The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  One area several teams are exploring as the next possible strategic advantage is biomechanics. Every team will agree that acquiring and developing pitching is the foundation to championship teams. But what good is great pitching if your pitchers aren't healthy enough to pitch? For all the planning and scheming it takes to build a roster, a team's season generally comes down to whether its rotation stays healthy or not. Even Torre's Yankees were proof of that. Here is the breakdown of Torre's rotations according to how many starters made at least 25 starts:

  25+GS YEAR

  2 2005

  2 1997,2001,2002,2004,2007

  3 1996*, 1998*, 2000*, 2003, 2006

  5 1999*

  * won World Series

  Torre won his four world championships only in the years when at least four starters took their regular turns. On the other hand, in the six years when he had to patch staffs together—when no more than three starters gave him regular work—his teams were knocked out in the first round four times and never won the World Series.

  Championships, then, might seem to turn on the vagaries of fortune, on the sheer luck of staying healthy. But what if health is not left to chance and can be controlled to a certain extent? What if data, and the analysis of that data, could improve a team's chances of keeping its pitchers healthy? Then you might have the next market inefficiency.

  Glenn Fleisig, PhD, and Dr. James Andrews did their best to explain this concept to major league trainers and executives at a special presentation in 2002. Fleisig and Andrews helped establish the American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, a nonprofit clinic devoted primarily to injury prevention.

  “We said, ‘Hey, we've got this biomechanics thing going,’” Fleisig said,”‘and we want to get into the prevention of injuries.’ We went for the home run: a contract arrangement with Major League Baseball in which we would screen all pitchers. We can figure out who is at high risk of getting hurt. They all said, ‘Great idea, but that's not how baseball works. Thirty different teams don't work as one company.’ “

  So ASMI opened its doors to individual teams. The A's were the only team to come through in 2002. The Indians, and then Red Sox, soon followed. The clinic now attracts 10 teams. ASMI puts reflective markings on a pitcher's body and uses eight special motion-capture cameras, using technology developed by Hollywood movie production companies, to film the pitcher's delivery and feeds the information into a computer. What comes out of the computer is a 35-point diagnostic checkup, measuring everything from the length of the pitcher's stride to “shoulder horizontal adduction,” a biome-chanical term for how far back the pitching shoulder flexes. ASMI captured so many pitching deliveries this way over the years that it established normative range guidelines for proper mechanics. They found that the greatest pitchers, such as Roger Clemens, don't do any phase of the delivery that is off the charts, but rather are exceptional because they fall in the normative range across the board.

  “What we're studying,” Fleisig said, “is how the principles of physics help people move and what are the patterns. What makes you the most efficient pitcher, where you obtain the most velocity with the least stress on the elbow and shoulder.”

  The biggest payoff to the data has yet to be unlocked: Once you have it, what do you do with it?

  “It's a huge challenge,” Fleisig said. “My number-one priority is to find out what's wrong with pitchers. What to do with it is a huge question. Some things might need to be improved on by the pitching coach and some by the strength coach.”

  The Indians, for instance, sent pitcher Jeremy Guthrie to ASMI in 2004. His diagnostic report indicated that his “maximum upper trunk angular velocity”—in layman's terms, it's the answer to whether his upper trunk rotates faster than his pelvis in his delivery—fell just short of the normative range. Guthrie clocked in at 1,059 degrees per second, just outside the normative range of 1,078 to 1,370 degrees per second. What did the Indians do about it? Nothing. Guthrie otherwise checked out fine with no major red flags.

  “It's so rare when you actually make a meaningful change with a guy,” Shapiro said. “Occasionally you can work stride direction, when the ball comes out of the glove, little things like that might actually help.”

  Pitching is an act of violence. Once the pitcher loads the baseball in the cocked position, the arm rotates forward at 7,000 degrees per second. “That is the fastest measured human motion of any activity,” Fleisig said.

