Juicing the Game

by Howard Bryant

  The baseball people listened to Gibson’s complaints of QuesTec, but - weren’t completely convinced that his protestations contained a great deal of merit. To some baseball executives, Gibson was himself in over his head. He admittedly knew little about baseball and how it worked, and it seemed that QuesTec had become something of a crusade for him. To Sandy Alderson, QuesTec was merely a starter technology and Gibson had latched on to it as his pet issue. Part of the QuesTec trouble, thought another baseball executive, was that Gibson was as much of a baseball novice as the technology itself.

  The pitchers, convinced that QuesTec did not expand the strike zone, but shrank it further, hated it. Early in 2003, Curt Schilling took a bat to one of the QuesTec cameras at Bank One Ballpark in Arizona. He was fined $15,000, the price of the camera. Some of the umpires privately congratulated Schilling and other pitchers vocal about the system’s failures, such as the Mets’ Al Leiter, but Larry Gibson didn’t particularly agree with the pitchers, either. He was convinced QuesTec was so inconsistent that it did not produce any type of pattern, in favor of either more balls or more strikes.

  Still, it had its supporters. Even if the technology was not yet perfect, some argued, at least the problem of accuracy was being addressed. That had value. Alderson was pleased that after two years baseball had finally adopted a system of monitoring the accuracy of the umpires.

  The umpires themselves were jumpy. The old umps who remembered 1999 seemed convinced that baseball didn’t want them to use their own judgment, that the technology was doing their job for them. Then Alderson attempted to tie perks to their accuracy. Only the highest-rated umpires would be offered plum assignments, such as the postseason and World Series, so running afoul of QuesTec was not wise. But that wasn’t the half of it, because QuesTec had been sold to Gibson and the umpires as a training tool only. Early into the 2003 season, Gibson learned QuesTec was being used to evaluate umpires, a condition he never agreed to. He felt burned by baseball, particularly Ralph Nelson, and immediately filed another suit against baseball, citing the fact that the technology was too inaccurate to be a fair judge of an umpire’s ability. Gibson’s fury rose when he later uncovered a copy of Nelson’s original contract with QuesTec, which revealed that it had always been viewed by baseball not as a training tool, as he was told, but as a method of evaluating the performance of umpires.

  HOW QUESTEC ascended from an untested technology, initially created as a cute graphic for television, into an umpiring training aid and ultimately into the main evaluating system for the umpires was a study in bureaucracy and, most likely, ego. Gibson did not believe QuesTec to be the handiwork of Sandy Alderson. Rather, he believed it all went back to Ralph Nelson. If anything, Gibson believed, Alderson and baseball stuck with QuesTec both as a face-saving measure and because Nelson had cost baseball millions.

  For Gibson, there were too many questions to ask. Had Nelson sought an independent evaluator for QuesTec before signing the deal with Ed Plumacher? Had there been any other competing technologies available that could have done a better job than QuesTec? Gibson answered that question himself in the negative, because no other companies promised the level of accuracy QuesTec said it could deliver. Did Nelson do any kind of background check on QuesTec or its partners? What was their level of expertise in building evaluating tools? Gibson had hired a team of scientists, including Robert Adair, the renowned Yale professor who wrote The Physics of Baseball, to analyze the QuesTec technology. Adair’s findings were not completely dismissive of QuesTec, nor did Adair absolve the umpires. His conclusion was simply that the technology was not quite ready to be an evaluating tool.

  Ostensibly, the battle was about the strike zone, but its real subtext was power, and for the second time in two years, Sandy Alderson was fighting with the umpires. This time, however, he was not the hero trying to clean out an entrenched bunch of umpires whose hubris had corrupted them. Now it was Alderson who was being perceived as the inflexible one. In 1999, Bud Selig had eliminated the American and National league presidents’ offices, which had existed for nearly eighty years. The umpires, who for decades had worked according to league, would now work both leagues equally and report directly to the commissioner’s office. To the opponents of Selig and Alderson, the umpires were merely another part of a power grab. To Alderson, it was not possible to redefine the zone if the men behind the plate were not willing to adhere to the new regulations. “I think it began with a handful of umpires who have just resisted the notion that the strike zone is defined by the rulebook and not by individual umpires,” he said. “What you have then is certain umpires trying to enlist the help of certain players in their campaign against the notion that there is a single strike zone that needs to be called.”

