Juicing the Game

by Howard Bryant

  Like Joe Torre, Don Baylor believed baseball policed itself. Except that in recent years, it hadn’t. Alderson and others in baseball’s front office found that hit batsmen were increasingly charging the mound, resulting in brawls that were not only more frequent, but more violent. Hitters never could understand the baseball custom of drilling the hitter following the one who just hit a home run. To Alderson, it was a remnant of baseball’s macho past. The old rules just did not apply in the modern game. There was too much at stake. Players made too much money to worry about getting smoked by a Randy Johnson fastball. That baseball had lived by frontier justice for more than a century did not mean it was the only, or even the proper, approach. There was no longer a place in the game for the old-school knockdown.

  As part of his negotiation with the new umpires, Alderson demanded rule 8.02(d) be strictly enforced:

  A pitcher shall not intentionally pitch at a batter. If, in the umpire’s judgment, such a violation occurs, the umpires may elect either to:1. Expel the pitcher, or the manager and the pitcher from the game or,

  2. Warn the pitcher and the manager of both teams that another such pitch will result in the immediate expulsion of that pitcher and the manager.

  If in the umpire’s judgment circumstances warrant, teams may be officially “warned” prior to the game or at any time during the game (League presidents may take further action). To pitch at batter’s head is both unsportsmanlike and highly dangerous. It should be condemned by everybody.

  Umpires should act without hesitation to enforce this rule.

  If Torre and Baylor believed that baseball should police itself, strict interpretation of the rules limited the opportunity for in-game justice. Now, by the strictest definition, one pitcher could drill a batter, and then the umpire would issue a warning. That essentially took away the opposition’s chance to retaliate and gave one team a free shot. Torre did not like that. Worse, as the edict was interpreted, the rule was talking not only about hitting a batter, but also about moving him off the plate. That meant that even if a pitcher simply tried to keep a hitter honest, he would receive a warning, and would automatically be ejected should he come inside again. That would throw a pitcher off his game. Pitchers weren’t merely being penalized for hitting batters, they were having the inside pitch taken away from them completely.

  Yet Alderson’s data told him that the entire notion of umpire warnings’ altering the rhythm of the game was unfounded. He said in its discussions with umpires, the league stressed that they use their individual instincts to gauge intent, thus allowing the natural flow of the game to continue as it had in the 1930s, 1970s, or any other decade. According to the data Alderson compiled, in 2004, 40 batters were hit by pitches after a warning was issued, but only 10 pitchers were ejected, a mere 25 percent. In 2003, 35 batters were hit after a warning, but only 12 pitchers were ejected from the game. In 2002, the numbers were 47 hit batsmen and 14 ejections. In 2001, slightly less than 10 percent of pitchers were ejected after hitting a batter after a warning: 30 players hit and 9 pitcher ejections.

  To Dusty Baker, the numbers felt hollow, suggesting that his eyes were deceiving him. “I’ve seen pitchers change their whole patterns. You can see it. I’m not sure I believe that.” It was another example of baseball’s cultural divide. “When you try to objectify something that has always been subjective, you run into these barricades,” Alderson said. “Maybe that is the conventional wisdom, but our data doesn’t support it.”

  To Sandy Alderson, the stakes were different than in Joe Torre’s day. The media was a big reason why. When Torre played for Milwaukee in the 1960s, Alderson reasoned, maybe one local station showed a replay of a hit batsman or even a brawl. The news cycle was limited to one day, and the trouble was over. Today, with twenty-four-hour cable and satellite sports programming, the footage of a brawl would be repeated constantly, fueling and refueling the bad blood. The game had to change, Alderson believed.