  While in that loaded position, the shoulder and arm bear the equivalent of about 40 pounds of force pushing down. The biome-chanical experts at ASMI were curious about how much more force an arm could take, so they brought cadavers into the lab and pulled and pushed upon the shoulder joint to find its breaking point. The cadavers’ ligaments blew apart just after 40 pounds of force. “So a pitcher is just about at maximum,” Fleisig said.

  No wonder pitchers break down: they have pushed their shoulders and arms to the edge of the breaking point. Pitching, unlike most sports activities, has reached the limit of what is humanly possible. So while sprinters continue to run faster, swimmers swim faster, golfers drive the ball farther and football players get bigger and faster, the pitcher has reached his peak. You will not see a pitcher throwing a baseball 110 miles per hour. The arm and shoulder are maxed out. Pushed any further, the shoulder would blow up, like a blown engine.

  “That's why the role of research in baseball is not to get the pitcher to throw faster,” Fleisig said, “but to lower the risk of injury.”

  Said Beane, “At some point what's really going to happen is we are all going to employ actuaries, like insurance companies. In some ways we have now become pseudo-actuaries. You may hire actuaries in your office to figure out the probability of injuries occurring, given the amount of money you're putting in. Biomechanics is certainly a fascinating area to explore. One pitcher can be both the riskiest and the best investment we make. It makes sense to explore why.”

  Dovetailed with this information revolution was the seed money to encourage innovation. Selig and the owners did not follow through on their threat to contract two teams, but the gambit did succeed as leverage toward establishing an increased revenue-sharing system that funneled more money from the rich teams—most especially, from the Yankees—to the poor teams. The revenue-sharing system in 2001, for instance, transferred $169 million. By 2008 the amount transferred had more than doubled to $408 million.

  Simultaneously, baseball developed lucrative sources of national income that didn't exist when the Yankees were winning the World Series. On January 19, 2000, for instance, Selig convinced the owners to share equally in all profits generated from the Internet. Baseball had no idea what kind of money was at stake— especially Selig, a technophobe who was computer illiterate. But Selig understood that if each team were left to make its own way on the Web, the rich teams such as the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox and Cubs would only grow richer, extending the resource gap between them and the other clubs.

  “I said at the time, and I didn't understand the full magnitude of it,” Selig said,”that this will go down as being similarly important to when Pete Rozelle talked the National Football League owners into sharing television money. I believe history will show that to be correct.”

  Major League Baseball Advanced Media was created in 2000 to handle the sport's digital assets, with MLB.com launching in 2001. By 2007 it was generating almost $400 million in revenue, much of it from selling tickets, subscriptions to game packages and as one of the Net's most adept providers of streaming video. Suddenly baseball owners were getting equal cuts of national revenues that never before existed. In addition to MLBAM, they also enjoyed payouts from such revenue streams as satellite radio and satellite television and Major League Baseball International. Moreover, many clubs seized control of the resale-ticket market, using the Web to claim the secondary-ticket market revenues that previously went to scalpers on the black market.

  The effect of these changes was that by 2008 every team
in baseball knew before it sold a single ticket or negotiated its own local media packages that it started with a nut of $29 million, up from $16 million in 2001. It was the equivalent of the bank handing you money in a game of Monopoly before a die is cast.

  The extra money did not close the gap on the Yankees’ financial might. Indeed, the Yankees were getting the same one-thirtieth cut of the revenue streams as, say, the Kansas City Royals. But what the growing national revenues allowed poorer teams to do was to make financial commitments to their young players that might not have happened previously. And if these teams could lock up their young stars, it would mean postponing their free agency, and postponing free agency would mean fewer choices for the Yankees when it came to making up for the deficiencies in their farm system.

  “More teams have signed guys who are prearbitration eligible, arbitration eligible and even to cover free agency,” said Chris Antonetti, the Cleveland assistant general manager. “That happened with Roy Halladay, Chris Carpenter and, with us, C.C. Sabathia. There have been a lot of guys where that happened. What that does, especially because of the timing of it, is limit the available players in their prime years. So if you sign a starting pitcher through his two through eight years? Those are going to be the years of his highest leverage.”

