The Only Rule Is It Has to Work

by Ben Lindbergh

  I’ve had three months to think about it. It has been a struggle. Eventually I turned to that old standby: the pro/con list. The pros were longer, but the cons were weightier. I remain mired.

  I guess the first thing to decide is whether I’d be good at it. That’s such a complicated question—I don’t really know whether most managers are good even after I’ve had twenty years to watch them—but in a very narrow, literal sense, did I even prove that I was “smart”? Ben and I weren’t very good at projecting performance. Before Opening Day, we each predicted our players’ slash lines or ERAs. We had seen their stats in previous years and knew their baseball histories. We had spreadsheet data on a bunch of them, and we had spent more than a week watching them in spring training and discussing their strengths and weaknesses with you and Fehlandt. If Ben and I are smart, we should have been pretty good at projecting their performance. We were not!

  Nailed Hibby! Missed more or less across the board on everybody else. We thought Kristian would be better than Joel! We thought Conroy would fall somewhere between Hvozdovic and Conley. You know a little about correlations, right? A correlation of 0 means no relationship, a correlation of 1.0 means a perfect relationship. The correlation between our projections and the actual stats was .24—what statisticians would call “a weak positive correlation.” In fact, if we’d had to fill out the opening lineup with the same nine guys that Fehlandt did, but in the batting order we thought was best, we would have barely outscored Feh’s lineup—5.79 runs per game to 5.73—and only because we wouldn’t have buried Hibbert in the ninth spot for crazy “second leadoff hitter” reasons. If we’d filled out the lineup using anybody on our Opening Day roster, based on our projections, we would have had Parker playing instead of Baptista and Gavlik instead of Mochizuki. Knowing what we do now about everybody’s performance, that lineup would have been significantly worse than Fehlandt’s, scoring 5.43 runs. Yuuuup. We were worse than Fehlandt. Happy now?

  Our spreadsheet was smarter than we were. Our six spreadsheet-signed pitchers allowed 4.39 runs per nine innings. The rest of the staff allowed 6.29. It is not a stretch to say that the spreadsheet might have kept us out of last place—if you and Fehlandt could only get a 6.29 ERA from your first choices, I don’t want to imagine your second-tier choices.

  But our spreadsheet hitters flopped. Among guys with more than 50 at-bats, Taylor was our second-worst hitter. Kristian was our third worst. And even when we had had weeks, even months, of observing our guys in games, we still misevaluated them. Ben wanted to cut Hurley, right before he turned into one of the league’s best hitters. We fought to get Moch dropped to lower in the lineup, and we finally succeeded around the end of July. He hit .389/.494/.597 in August, easily the best performance on our team. Remember when I sent T. J. an encouraging email in August, where I used HITf/x data to show how hard he was hitting the ball—that bad luck was making his numbers look worse than he was? “As you play your final eight games with us,” I wrote, “keep doing what you’re doing. You’re hitting like a beast, and you’re going to have a big final eight days.”

  He hit .174/.321/.174 the rest of the way.

  It’s easy to remember the good moves—that we saw Baps and Hurley and identified them as what they turned out to be, the two best players in a 100-person tryout; that we signed Santos, Stoops, and Sean sight unseen and got three aces playing for almost the minimum—and blame the misses on small samples. It’s easy to make the world look just the way you want it to. But I’ve spent the months since August wondering how far Fehlandt might have taken this team. Fehlandt was smart, too.

  Now, I don’t know how much it matters to you how good I’d be; I’m not sure how much it matters to me. Your goals as GM of the Stompers, near as I could tell, were, in order,

  1. Do right by these players; don’t get in the way of careers that might still go somewhere.

  2. Protect the existence of the team and league by producing an entertaining experience at sustainable expenses.

  3. Win.

  My priorities would be slightly different, but we agree on number 1. That was a revelation, actually. When this project was conceived, a little more than three years ago, we were going to take over a team and make them do all our crazy experimental stuff so we could see if it worked. True lab-mice conditions. The players were chum for our curiosity and ambitions. Over the years, we came to realize that no experiment would be useful if the conditions didn’t mirror real life. If we took away the players’ agency they wouldn’t perform, or to the degree they did perform it would all be polluted by resentment, mistrust, confusion, etc. So we could do the lab thing, but we had to do it in a way that was respectful.