  To Jeff Brantley, who pitched in the major leagues for fourteen years, a greater phenomenon was taking place: The game had chosen to protect the hitter. Brantley thought of the NBA and the subjective art of calling fouls. A reach-in foul on an average player would never be called on Michael Jordan. The stars ran the show. Brantley believed a similar trend was taking place in the batter’s box. The hitters were the big-money guys. They were the biggest financial assets of a club, because even Pedro Martinez and Randy Johnson only pitched once every five days. What baseball had done, Brantley thought, was to protect the superstar hitters at the expense of altering the game’s delicate balance. “My opinion is if you’re the owner of the baseball team, you want your stars to be your stars,” Brantley said. “I want Nomar and Manny and Jermaine Dye and Eric Chavez in the ballgame every day. If I’ve got a headhunter throwing the ball in here and he breaks my third baseman’s hand, guess what happens? I’ve lost him since June 1, and you know what? I’m pissed. I’m upset. I don’t want that. So, I’m going to dictate to MLB, to the commissioner, and to the umpires that if you throw the ball in here, I want a warning right away. We’ve got to protect that player. All of a sudden, you have a whole change in the dynamic of pitching.”

  To the pitchers, a fundamental right and necessity of pitching had been stripped from them. There would no longer be balance. The league was purposely trying to protect the hitters to promote more offense and more home runs at their expense. Hitters were already wearing huge protective foam or plastic shields on their arms and elbows to protect themselves, a practice that made hitters less fearful. When the pitchers complained about excessive body armor (sluggers Mo Vaughn and Barry Bonds were two of the most egregious offenders), they were mollified slightly by limits on the length of the armor, but could not gain much of a sympathetic ear from anyone, including the Players Association, which contained more hitters than pitchers.

  IF THE pitchers believed an important tool had been taken away from them, they suffered the consequences of a larger, simmering battle between Sandy Alderson and the historical role of the big league manager. Managers wanted to prove they were in control and the best way to do that was to order knockdowns from the dugout. This was the part of the game that was the most contentious, the most macho. Clubhouses had been torn apart over a pitcher’s not protecting his teammates appropriately by not dusting an opposing batter. While managing Detroit, Billy Martin, one of the best but also most combative managers of his time, once ordered a knockdown pitch against Reggie Smith, the Boston center fielder, following a home run by the previous batter. The pitcher hit Smith, breaking his jaw. Weeks later, when Smith returned, the Red Sox were playing the Tigers at Fenway Park and Smith waited for Martin, challenging him to a fight under the right-field bleachers. In the modern game, however, with a hundred million dollars playing on the field at any given time, injuries and brawls now had to be kept to a minimum. Alderson felt that baseball needed to implement controls to discourage managers from ordering beanballs. By forcing the umpires to actively issue warnings, discern intent, and eject pitchers, baseball took yet another piece of control from the manager.

  To Alderson, a big league skipper was little more than a midlevel manager. He may not have been rank and file, but the manager wasn’t part of the executive inner circle, either. The manager was, actually, the most malleable piece of the front office apparatus. It was nonsensical to Alderson that a manager would be judge, jury, and executioner when it came to a team’s decision-making on players who in many cases would be with the organization long after the manager was fired. Yet that’s precisely how baseball did it. The old-school baseball world started with the manager, with McGraw, Stengel, Durocher, and Sparky Anderson. In those days, even the most devout baseball fans could barely name the general manager of any club. The official face of a team’s front office was the manager.

  Alderson would teach Billy Beane a lesson the latter would not only perfect but also articulate with such precision that no manager of the Oakland A’s could ever have any illusi
ons about his place in the organizational food chain. “There is a feeling that an organization begins with the manager,” Beane would say often, echoing his mentor Alderson. “It - doesn’t.” A few old-timers still existed. Joe Torre of the Yankees, Bobby Cox in Atlanta, and Tony LaRussa in St. Louis were throwbacks. They were also dinosaurs.