  To some of the players, it was a power play of another kind, in which a person who had never played the game was now trying to impose his will on what occurred inside the lines. Alderson had crossed the magic barrier. He wasn’t a player. Rob Dibble, a former pitcher who owned the distinction of having come to blows with his manager Lou Piniella in Cincinnati, closed his mind to Alderson and anyone who wasn’t part of the fraternity. The passionate Dibble wasn’t considered an intellectual among his peers or even particularly influential, but as an analyst for ESPN, he owned a national forum, and used it to unload on Alderson. “The umpire sets the tone for a ballgame. I would scrap QuesTec right now,” he said. “There is no room in baseball for computers and video run by people who never played or umpired themselves. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” It was another example of how myopic baseball could be about new ideas, and Alderson, always one to question the existing structure, tended to be a frequent target of the old guard.

  There were other, more serious problems for baseball. Ralph Nelson was in trouble again. QuesTec was his baby. He had brokered the deal and nobody was happy about it. As the umpires complained about QuesTec, and Gibson had already taken baseball to court on their behalf, Nelson, true to his pit-bull image, gave back as hard as he got. “They just don’t like being judged,” Nelson said in an interview with the Arizona Republic. “The analogy I use is that of a divorced family. The kids go to Dad’s house and have ice cream for breakfast. They come home to Mom and have to live by stricter rules. So, of course, they want to stay at Dad’s house. They want to eat ice cream.”

  A week later, Nelson announced a stunner. He would resign immediately as the supervisor of umpires and leave baseball. Alderson had no comment. Rob Manfred offered no reason for the resignation (which was seen in certain parts of the game as an unofficial firing), but said the departure was not related to Nelson’s interview with the Republic. From his Baltimore office, Larry Gibson went on the offensive. “Ralph Nelson is the person who signed the five-year contract with QuesTec. He did so without obtaining any independent review of either the company or the system. He relied upon the claims of the vendors as to what the system could do. QuesTec has become an embarrassment to Major League Baseball.”

  NOTHING ABOUT QuesTec was quite as impressive as it seemed. That was especially true of Ed Plumacher, who, to the embarrassment of baseball officials, had never been subject to even the most cursory of background checks. During his rise in baseball, both Plumacher and QuesTec were being hunted by federal and state authorities in two countries. Had Nelson checked when he made the deal with QuesTec on that Valentine’s Day in 2001, he would have found out that the American Stock Exchange had investigated Plumacher when he worked for Shearson Lehman for several violations, including authorizing stock trades without the consent of his clients. The AMEX said in 1994 Plumacher tried to cover his tracks by changing the addresses of certain clients to his own. Two years later, when Plumacher had made his big score with baseball at the winter meetings, the AMEX had just censured and permanently barred him from holding an officer title in any companies that were part of the Exchange. The next year, the British Columbia Securities Commission had charged Plumacher with thirty-four counts of failing to disclose his s
tock holdings for three years. The Canadian commission then checked his background and relationship with the AMEX and found that Plumacher had not only misrepresented it, but lied to them a year earlier. “In March 1996, Plumacher had given the Canadian commission a sworn response to a questionnaire,” wrote the New York Times. “When asked if he had been ‘reprimanded, suspended, fined or otherwise disciplined, in any jurisdiction, by a self-regulatory organization,’ he answered no. He did not divulge the charges he faced from the American Stock Exchange.” The Canadian commission responded by fining him $5,000 and barring Plumacher from holding any officer position with a public company for eight years.

