by Joe Torre
The missteps continued during the season. When the right-field platoon revealed itself to be a bust, the Yankees traded for the famously overpaid and undermotivated Raul Mondesi. They also traded Ted Lilly, a 26-year-old lefthander with a 3.40 ERA, to get Jeff Weaver, a soon-to-be-26-year-old righthander with a fragile personality who had been durable on the mound but only a little better than average with Detroit.
“I thought trading Ted Lilly in essence for Weaver was terrific, and I was wrong,” Torre said. “I remember telling Jeter about the chance to get Weaver and he was excited, because he didn't like facing Weaver. Again, I think that's another situation where New York played a part in not being able to realize your ability.”
Just how bad was Weaver? There have been 188 pitchers who threw at least 200 innings in their careers with the Yankees. Weaver pitched the worst of all of them, posting a 5.35 ERA. Weaver was another reminder of the challenge of doing business in New York. Because of the expectations and scrutiny in New York, the Yankees face a longer checklist of evaluative items on a player than do other teams before pulling the trigger on a signing or trade. They must ask not just “Can he play?” but also “Can he play in New York?”The years following the 2001 World Series would be littered with expensive mistakes of exactly that kind like Weaver.
“I was more like a deer in the headlights when I got there because I really wasn't sure,” Giambi said. “In Oakland, I was that leader, that guy. But all of a sudden you walk into a room with guys with just as many years in the big leagues as you do. In the beginning I was just more getting acclimated to trying to fit everything in. You realize after a while there are just so many people who need so many things, especially when you're the new kid on the block, the fresh story. Because before you know it you can find yourself saying, ‘Oh, I've got a game to play now?’ It happened.
“There are so many newspapers and they're all trying to vie for the same reader and they all have to have something different. They have to ask you different questions. That's where you learn how to fit in. Give people what they need or change your story a little bit or give them a little bit different quote and try to take care of them.
“I don't think it was bad, it was more like, ‘I've got to get this under control.’ The Yankees are the ultimate place to play if you're a player because it's all you can ask for. You have fans that are fanatical. You have your media. You're a traveling rock show. The Yankees are a traveling rock band.”
Not everyone was made for the stage. The 2002 Yankees, and those teams that followed, found themselves playing under tremendous pressure. No longer was it just the pressure of New York, but now it also was the pressure of trying to re-create the success of the Old Guard Yankees—and without that indomitable will that those men uniquely shared.
“With Paulie's retirement that kind of changed the core,” Mike Mussina said. “You're asking about a leader, and I don't think it was a guy. It was a group. It was like six or seven guys who kind of worked together as a committee, not necessarily one guy.
“It was just about winning the game that day, whatever they had to do. They could be 0-for-4 in the eleventh inning but fight their way for a walk. Whatever that small thing it took, that's how that group of guys played the game. You start losing guys who have been involved in most of the championships, that's big. It's hard to keep the same feeling when it's not the same people.”
Without the Old Guard core, or at least their playing values, the Yankees could never again live up to that mandate. And forced to find suitable replacements for those players, many of whom were homegrown, the Yankees did not run a productive enough farm system to sustain that culture. And when they needed to look outside the organization for those replacements, they found a changed landscape in baseball from when Watson, Michael, Torre and Steinbrenner reengineered the 1995 Yankees into champions.
Informational and economic revolutions were percolating around baseball. When the Yankees were winning championships, the teams they were competing against in the American League East were being run by men with mostly traditional scouting backgrounds who would never again run another team: Gord Ash in Toronto, Dan Duquette in Boston, Syd Thrift in Baltimore and Chuck LaMar in Tampa Bay. Most people in baseball, in fact, were just like them, running teams in dowdy, old-school ways that were made largely ineffective by the Yankees’ growing edge in resources. In the new century in places such as Oakland, Cleveland and Boston, young minds were studying and understanding baseball in new, cost-effective ways. They knew they could not outspend the Yankees. The answer was to outsmart them. It wasn't until the 2003 publication of the bestseller Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, which laid bare how Oakland general manager Billy Beane built winning teams on the cheap by exploiting “market inefficiencies,” that the Yankees and other teams in baseball understood the gains in research and development that were happening in the labs of these cutting-edge teams.
“There has to be a certain point that the game gets elevated,” Mussina said. “I think Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson in the NBA made everybody else have to be better. The league had to get better. Wayne Gretzky made everybody else have to be better in the NHL or he was going to embarrass them forever. So the league started to get better. I think the Yankees of the ‘90s forced everybody else to find a way to be better because what they were doing wasn't good enough. So they found a way to be better, so it elevated the game another notch.
“Like Jordan going away or Gretzky going away, the Yankee dynasty, it went away. We tried to hang in there. We've been in the playoffs every year, but it's not the same.”