  But once we started signing players and getting to know them, and especially once we saw them in spring training, we realized that they were not in our story so much as we were in theirs. They were the ones who were putting everything on the line to chase this dream, and if we didn’t respect those dreams—not just pretend to, but truly respect them—we wouldn’t be able to live with ourselves. So “do crazy stuff to see if it worked” changed to “do crazy stuff once we were confident it would work.”

  I don’t think this season answered the question of whether we’re good at this, but it did answer the question of whether, within the “their story, not ours” framework, we could do it at all—whether there exists a path for putting statistically derived unorthodoxy onto professional fields.

  Before this started, I was so afraid of asking the players to do anything new. But it wasn’t just me, you know? Fehlandt was afraid too. He was afraid that changing pitching roles would upset or discombobulate usage patterns. And Yoshi was afraid that the club would crumble if veterans weren’t treated with deference and rookies with a sort of paternalistic distance. That’s why he decided to bench Taylor Eads that one day, even though Taylor was our hottest hitter, and even though Taylor was the one I was most worried would lose confidence if he was benched for the new veteran outfielder. For goodness’ sake, Yoshi was worried every time we walked into his office that we were making him look “weak” in front of the team, that they would think statheads, not the manager, were making moves. But none of those fears—Feh’s, or Yoshi’s, or ours—were ever justified, and nothing we worried was one step too far ever led us off a cliff. The players even filled out their happiness surveys, hundreds of them deposited obediently into the lockbox. It’s funny, because statheads are the ones who get the reputation for treating players like number-generating cogs, for not respecting them all as individuals, but the old-school notions of how they had to be used seemed even more reductive: Sean couldn’t come into the seventh because the closer is the closer because he’s the closer, but isn’t he really just Sean? Isn’t the best way to use Sean the best way to use Sean?

  Paul just texted me, by the way. I had asked him if we were good, Ben and I. He said, “It was awesome learning the new ideas in the game we have been playing our whole lives. U guys were the smartest people in the dugout.” Man, I love Paul.

  Look, I’m never going to be the fair and impartial judge of my own performance. Maybe we were the worst. But yes, I believe we can be good for these players’ careers, just by being open to everything they can do. I believe we were good for their careers. Sean, Stoops, and Santos: They were retired, playing weekend rec leagues for fun. Now they’re prospects. You told me in August that the lesson from all of this may be that one person—or, between you, me, and Ben, three people—ultimately just can’t do that much, no matter how good their data. A baseball team is too complex an organism, and the center will always hold. In the standings, I think you’re right. But we did a lot, the three of us. It never felt wasted.

  Of course, a small but stubborn part of me wants to resist your premise about not being able to do much in the standings. Yoshi was a great manager, Theo. He wanted to see our data, he wanted to listen to our arguments, and he wanted to engage with new viewpoints. What made the second half so frustrating, and what makes
it so tempting to take Yoshi’s job, is that ultimately the last stage of every decision—even data-driven decisions—is the gut. Our data could get us only so far, and even we knew that to get from a spreadsheet to the decision on the field meant weighing the situation and taking a leap. Ben and I could look at the same data and come to two different conclusions; so, too, could Yoshi. Our guts diverged. When you show somebody data and they still do something you disagree with, it’s maddening. It feeds the appetite for more power. I want my gut to run things. My gut tells me my gut could add ten more wins.