  Under Plumacher’s leadership, QuesTec had been fined on two occasions by the New York State attorney general’s office, both times for selling unregistered securities. The second time, which came after Plumacher signed a written statement promising he would discontinue the practice, the fine was increased tenfold, from $2,000 to $20,000. Plumacher had been previously fined $1,600 for withholding insider stock reports.

  By 2003, only QuesTec’s bizarre and shaky relationship with Major League Baseball gave it a semblance of life. The Deer Park office closed, with only a P.O. Box and a fax number remaining as proof that the company ever existed. Ed Plumacher, barred by two stock exchanges from holding any meaningful position in QuesTec or any other public company, remained baseball’s chief contact for QuesTec. The number baseball used to contact him was a cell phone.

  In 2004, one hundred shares of QuesTec stock could be purchased for a penny. Numerous employees discovered QuesTec had allowed its company health coverage to lapse and were left with enormous medical bills. Ron Klimkowski, who once pitched in the big leagues for the Yankees, was fired in October with an unsigned letter from QuesTec while attempting to recover benefits for unpaid medical bills. Daniel Beard, who installed the camera systems in various big league ballparks, sued Plumacher for unpaid wages and for equipment and travel expenses. A judge awarded him $117,000, which Plumacher did not pay. The Department of Labor began an investigation of the company. Meanwhile, the man who forged baseball’s connection to QuesTec, Ralph Nelson, went underground, some said to Hawaii, others said Arizona.

  Why baseball sacrificed its credibility for Ed Plumacher and a questionable technology remained a mystery. “The umpires’ view is that not only is it unreliable and inaccurate, but that management knows this, and got stuck out there,” Larry Gibson said. “For whatever reason, they did not feel they could publicly back down.”

  BOB WATSON loved to look at a hitter’s feet and shoulders. Watson played in the majors for nineteen years, hit .295, was a hitting coach and, like Leo Mazzone when it came to pitching and Rich Melloni about the science of the brain, grew energetic about the subject of hitting. The first step to hitting, Watson believed, was always to respect fear. It was all part of the natural balance between pitcher and hitter. Hitters wanted to control the plate and it was the pitchers’ job to make hitting as difficult as possible. Hitters wanted to hit, but had to be mindful of getting hit. This was especially true in righty-righty or lefty-lefty matchups. The instinct to dive out over the plate to get that crucial jump on a pitch or to avoid being beaten on the outside corner had to be tempered by the possibility of getting drilled up and in, especially in the high shoulder or head area, by an inside fastball. To Bob Watson, the fear of getting smoked by that pitch was an essential part of hitting. For the pitcher, it was built-in assurance that a hitter would not be able to drive the outside pitch with power. That the outside corner was sacred. Pitches on the outside corner were supposed to produce defensive swings, not aggressive ones.

  When Watson was general manager of the Yankees in 1996, he saw Brady Anderson’s 50-homer year as the start of something new and different in the art of hitting a baseball. It started with how differently hitters were approaching their task. Watson thought this fundamental change was epitomized by his young shortstop, Derek Jeter. Not only did Jeter stand virtually on top of the plate, but he leaped at the outside pitch, not with the intention of slapping a hit or fouling off a pitch, but of driving it to the opposite field. It was an aggressive lunge, the kind of attacking motion that in Watson’s day would have produced a hostile response from any pitcher in the game. “Watch the old videos of the way we hit,” Bob Watson said before Game Four of the 2004 World Series in St. Louis. “You’ll see the slightest hesitation in a hitter as he strode into the ball. It was that instinctual protective flinch to make sure the ball - wasn’t in here, at your head or into your body. It’s subtle, but you can definitely see it.”

