fans on Friday and 872 on Saturday—big numbers by Stompers standards, not to mention the extra proceeds from the Canseco Stompers shirts that Theo will be trying to sell out of until approximately the end of time. It’s also the only time all season that the team is on local TV.

  A little over a week after Canseco leaves Sonoma, his agent emails Theo to ask if we’re interested in signing him permanently at a “decent” rate. “He found a new love for the game after playing with u guys,” the agent writes.

  “We should tell him to play for his newfound love of the game,” Ben says.

  “Ask him what he runs a 60 in,” I joke. And then, on the off chance that Theo is actually intrigued, I make it clear that I’m strongly against bringing him back.

  “I’m doing my due diligence,” Theo answers. “From a pure baseball standpoint, where you get to comfortably reside, it is a for sure no. But as far as selling tickets, having an attraction and league visibility, we have to at least ponder this.” The next day, he texts me that he’s beyond pondering: He’s signing Canseco for the rest of the season.

  I text Ben to tell him I’m infuriated. “I want to quit this stupid project now,” I write. It feels like all our authority, and our ability to represent ourselves as a team that’s really trying to win and has the best interests of its young players at heart, has been wiped away with one move. Ben is already trying to figure out how we’ll squeeze Canseco onto the roster, which has less room for him than my compact car. Will we platoon him with Baps? Could we trade Carranza for an ace starter? Whom will we drop? Theo’s ducking my calls, so I start fomenting rebellion: I text the roster news to Fehlandt, who is as “hell naw” about it as I am. There’s a real chance that he’ll refuse to play or manage if the front office foists Canseco on him. I’m egging him on, trying to get him to issue an ultimatum. Finally, seven hours after I woke up to the news, Theo picks up my call. Laughing, he admits that it was all a joke. Not only are we not re-signing Canseco, but Theo never seriously considered it.

  Sheepishly, I tell Fehlandt that I wound him up for no reason. “I’ve never been more got than I just got got,” I text Ben. At least I’ve learned something from this embarrassing experience: It is possible for me to find common ground with Feh. All it takes to force us into an uneasy alliance is a false alarm about a fifty-year-old former Bash Brother. I guess we’ll have to hope that exact scenario arises again.

  9

  BREAKING BARRIERS

  There’s an ad from my childhood that I saw so often it’s stuck with me, even though I no longer know who paid to put it on TV. It was like a lighthearted cover of a Sally Struthers commercial, which made poverty seem almost pleasant: Instead of starving children in squalid surroundings, it showed a well-fed but apparently poor boy playing with a puppy, backed by the boy’s grateful voice reading a letter to the man whose donation made the puppy possible. “I’ve never met you, but I love you,” the voice-over said. The ad was supposed to put parents in a giving mood, but it made me envy the boy. I couldn’t convince my mom to get me a dog before fifth grade.

  I think of this ad for the first time in years thanks to Taylor Eads, an outfielder from Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama. In my mind, he’s both the boy in the ad and the man who supplies the puppy: I want to help him, and I want him to help me. And I love him (in a purely statistical sense) long before we meet.

  I see Taylor’s name for the first time on June 12—the day before his twenty-third birthday and two days after the final round of the MLB amateur draft—when Chris Long sends us a spreadsheet of 2015 senior position players, ranked using the same statistical method that guided our preseason signings. The top rows look like this:

  Just as I did months earlier, I filter Chris’s spreadsheet, resentfully removing the drafted players who are already negotiating with the major league teams that took them. Uhl was selected in the seventh round (215th overall) by the Seattle Mariners; he eventually signs for a $50,000 bonus. Kaczmarski went to the New York Mets in the ninth round; he settles for $5,000. Tice was a thirty-sixth-round pick by the St. Louis Cardinals, who have previously struck gold by using stats to pan for prospects at the tail end of the draft. Rainey is a serious prospect: He was taken in the second round by the Reds, for a bonus of $432,950. He was near the top of our list as a hitter, but he was drafted as a pitcher, which gives you some sense of how good at baseball one has to be to catch a team’s eye early on. Rainey, we learn later, once struck out Eads on a 97 mph fastball, the hardest pitch Eads had ever seen (and harder than any he might see with the Stompers).