  But was my gut any better? I can’t help thinking of Josh McCauley, the pitcher I signed three days into the season. I’d heard about Josh months earlier, when I was trying to recruit Paul. They had gone to the same college, and the coach there told me Paul probably wouldn’t sign with me but this other kid, Josh, was the one I wanted anyway. Big dude. Pitcher’s body. 6-foot-5, muscular, thick calves, threw in the mid-90s with a hammer curve. He’d been a D1 pitcher until an assistant messed up his class schedule and enrolled Josh for a class that Josh never knew he was in. At the end of the semester, an F landed on his transcript. It made him academically ineligible, and he’d gone to little Shepherd University just so he could get seen by scouts. Naturally, he found out later that that wasn’t allowed, either, and he had to sit out most of the year—but the scouts came anyway, watching him pitch before games that he was ineligible to pitch in. That’s how attractive Josh McCauley was. That’s how attractive all Josh McCauleys are.

  The Cubs took him in the twenty-first round. He went to Arizona to take a physical and sign the paperwork that would make him a professional ballplayer, but he failed that physical. The Cubs sent him home, unsigned. He had Tommy John surgery—his insurance, not the Cubs’, paid for it—and now he was trying to make his way back. He had signed with an upstart league in Oregon, but that league had fizzled just weeks into the season. That’s when Josh finally returned our calls. I talked to his manager in Oregon City, who assured me Josh was already throwing in the low-90s and was only getting stronger. But I looked at his stats in college and they weren’t very good. I looked at his stats in Oregon City and they weren’t very good, either. I should have stayed true to what we were doing, but my gut kept saying “big right-hander, big stuff,” and I chased that. Josh was awful. He pitched twice for us and threw nowhere near the low-90s. My gut had been gullible and disregarded the data.

  So now I get an offer not to do more with data—Yoshi heard the data, and was always open to it—but to do more with my gut. I’m not sure that’s a worthwhile goal. It feels like learning to accept that other people are going to make different decisions than I would is a far greater goal than pursuing absolute power so I can impose my own.

  Maybe that’s weird. Remember Vallejo’s bench coach? There was a day when he showed up in our dugout about an hour before a game between us and Pittsburg. I’d heard he was looking for a new job, even though he was still with Vallejo. So we’re making small talk and he asks me, “Hey, how far back in the standings are we now?” I tell him, “Vallejo? I think you guys are seven back in the second half.” And he says “I’m not with Vallejo anymore.” Oh, okay so—he’d been hired by Pittsburg? “Nah,” he says, “I’m with y’all now.”

  Well, I mean, no, he wasn’t. I knew that he hadn’t been hired by us, that he wouldn’t be hired by us, and that if somehow he had been hired by us I’d know about it. But there he was, just declaring it so. And it worked! He stayed in our dugout that entire game, our new bench coach by sheer will alone. Top-five moment of the year, Theo. And then the next day he decided Vallejo wasn’t so bad after all, and he went back there. So weird, so weird, but all year I saw how this attribute—show up and just declare you belong—makes indy ball go ’round. Like Matt Walker, showing up and declaring he belonged. Like that kid we didn’t draft at the tryout, the one who lied about his college stats and may have made up a suspicious sick grandma to try to get us to sign him—and who ended up getting a job with Vallejo and playing professional baseball for most of the year. This sport is for people who see an opening and take it and don’t ask whether they’re qualified or welcome. As you and Ben saw all year, I just don’t have the gumption to do that. Two paragraphs up, I was second-guessing hypothetical decisions I haven’t even made yet. I’m probably just not built for a baseball dugout.

  I don’t know, Theo. I keep going back to a conversation I had with McCauley on the third night of our season. I’d just picked him up at SFO after our wild, extra-innings win over Pittsburg, and we were eating In-N-Out just around midnight. Did I ever tell you about his order? He’d never been to In-N-Out, so I recommended the grilled onions. He tells me thanks, but “I don’t eat anything healthy.” Onions caramelized in oil was too healthy. He got a cheeseburger with no tomato, lettuce, or onion. Man, I loved McCauley.

  Anyway, while we’re eating I tell him what the Pacific Association is like. “There are some good prospects,” I say. “And there are some older guys. What I’ve learned is that there are two kinds of players in this league. There are the guys who are here because it’s just fun to play baseball, to be around baseball, and if somebody is willing to pay you to do it then why not? The economy sucks for job-hunting anyway, and they’re probably not giving anything up to be out here. Have fun, be recognized, party, play ball.