  With a few exceptions, usually burly power hitters such as Don Baylor or Frank Robinson, it was unheard of for a batter to hit with such aggression. The few who did earned the distinction of getting hit more often than other hitters. The approach epitomized by Jeter meant that a hitter could now control both sides of the plate, which upset the century-old balance of the hitter-pitcher relationship. Joe Torre, who managed Jeter, was stunned by the new phenomenon, for Jeter was no anomaly. The approach went against everything Torre knew about hitting. One of his best friends in life was Bob Gibson, the great Cardinals’ pitcher of the 1960s. Torre often wondered how the ferocious Gibson would have responded to hitters such as Jeter, Mike Piazza, and Manny Ramirez who aggressively dove out over the plate to attack the outside pitch. Gibson more than once dusted a hitter who dared take the outside corner, putting him in the dirt. “If I mistake inside, fine,” Gibson once yelled at Bill White, a former teammate. “But the outside corner belongs to me!”

  As a former catcher, Torre knew the only way to combat this new, aggressive style of hitting was to do what Gibson would have done, to remind the hitter, in Torre’s words, “that he would get knocked on his ass, or at least have something to think about.” Yet Torre found that this response was virtually nonexistent in the current game. Not only did very few pitchers discourage hitters from encroaching on the plate, but they - hadn’t ever been taught to do so. It was as if even they regarded this clear violation of the pitcher’s plate space as normal. To Torre, it was a new and (for a pitcher) frightening trend. A generation of pitchers had grown up in the game without knowing how to establish the inside part of the plate. It was unheard of. If the pitchers didn’t demand some portion of the plate, they were bound to get killed, Torre believed. With no system to check a batter, hitters would be able to extend over the plate without fear of brushback. They could cheat outside, fouling off pitches until a pitcher had to throw the ball on the inside part of the plate where it was more likely to get creamed. Add to that a misshapen strike zone, which meant a hitter didn’t have to worry about the high strike, and he could drape himself over the plate, lunge for the outside pitch, and adjust to the pitcher trying to sneak a low inside pitch past him.

  Don Baylor saw the change in pitching as the greatest transformation in the game during the era. “All of the fear that used to be a part of hitting has been taken away,” he said one day in spring training in 2005. “Major League Baseball has taken away the aggressive side of this game. There is absolutely no fear factor.”

  Hitting without fear, Torre thought, was a luxury any hitter would kill for. It was like a boxer being taught to throw haymakers without worrying that he might get hit with one himself. Torre thought Derek Jeter was a great example, for many of his home runs were hit to the opposite field. But if he enjoyed watching Jeter dive and drive outside pitches for extra-base hits, he also knew it meant the same thing could happen to his pitchers.

  By 2002, Bob Watson had joined Sandy Alderson in the commissioner’s office, taking over the position of baseball’s vice president for on-field activities. That meant it was Watson’s responsibility to discipline players for on-field infractions. What Watson found in the corridors of baseball’s headquarters was a desire to put a stop to the beanball and the brawls that would result from it. It shouldn’t have been anything new, as the official rules for years had condemned and outlawed intentionally throwing th
e ball at the hitter, yet over the game’s history, common law had prevailed; the umpires had adopted a code of letting the teams settle their differences on the field. Each team got one, and it was a one-for-one. If the cleanup-hitting center fielder of the Cardinals got hit, then either the Giants’ cleanup man or the center fielder was going down (unless, of course, he happened to be the same person). Then it was supposed to be over. Both teams got their shot, and the bad blood ended.

  Under the new system, managers thought that the great intimidators of the game such as Pedro Martinez were even more intimidating, for they knew how to manipulate the warning rules. Martinez could deck a hitter, setting the tone for the entire game, and his hitters would not fear reprisal, for the warnings were already in place. The key when facing a pitcher such as Martinez, thought Don Baylor, was to attack his batters first, forcing Martinez into a defensive mode in which he would risk ejection by retaliating.

  Don Baylor remembered as a young player having great success against the Angels’ Andy Messersmith. He hit his first big league home run off Messersmith on April 29, 1972, beginning a streak in which he would go nine for ten against the right-hander. In the eleventh at-bat, Messersmith drilled Baylor high in the back. As Baylor trotted to first, he yelled at the pitcher. “What was that for?” Messersmith retrieved a new ball and yelled back. “You’re nine for ten against me. Didn’t you think it was time?”