The new-age general managers, freed from the shackles of conventional thinking, enjoyed an edge on the teams still doing business with old-school ways. They rooted for the old men to keep their jobs, and mourned when another team made the switch and joined the information revolution. They knew where to go to pick somebody's pocket to find undervalued, cost-efficent players. One general manager said he went to the same pigeon time and time again to pluck future big leaguers out of his farm system. The first reaction of the traditionalists to Moneyball was to deride its paint-by-numbers approach to evaluation. It was an easy shot to take. Beane's A's, after all, never made it to the World Series and they were built on as timeless a philosophy as ever existed: a perfect storm of talented and cheap starting pitching. Between 2000 and 2003, the Athletics made the playoffs every year largely because Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito started 57 percent of the team's games in that four-year period while costing Oakland the total sum of $7.2 million, or about $10 million less than the Yankees paid for 12⅔ innings of Steve Karsay in the last three years of his deal. But even the most crusty traditionalists eventually had to concede that Moneyball at the very least changed the dialogue in the game. If you were a dinosaur, it was something best kept to yourself.
“It's a sensationalized book that doesn't completely accurately depict what happened,” said Mark Shapiro, general manager of the Indians. “But it does pose the questions that should be asked. What are our decision-making processes? How are we making decisions? How do they fit into a strategy and a plan? I don't think Moneyball—leaning objectively all the way in making decisions— is the right way to go. The beauty of this game is that the reality is we're dealing with human beings. But if I were an owner, I would certainly have the right to ask,’What are our processes? How are we making decisions? How do our decisions mesh with each other as we implement a plan, a strategy? What are we doing at the levels beneath the major league team that support that plan? To facilitate us making the best decisions possible? In an inefficient environment, how can we be as efficient as possible? How can we find value?’
“Those kinds of questions have got to be asked by owners. What I think is—and this is theory—is that owners started getting asked by their friends. It's a small fraternity. David Glass of Kansas City starts getting asked by his friends, ‘Hey, did you read that? That's pretty incredible. Do you guys do that?’ Now all of
a sudden they go down and they look at a conventional old-school general manager, and they're probably not satisfied with the answers they're getting in response.”
The intellectual revolution took off. Teams now wanted not just a Billy Beane of their own, but a Paul DePodesta, the Harvard economics graduate who at the age of 26 became Beane's righthand man and the brains behind the numbers and at 31 became the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The game that depended largely on washed-up former players and reassigned company men to build a 25-man roster became a multibillion-dollar business that attracted well-educated minds to build organizations, even systems. When Beane, for instance, promoted David Forst, another Harvard grad with a sociology degree, to replace DePodesta, he posted an opening for Forst's former position as an assistant general manager. He received 1,500 résumés, including one from a chap who wrote, “I apologize, but I won't be available until June because I am completing my astrophysics degree from Oxford.” Beane wound up hiring Farhan Zaidi, a PhD in economics from Cal Berkeley who earned an undergraduate degree in behavioral economics.
“Guys that maybe 15 years ago spent four years at Goldman Sachs and then moved on to private equity are applying for jobs with baseball teams,” Beane said. “I remember when I sheepishly had to inform Farhan the amount of money we were paying him to start. The point being is that the résumés you see now are amazing. Partners in law firms are ready to give it up to work in baseball.
“I'm talking about entry-level positions, below Farhan, paying $30,000 starting salary. The people that got to Wall Street and want to work in sports are by nature very competitive. And because they are smart and competitive, the ultimate reward is they make a lot of money. Not that everyone makes a lot of money, but it's there to be claimed. That's the way it should be. I wouldn't even be able to apply for this job in another ten years. And it doesn't bother me.”
The rise in intellect meant that all organizations began to better understand the value of the players. For instance, after the 2002 season, the Red Sox encountered little competition for free agent third baseman Bill Mueller. He did not hit for power and he did not hit for an especially high batting average, the two traditional yardsticks for offensive “value,” and thus the two components tied most directly to pay. Splitting the 2002 season with the Cubs and Giants, Mueller batted .262 with seven home runs. The Red Sox signed him for three years (with the third year left to their option) at a total cost of $7 million. What the Red Sox knew then that most others did not, however, was that Mueller was far better than the average player at getting on base. And the more runners you put on base the more runs you could score. His career on-base percentage was .370. Mueller won the American League batting title in his first year with the team and helped the Red Sox to the world championship in his second year.
Four years later, Dave Roberts, a career .270 hitter with little power, went on the free agent market. By 2006, teams understood the value of on-base percentage and were paying for it. Roberts, like Mueller, did not have traditional value in terms of a high batting average or home runs. His value was getting on base. Roberts did not reach base as readily as did Mueller—his career on-base percentage was .344—but still he was better than the average player at getting on base. The Giants gave Roberts $18 million over three years, a whopping 129 percent increase over Mueller's value just four years earlier. Finding the next Bill Mueller became increasingly difficult with the rise in intellect. And if more teams were better at identifying the value of talent, then more teams had a better chance of putting together a winning ballclub.