  “Managers are very controlling. You look at the managers today and the ones that are ‘my way or the highway’ are very few. It’s a remnant of another generation,” Alderson said. “If an organization is worth its salt—we’re talking about maybe the paradigm corporate existence where the corporation has a reputation, it’s been doing things for a long time, it’s innovative and has continuity—why would you turn that company over to not a middle manager, but a lower or upper manager? So as we went through—now this was post-Tony LaRussa—the attitude was, ‘We have a philosophy and we’re going to find a manager who is going to implement that philosophy. We’re not looking for someone to tell us how to run the team, or upon which theory it should be predicated. We already have that. We want someone who is going to implement it for us.’ That’s a very different approach.” Alderson recalled when Oakland hired Art Howe in 1996, after LaRussa went to manage St. Louis. The conversation was telling, and would underscore virtually every tension, every fault line between Howe and Billy Beane, over the following seven seasons as the A’s once again rose to power. “We sort of said, we want to make sure you’re compatible with us, because it’s going to be a tough fit otherwise,” Alderson recalled telling Howe. “But we’re not hiring you for your philosophy. We’re hiring you because we think you fit ours.”

  The on-field philosophy, how a team would approach the daily task of winning, no longer originated in the manager’s office, but in the front office. This created tension on two fronts. The first was that the manager became something of a lame duck. If a manager believed that he was still the ultimate authority once the game began, he found out swiftly and severely how wrong he was. The organization had no interest in a manager’s desire to hit and run or his hunches, and too much in-game independence on the part of a manager often resulted in either nasty confrontations after, as was the case in Oakland under Billy Beane, or the front office’s silent but permanent loss of confidence in its manager, as in Boston under Theo Epstein, Larry Lucchino, and John Henry. In either case, the manager found himself in fatal trouble for veering from the club philosophy.

  During a year in which he would win ninety-three games, Grady Little, the manager of the Red Sox, clashed constantly with the front office for trying to manage his way. On numerous occasions, Little had met with the club’s top executives, its three owners, and general manager Theo Epstein, and was explicitly told to manage the team using the data provided. In other words, no hunches that your hot-hitting second baseman will do well against a pitcher he has no lifetime success against. In 2003, Little came within five outs of taking the Red Sox to the World Series, but he never quite got with the program. Pedro Martinez was a different pitcher after 106 pitches, but Little ignored the numbers and lost the deciding game. He was fired as soon as the season ended.

  As more teams adopted the Alderson/Beane top-down approach, the role of the manager and of a scouting system that hadn’t changed much since the 1920s diminished, while the emphasis on analysis grew. So did tensions. In this new world, it was the general manager, not the manager, who would decide if the team would steal bases, hit and run, or sacrifice. Any manager who did not follow the philosophy wouldn’t have a job for long. In Toronto, J. P. Ricciardi spoke for this new breed of general managers when asked about the sacrifice. “Give up outs to score runs? We don’t do that here.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  For Bill James, the first thing to do when attempting to explain the post-strike era was not to figure out the effects of steroids, expansion, or even the shrunken strike zone. To the legendary stat guru, the first step was to confront the issue directly: Was the period from 1994 to 2002 the greatest era of offense in the history of the game? James agreed that on its face, the decade was extraordinary. The question, though, was whether the decade stood up as the greatest offensive era statistically as well as anecdotally. Maybe, James, thought, the thirties were more impressive than the nineties. In 1930, the entire National League hit .300 and the ball soared for the remainder of the decade. Given the opportunity, James was quite eager to crunch the numbers:

  You asked me a question in the press box at Fenway last week which I had never thought about, and to which I did not have any answer. The question was “Is this the greatest ‘hitter’s’ era of all time?” It occurred to me later that one should be able to develop a method to give a reasonably objective answer to this question, and so I have.

  The first annoying technical question we have to deal with here is “what do we do about unearned runs?” In the 1870s and 1880s there were large numbers of runs scored, not because of big hitting numbers, but because of huge, huge numbers of errors—many times more errors, and many times more unearned runs, than we have now. What do you do about those? You can’t really ignore them, because they are runs scored, and you can’t really count them, either, because they’re not evidence of a hitting era.

  I decided to count them as one-half—unearned runs are half a run each. If you count them as half a run each, then the norm of runs scored per game, throughout all of major league history, is 4.13.