  “Then there are the guys who are here because they actually have a chance of making it, and this is what they need to do to get that chance. You’re one of those guys. Paul is one of those guys. The baseball world, for whatever reason, didn’t give you guys the chance you deserved, but you’re as good as a lot of the players it did. So you keep going until you get that chance.

  “But the hardest part for me is that a lot of the guys who should be in the first group think they’re in the second. They’re so stressed about every bad at-bat. They’re so hurt by every non-promotion. If they knew they were in the first group, I’d be so happy that they’re out there, having fun and living life. But they don’t, so instead it just makes me sad, that they’re chasing something that just doesn’t exist and getting their hearts repeatedly stepped on for it.”

  Last summer, Theo, I was the first type. I had the best summer of my life. I love those twenty-two ballplayers more than just a fan ever can. I’m inspired by what they do for the game, by what you do for the game. I wish I could live in that space forever. I can’t, though, not for first-type reasons. I’m old. My daughter’s first day of kindergarten would be during our final week of the season, and if I take the job I’ll miss it. My wife is going to be looking for a new teaching job, and if I do this I won’t be able to provide the support she’ll need. A baseball team feels like a family, but my family is my family, and I can’t leave them behind for another summer just because it’s fun. To take this job, I’d have to convince myself I’m the second type.

  It hurt too much to watch so many young men this summer convince themselves they were the second type. Thank you, Theo. However, with a heavy heart, I decline.

  But I hope you keep doing this forever.

  Sincerely,

  Sam

  THE SONOMA STOMPERS FINAL TEAM STATISTICS

  For more statistics, photos, and videos from the Sonoma Stompers’ 2015 season, visit the book’s official website at www.theonlyruleisithastowork.com.

  END-OF-SEASON AWARDS

  MOST VALUABLE PLAYER

  Matt Chavez, Pacifics

  PITCHER OF THE YEAR

  Max Beatty, Pacifics

  ROOKIE OF THE YEAR

  Mark Hurley, Stompers

  RELIEF PITCHER OF THE YEAR

  Sean Conroy, Stompers

  MANAGER OF THE YEAR

  Aaron Miles, Diamonds

  DEFENSIVE PLAYERS OF THE YEAR

  P: Sean Conroy, Stompers

  C: Isaac Wenrich, Stompers

  1B: Daniel Baptista, Stompers

  2B: Yuki Yasuda, Stompers

  3B: T. J. Gavlik, Stompers

 
; SS: Danny Gonzalez, Pacifics

  LF: Mark Hurley, Stompers

  CF: Zack Pace, Pacifics

  RF: Matt Hibbert, Stompers

  At the Pacific Association tryout in March, Daniel Baptista runs a speedy 60-yard dash, unseen by Sonoma Stompers general manager Theo Fightmaster and San Rafael Pacifics GM Mike Shapiro in the blurry background.

  Third baseman Kristian Gayday crushes the ball and breaks his bat in the Stompers’ Opening Day game.

  Paul Hvozdovic, a left-handed pitcher we discovered by analyzing the statistics of college pitchers who were overlooked in the major league draft.

  Isaac Wenrich, one of our catchers, quickly became a team leader. Here he is hugging and hydrating outfielder Mark Hurley.

  Theo (with cap) watches a practice with a stopwatch-wearing Ben Lindbergh.

  To bring fans to the ballpark, Theo invited former major league star Jose Canseco to join the Stompers’ roster for one weekend in June. From left to right: T. J. Gavlik, Paul Hvozdovic, Erik Gonsalves, Jose Canseco, Sam Miller (in blue shirt), Andrew Parker, Jon Rand.

  Managers Matt Kavanaugh of the San Rafael Pacifics and Fehlandt Lentini of the Stompers exchange lineups before a game at Arnold Field. Note the football goalposts in the field of play in right-center field.

  Bench coach Takashi Miyoshi (universally known as Yoshi) was surprisingly open to using advanced statistics to devise strategy.