  My first fixation from the spreadsheet isn’t Eads, but Nick Sell, a senior from Seton Hill, a strong Division II team outside of Pittsburgh. In a pitcher’s park, Sell batted .444/.520/1.032, with 28 homers and way more walks than strikeouts. He finished first or second in Division II in virtually every offensive category, and he won the Tino Martinez Award, D2’s equivalent of the MVP. Somehow, he wasn’t one of the 1,215 players picked during the draft’s forty rounds. “I’d jump on that guy like a hobo on a ham sandwich,” Chris tells us.

  Our infatuation doesn’t last long. The next day, while trawling Twitter for info on our top targets, I discover that the Los Angeles Dodgers have signed Sell as an undrafted free agent. According to a newspaper report, the team’s assistant director of player development called him two minutes after the draft ended, pouncing just after Sell’s spirits had sunk. No one else offered a contract, so Sell now belongs to L.A. “I’d be throwing furniture if I still worked for the Padres,” Chris says. “That’s the kind of stuff that literally gave me ulcers.”

  On June 17, Collins Cuthrell—the third-ranked undrafted hitter—signs with the Florence (Kentucky) Freedom of the Frontier League, a higher-level circuit that’s also close to his home in North Carolina. It’s a week after the draft, and Eads is the only one of those seven leaders who’s still on the board. This makes him my precious.

  Eads, a right-handed outfielder from Slidell, Louisiana, batted .538 for the Spring Hill Badgers, with a .623 on-base percentage and an .846 slugging percentage. (All three of those numbers have implied exclamation points.) He walked or was hit by a pitch twice as often as he struck out, and his team went 16-0 against Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference competition. Unlike Kristian Gayday, our first spreadsheet signee, Eads wasn’t a one-year wonder. In high school, he homered in five straight at-bats and was disciplined enough to take a walk between the fourth and fifth dingers. As a junior in college, he batted .423 with an OBP over .500 and a slugging percentage well over .700. Because of Spring Hill’s provisional status in 2015—a consequence of switching from the NAIA to Division II—Eads was ineligible for league awards, but he was a second-team NAIA All-American in 2014, which speaks to some all-around skills. He’s a fifth-year senior, which makes him less projectable (and less appealing to MLB teams) than a younger player with the same stats, but we aren’t ageists. “Eads has the OBP skills to really push up your scoring,” Chris tells me. “He’d grind opposing pitchers into dust. He’s the guy if you can sign him.”

  I’m less worried about persuading Eads to sign with the Stompers than I am about persuading Feh that the team needs another rookie. I k
now the stats alone won’t sell him, so I have to paint a more complete picture, preferably one that appeals to Feh’s old-school sensibilities. A few days after receiving Chris’s spreadsheet, I email Frank Sims, the head coach at Spring Hill. Unlike a lot of college coaches, who seem to log in to their email accounts on a quarterly basis, Sims sends me a lengthy response almost immediately, which seems like either an indicator that he cares about Eads or a sign that he’s sick of Spring Hill being passed over by major league teams. (The most recent Spring Hill draftee was selected in 1994.)

  Yes I think Taylor would be very interested in playing some independent baseball. He is working out for the White Sox today in Birmingham so I know he has a strong interest in wanting to play more baseball. Taylor comes from a very poor family, they lived in a FEMA trailer after Hurricane Katrina (he is from the New Orleans area). His mom left the family a few years ago leaving his dad to raise three kids with one special needs child! His character and work ethic are very strong and he also loves the fitness end of athletics. He was voted Captain his two years at Spring Hill and did a nice job in that role. The other players knew he worked hard and played hard every play!! He was our team leader!