  Here is an example. In March of 2006, the Indians signed center fielder Grady Sizemore to a six-year deal worth $23.45 million, with a club option tacked to the end of it. That meant the Indians control Sizemore's services through 2012. Without the contract extension, Sizemore could have left the Indians as a free agent after the 2010 season at age 28—smack in his prime—with the Yankees no doubt prepared to outbid everybody in baseball for his services. In all likelihood, the Indians would have faced the necessity of having to trade Sizemore before or during his walk year to gain a greater return on his loss than simply two compensatory draft picks. The contract extension, though, keeps Sizemore off the market, and away from the Yankees, for at least another two years and until after his 30th birthday.

  “If we didn't have Grady signed we'd probably be looking at trading him at some point,” Antonetti said. “What the central fund money has done is allowed us to retain our core guys. That's mostly what it's allowed us to do.

  “For the teams in the middle and smaller markets, the central revenues are becoming a larger percentage of their revenues. Whereas for the larger market teams, that's not happening. Their revenues continue to grow with new ballparks and TV deals, radio deals, raising ticket prices, attendance … they're still increasing their local revenues. Our local revenue is far smaller, but the growth in central revenue becomes more and more important for us.”

  With clubs able to afford to delay free agency for their best young players, free agency became less of a guaranteed lifeline for the Yankees. When Toronto locked up Roy Halladay, for example, the Yankees were left to troll for Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright.

  “Start with the fact that free agency is inefficient by nature,” Shapiro said.”Because almost all of the players are past their prime as they hit free agency. You're paying top dollar for declining talent. Start with that. Then reduce the overall talent base in terms of quality, to the point that you've got competitive frenzy for the limited talent that is out there? You're exponentially increasing the inefficiency. And then, to add a more cyclical trend now, with more and more players tied up to deals, there is going to be less and less talent out there.”

  Though the Yankees kept generating more local revenues, the rise in intellect, the sharing of revenue and the tapping of more national revenue streams created a competitive balance in baseball that had not been seen since the 1980s. The Yankees now had to worry about not just old foils such as the Red Sox and Braves, but also the Angels, Marlins, Tigers and Indians—all of whom knocked them out of the playoffs—while teams such as the Astros, Rockies, Cardinals and White Sox were going to the World Series for the first time in a generation, if ever.

  After the 2001 World Series, 12 franchises played in the next seven World Series, including nine that had not been there since 1987 and five who made it the year after posting a losing record. The trend toward parity has only accelerated. Since 2005, the eight World Series slots have been filled by eight different franchises. In 2007, no team repeated as division champion for the first time since 1988.

  “The big market clubs will always be big,” Selig said.”Even they understood this system was in their best interest. You're never going to get a completely even playing field. But if you're a fan in New York or Boston or Chicago or Los Angeles, and if you know three-quarters of the clubs coming in don't have a chance to win, what's going to happen? You know, people aren't dumb. I think it's worked out extraordinarily well.”

  After 2001, the Yankees could no longer count on other general managers to be pigeons or for cash-strapped teams to dump their best young players on the market or for teams that were down to stay down. They could no longer count on a core of New York– proven winners on their own roster or another wave of players from their minor league system to fortify it. Into the headwinds of all of those forces, though, the Yankees stubbornly counted on the same old outcome: to win the World Series. Anything else was a failure.

  “It reached a point with us where it was six months of preparation for one month of important baseball,” Mussina said. “And that wasn't written on the chalkboard anywhere, but it had become that way. I mean, the machine that had been created, the monster that was being created, that's what it was all about. It wasn't about getting to the playoffs anymore. It was about getting there and winning. It didn't matter how you got there, just get there and win.”

  Leaving themselves only two options in this new realm of baseball, win the World Series or fail, the Yankees came to know only failure.