  4.13 is essentially equidistant from 3.75 and 4.50. We will then decide that any year in which this figure is over 4.50 is a “hitter’s year,” and any year in which it is under 3.75 is a “pitcher’s year.” Make sense?

  That gives us hitter’s years and pitcher’s years, but what you asked about was a hitter’s ERA. I shouldn’t have capitalized era, because that makes it E.R.A., but you get my point. How do you decide what is the greatest hitter’s era?

  I decided on the following rules:1. Each season contributes to the “hitting era score” to the extent that the runs scored that year exceed 4.50 (counting unearned runs as half-runs),

  2. Two years in three over 4.50 signals the start of a hitting era,

  3. Three consecutive seasons under 4.50 mark the end of the hitting era.

  Thus, in 1994, when the average was 4.70, that counts as +.20. This becomes a “hitter’s era” in 1995, when the average was 4.63, which adds .13, which makes the “score” for the era (at that point) +.33.

  We are still in that era, and the “hitter’s era score” is now up to +1.71. This marks it, by my math, as the second-greatest hitter’s era of all time, and the greatest hitter’s era in “modern” baseball history, post-1900. By this system, baseball history can be sorted into three big-hitting eras, three pitcher’s eras, and periods of normalcy in between. The scores for these are:

  Thus, my answer would be that this era has now surpassed the 1930s as the biggest hitter’s era of modern baseball, but that it is nowhere near the levels of 1890s baseball.

  If the poststrike era was all about crushing a century of conventional wisdom, then it would come as no surprise that the most discussed figure of the first few years of the millennium would be Bill James, the statistical pioneer who, beginning in the late 1970s, captivated a growing base of fans disaffected by the lack of statistical evidence available to buttress generations of conventional wisdom. James himself was not any sort of firebrand. If anything, he was quite the opposite, not completely reclusive, but certainly more of an underground cult hero to the millions of baseball fans who, thanks to his groundbreaking Baseball Abstracts, began to view baseball in a completely new way.

  As the millennium began, a handful of young executives who grew up on James’s Abstracts found themselves in charge of major league ballclubs and began to construct their teams with an eye toward advanced quantitative analysis. In 2003, James himself accepted a position as senior adviser to Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein, thus making the ultimate leap from rebel outsider to connected insider. Over the previous quarter century James’s theor
ies had been easy for the baseball establishment to ignore, but now that they were being put into on-field application, they ignited a culture war between this new breed of executive and the managers, coaches, executives, scouts, press, and players who believed statistics to be overrated and were threatened by this new approach.

  In a way, the revolution had started in the mid-1980s when Sandy Alderson, early in his tenure as the Oakland general manager, began to employ Jamesian theories to the construction of the A’s, becoming one of the early proponents of the virtues of on-base percentage, thought to be the most important offensive statistic by James and his followers. Alderson recalled bringing in forty-year-old Reggie Jackson in 1987 to replace Dave Kingman as the team’s designated hitter. Jackson would have only one year left, and Kingman had hit 35 home runs the previous year to Jackson’s 18, but what motivated Alderson was that Jackson’s on-base percentage was a staggering 124 points higher. The only time Kingman was ever on base, it seemed, was when he was doing his home run trot. It was that ability to see beyond the traditional statistics, somewhat radical in baseball at the time, that separated Alderson from his peers.

  More than a decade later, Sandy Alderson and Bill James had something else in common: Neither tended to think steroids were the primary reason for the explosion in offense. Alderson in his position had to be mindful of various important political considerations; the game’s image was at stake. Children used the same bats, gloves, and equipment as their heroes. If they knew ballplayers used steroids, they could potentially use them, too. Being soft on drug use was death for a league with an image as public as baseball’s. It was in the game’s best interest, Alderson knew, to discourage drug use. When it came to analyzing raw data, however, Sandy Alderson was not entirely convinced of the steroid’s individual might.