  His outfield play is very solid. Runs a 6.9, gets good jumps on balls and is not afraid of the wall. His arm to me is a left fielder’s arm in pro ball. It is an average arm in college baseball. He played right field for us and a little center. He is very strong at the plate, hits the ball consistently on the barrel and has a pretty good eye at the plate. Would have been the player of the year in our conference and would have had a great chance to have been player of the year in all of NCAA II if we had not been on provisional status. To be honest we had several teams contact us about Taylor, but no one drafted him! I thought he should have gotten a shot to play somewhere! He is a very respectful young man (the yes sir no sir type kid).

  It’s hard to imagine a more encouraging recommendation, or a more sympathetic player. Not only is Eads a statistical standout, he’s a fitness freak, a team leader, and a genuine Southern gentleman—the anti–Will Price. And his hardscrabble backstory is a documentarian’s dream, the perfect companion for his Twitter bio, which is pulled from an inspirational poster: “The ONLY disability in life is a bad attitude.”

  Later that day, I get a call from Spring Hill assistant coach Andy McCall, who works with the hitters and outfielders and oversees the strength-and-conditioning program. He also sings Eads’s praises. Most coaches don’t call me back; this is the first call I’ve received unsolicited. These sellers seem so motivated that I’m almost suspicious, but they’re mainly motivated by an attachment to Eads, which I already share. McCall sends me video from the White Sox workout. It’s a little more than a minute of footage, shot from a phone in the first-base dugout, in standard definition. The video is vertical, with big black bars on both sides, and Eads is standing inside a turtle-shell batting cage, partially obscured by its support bars. He watches one pitch, takes eleven swings, and connects eleven times, with a large stride, good bat speed, and a one-handed, helicoptering follow-through. I have now confirmed that he can make contact with batting-practice pitches. McCall also shares video of two outfield throws, shot from so far away that I can barely see the ball. With that, I have everything: stats, a story, two testimonials, and some low-quality, inconclusive video. It’s time to talk to Feh.

  The Stompers are rolling, having won eleven of our first thirteen games, so I know this will be a tough case to make. But I also know it would be a mistake to buy our own bullshit, like a monarch who convinces himself he’s a god. We’re good, but we aren’t unbeatable. And the stats say that our pitchers, in particular, have been lucky, succeeding in a way that almost certainly isn’t sustainable. Here’s where the league’s pitching staffs stand through our first thirteen games:

  On June 16, with his family in attendance and a small Pittsburg crowd buzzing about the Warriors’ win in the NBA finals, Matt Walker (of all pitchers) comes within two outs of a no-hitter before Diamonds third baseman Rich Mejia breaks it up with a single to center on a 1-2 slider. Walker’s complete-game one-hitter is all the more improbable because, as usual, he doesn’t have no-hit stuff: Walker whiffs only four batters but walks five, plunks two, and gets an assist from Isaac on a caught-stealing. The start is a microcosm of our staff’s season.

  No one has hit us hard: Our pitchers have allowed the league’s lowest Weighted On-Base Average (wOBA), an offensive statistic that measures the entirety of a batter’s contributions on the same scale as on-base percentage. But our strikeout rate isn’t impressive, and our walk and home run rates aren’t far out of line with the rest of the Pacific Association’s. As a result, our Fielding Independent Pitching, or FIP—an ERA estimator that filters out the effect of the defense by focusing on the “three true outcomes” (walks, strikeouts, and homers) that the pitcher largely controls—is actually higher than the Pacifics’, which suggests that our staff isn’t more skilled, even though San Rafael has allowed the most runs in the league. The big difference between the Stompers and everyone else is opponent batting average on balls in play, or BABIP: Ours is .276, while everyone else’s is at least 50 points higher.

  One of the sabermetric movement’s most counterintuitive, game-changing insights is that there’s little variation in most pitchers’ ability to prevent hits on balls in play. In 1999, at the peak of his powers, Pedro Martinez allowed a .323 BABIP, in a league where the average BABIP allowed was .301. The next year, Martinez’s BABIP allowed dropped to .236, even though he was slightly less dominant overall. Most variations in BABIP from one season to the next are noise, driven by bloopers and bleeders that fall in or evade fielders one year and not the next. Good pitchers are good mostly because they keep balls out of play (by striking batters out), while also limiting walks and suppressing home runs. There’s no sign that we’ll excel enough in those areas to keep throwing shutouts, and while we may be better than our opponents at defense, we can’t keep our BABIP below the major league average in an environment where both the fields and the fielders are bumpier than in the big leagues. Although I don’t admit we’ve been lucky when Tim asks me for a progress report in a Q&A on the Stompers’ website—knowing that the players might see what I say, I’ve already learned how to dissemble like a seasoned front-office exec—I know this won’t last. I want to build an ark to help the Stompers stay afloat during the flood of runs I foresee.