“There are fewer inefficiencies to exploit,” Shapiro said. “It becomes harder and harder, particularly as the teams with the great resources become well run and more efficient in the way they operate. The opportunities are fewer and farther between. And that has created some of the parity you're seeing. Obviously, I still feel like there are opportunities in certain areas, but they're harder to find.”
Said Beane,”It used to be ten to twelve years ago I could call up Brian Cashman and there was always a yin and yang with teams. He could take my expensive players and I could value his younger players. It was a case of what was most valuable to each franchise. You could always find a dance partner. The biggest thing happening now is the ability to properly value what is the most valuable commodity in the game: the cost-controlled young player at a minimum salary who is productive at the major league level. Everything revolves around that.
“The Boston Red Sox are incredibly bright. They still have the resources to get the high-priced player, but they also value the young player with great player development. They can have the best of both worlds. The dangerous thing is when you have really smart guys that have a lot of money and are running those teams, quite frankly, when you look at Boston there's no reason to think they won't continue to win. The fact of the matter is you arguably have the brightest front office with lots of resources and an ownership group that supports it. They've turned the Red Sox into an international brand name with their on-field performance and marketing that brand. They created a Manchester United, an international brand.”
Intellect and player development is where Boston lapped the Yankees. The Red Sox, for instance, became so insatiable about the power of information that they deployed expert number crunchers to the NCAA headquarters in Kansas to input every available statistic on all college players in history into a database. They then cross-referenced those numbers against the performance of those college players who made it to the big leagues, and from there they devised their own tables of how college performance might help predict major league performance—information that would become critical in their draft-day decisions. They also hired a renowned trainer specifically dedicated to keeping pitchers healthy, understanding that arms and shoulders required a very different expertise and maintenance than the bodies of position players. (The Yankees, meanwhile, stumbled so badly looking for answers to conditioning issues that in 2007 they hired a “director of performance enhancement” out of a country club in Florida. Marty Miller had not worked in baseball in 10 years. After five hamstring injuries on the Yankees in four weeks, he was fired one month into the season.)
When the Yankees won, they did so with a very similar model to what is in vogue today: a core of cheap, homegrown players. On the 125-win 1998 world championship team, for instance, Jorge Posada, then 26, Derek Jeter, 26, Mariano Rivera, 28, and Andy Pet-titte, 26, were paid a combined $5.55 million. Bernie Williams, 29, another product of their farm system, was the team's highest-paid player at $8.3 million.
“The template wasn't much different than it is today,” Beane said. “As that core gets older it sort of needs to be rejuvenated to some extent. After around 30, 31 years old, you start to get depreciating performance due to age. You still need to have those 25-year-olds entering their prime. Free agents complement the core.”
The Yankees never replicated that sort of young core, in large part because they did not give their farm system the same priority they gave their 25-man roster, especially as their frustration grew with not winning it all.
“The Yankees have never been able to do both,” said one veteran general manager. “They've tried to change and do some de-construction, but it's so complicated over there, so institutional, so multiheaded, that Cashman has a hard enough time just tearing things down to build them back up. They are smart and they have talent. They got pretty lucky internationally with Wang, Cano and Cabrera—Arizona could have had all three in the Randy Johnson deal. That really helped them because they had terrible drafts up until 2006.
“But it's so hard to deconstruct there that they went so far in the other direction. They rushed starters and made mediocre prospects untouchable. It was too dramatic a pendulum swing.”
Another executive cited the declining health of George Steinbren-ner as a factor in the Yankees falling behind the curve. Cashman's hold on baseball operations, which he seized in 2005, became more complicated with a committee t
o answer to, involving Hank and Hal Steinbrenner, Randy Levine, Felix Lopez and Lonn Trost.
“They started to catch up,” observed the executive, “and they started, according to my conversations with Cashman, to understand what was happening to them with the Red Sox. They started to react to that and started to do things much more effectively and the dysfunction kind of went away for about two years. And now the dysfunction is right back. Cashman is wasting his time on things I don't have time to waste my energy on. Factions are starting up again.”
Said the Indians’ Shapiro,”Don't make the mistake, whatever is happening now, to think those teams with resources don't have a distinct advantage, particularly with how the Yankees were for a brief period of time and how the Red Sox are now.”
Teams moved beyond the popular conception of Moneyball long ago essentially because on-base percentage was no longer an inefficient market. So if all teams now recognize on-base percentage as well as the value of young players, what is the next inefficient market to exploit in order to make up the ground on the Yankees’ growing edge in resources? Beane laughed and said, “Just saying that gives me a headache. Every part of the game is measured now versus the dollar investment. It's about turning over every rock. It's more and more difficult. I think that's a good thing. I have no chip on my shoulder about being antiquated.”
The race is always on. The A's have tried to develop proprietary defensive metrics to identify undervalued players by way of their glove work. The Red Sox then set about working up their own defensive metrics based on Class-A and Double-A players—trying to snatch them before they got to the big leagues. Such a thinktank culture helps drive the game forward and fosters the spirit of parity: if the real currency of the game is intellect rather than money, then why can't anybody truly win?