  By 2001 the so-called Greatest Rivalry in Sports, the shorthand account of the competition between the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, was no more a rivalry than what existed in the cartoons between the roadrunner and the coyote. The 2001 Red Sox gave what even for them was a virtuoso performance of the doomed foil. They finished in second place behind the Yankees for the fourth time in what would be eight consecutive such finishes. They won just 82 games, winding up 13½ games behind the Yankees. The Red Sox had the best pitcher in baseball in Pedro Martinez, but their attempt under general manager Dan Duquette to support Pedro with a collection of castoffs and aging veterans—Frank Castillo, Hideo Nomo, Rolando Arrojo, David Cone and Bret Saberhagen all had seen better days—failed miserably. Even the great Pedro broke down, giving them only 18 starts in 2001. The Red Sox fired Jimy Williams as manager and replaced him with pitching coach Joe Kerrigan, who presided over the team mailing in a 17-26 finish.

  Quite simply, there was no rivalry. In the six seasons since Torre took over as manager of the Yankees, New York was 67 games better than Boston and won the head-to-head competition 45-35. The Yankees had won fourteeen postseason series, including four World Series, and the Red Sox had won one postseason series, while a World Series championship remained almost unfathomable for the accursed franchise.

  It was not a fair fight upon any ground, including the business side. In 2001 the Yankees generated 52 percent more in revenues than the Red Sox. Boston drew fewer fans than fifteen franchises— fully half the teams in baseball—including such middle-market franchises as the Rangers, Brewers, Rockies and Orioles. The Yankees essentially built their dynasty with little resistance from the Red Sox, with the exception of the 1999 season when Pedro Martinez, at the height of his mastery, willed them into the American League Championship Series. Even then, however, the Yankees dismissed them in five games. The Red Sox won the only game Martinez started in that series, but lost the others behind fading starters Kent Mercker, Ramon Martinez and Bret Saberhagen.

  The rivalry as we know it did not begin until December 20, 2001. On that day the Red Sox partners, operating the team under a trust arrangement from the estate of former owner Jean R. Yawkey, voted to sell the team to an i
nvestment group headed by John Henry and Tom Werner. Larry Lucchino, who would be named club president, joined them. The group paid $660 million for the Red Sox, Fenway Park and 80 percent of the New England Sports Network, the regional sports network that carries Red Sox games. No baseball team ever sold for even half that amount.

  The sale was bad news for the Yankees. Henry, Werner and Lucchino were true baseball insiders, friends of commissioner Bud Selig, who knew from their previous stakes in big league teams how to play by Selig's unwritten rules. (Henry had owned a small piece of the Yankees, then the Marlins, while Werner had owned the Padres and Lucchino had served as president of the Orioles and Padres.) These men knew how to make deals and make money in the provincial world of baseball, having long ago covered the learning curve that even the sharpest of businessmen must traverse when they join the game. They represented the biggest threat to the Yankee dynasty. Within hours of their purchase, they fired Duquette. They promoted assistant general manager Mike Port to serve as general manager but only on an interim basis, vowing to take as much time as necessary to find a dynamic young architect that fit their vision for the team.

  Kerrigan lasted only two weeks into spring training, the owners waiting until their purchase was closed in February. Lucchino called a team meeting one day in the team's clubhouse at its spring training site in Fort Myers, Florida, to introduce Grady Little to the players as their manager. Little, who had served as Williams’ bench coach for three seasons, was a safe, popular pick. Immediately after Lucchino introduced Little, Martinez was so happy he danced naked around the clubhouse, cracking up his teammates by shaking his member.

  The owners made a more important hiring that same spring training to far less fanfare, crude or otherwise. They named a 28-year-old Yale graduate to serve as an assistant general manager to Port. Theo Epstein, who grew up one mile away from Fenway in Brookline, had started out in baseball as a summer intern for Lucchino's Baltimore Orioles in 1992, 1993 and 1994. Epstein followed Lucchino to San Diego, where he worked two seasons in the Padres communications department before moving to baseball operations in 1997, all the while earning a degree from the University of San Diego Law School. He was whip smart, full of questions and at the front of a generation of young, computer-savvy executives and analysts who believed some of the answers for evaluating players and constructing teams could be found in a careful parsing of the game's copious statistics.