  Eads can’t help our pitching staff, but runs are runs, whether they’re scored or saved. If we can upgrade our offense, it will offset some of the regression in store on the defensive side. “Really, the moment you’re satisfied with your team you’re done,” Chris Long tells me.

  Left field looks like our weakest link. On June 17, Mark Hurley goes 1-for-5 with an error and fails to execute a sacrifice bunt. “If you’re having your LF sac bunt, yeah, he’s not the guy you want in LF,” Chris observes. The next day, the Stompers lose 3-2 to Pittsburg, and Hurley goes 0-for-3 with 3 strikeouts. This seems like my moment. Hurley is hitting .245/.310/.359 through 58 plate appearances, with 12 strikeouts and only 4 walks. His line sits just slightly below our Opening Day estimates: .260/.320/.370 (Sam’s) and .260/.330/.380 (mine). This was roughly how we thought he’d hit, and nothing we’ve seen has made us change our minds. “I don’t think your LF is going to do much better,” Chris says. “That’s unacceptable for that position.” Hurley is well liked, but he’s also a rookie, which keeps him outside of the clubhouse inner circle. Nor does it seem as if the team views him as a budding superstar: Although our players have taken to calling him “Baby Bulldog,” the nickname owes as much to his age and his underbite as to his mentality. In the dugout one day, as Hurley went down swinging, I heard the Stompers’ starting pitcher say, “Hurley’s like clockwork. Takes a first-pitch fastball and swings through a second-pitch breaking ball, every time.” He sounded disappointed that he wouldn’t get to face Hurley himself.

  The morning after the loss on June 18, I put
together a Taylor Eads primer for Feh, including the stats, the character reference from Coach Sims, and the batting-practice video. “I’m hesitant to suggest any changes because I know we don’t want to mess with what we have going,” my email begins, an attempt to defang Feh’s response. “On the other hand, we don’t want to get complacent because we’re off to a good start.” I also mention that while Mark is a good guy who gives a great effort, his bat seems a little light for a left fielder’s.

  The reply, which comes later that day, doesn’t even mention Mark.

  As good as Taylor sounds, there is no way I’m replacing an outfielder that we have with him. If we release TJ the chemistry will easily take a shit because he is close with everyone on the team. And Yuki as well has earned everyone’s respect and admiration. It has nothing to do with complacency, it has to do with guys doing their jobs. If changes are made when guys are doing their jobs, then every single person in there starts feeling the pressure because if guys doing the job get released than anyone can. I understand what you are saying, but until we need to make a change im not going to be for making one.… We have the best team and we are playing baseball the best. Now is not the time for changes.

  I see what Feh is saying, even if I’m not sure whether “take a shit” is a typo or something he intended to write. As an actual baseball player, he’s much better qualified to assess the impact of a move on team morale. I just wonder whether there’s a point at which it’s worth risking a decline in chemistry to improve a position. I respond to clarify that I’m not talking about T. J. or Yuki, which is how I learn that Feh is much higher on Hurley than we are.

  I don’t see Mark as a weak link at all. And honestly he is just learning the swing that will allow him to hit for power. Yesterday was his best batting practice yet. And I know he is getting the swing because he has driven two balls to the wall in left/ left center in the last few games. He hasn’t scratched the surface yet and he is getting the job done. And he has a level of knowing the nuances of the game that I know comes from the same coach that taught me. The instincts he has already shown me show that his baseball IQ and instincts are far beyond his level of experience and I know that is why. I have seriously no doubts about how he is going to perform we are only 13 games in and he has earned my confidence.