by Joe Torre
“Geno!” Torre said.
He called for Monahan, the trainer, to check on Chamberlain.
Said Torre, “For some reason I stopped because I was thinking about a trip, and I didn't want to make a trip, even though this was something extraordinary. I just didn't realize how extraordinary it was. I sent the trainer out.”
Monahan raced out to the mound—armed with more bug spray.
Torre didn't know how bad the situation was because the midges inexplicably kept their swarming activities to the middle of the diamond. There was almost no problem in the Yankees dugout, where Torre sat, or down the right-field line, where umpire Bruce Froemming, the crew chief working the final postseason of his career, enjoyed a comfortable, bug-free view. So Torre made no appeal to the umpires to stop the game the way they would when rain is heavy enough to compromise playing conditions. It was a moment he would later identify as his one regret in 12 years as the Yankees manager.
“I see Jeter out there at shortstop, just waving,” Torre said, “but it was never one of these things like Joba was going through. So my feeling is if I had gone out there, and could've called the umpire out and said, ‘You can't pitch in this’ … well, I'm not sure if it would've gotten me anywhere, but I may have been convincing enough to at least call a timeout for a time, like a rain delay of some kind.”
Torre was under the impression that another round of bug spray helped Chamberlain, though it did not.
“It looked like it was okay,”Torre said.”It looked like something you could deal with. I'm not saying it disappeared, but it looked like something that was less than what it actually was. But I think Joba just got rattled, which is understandable.”
Chamberlain managed to get his next pitch over the plate. Cleveland second baseman Asdrubal Cabrera bunted it, sending Sizemore to third on the sacrifice. Travis Hafner, the Indians’ designated hitter, ripped Chamberlain's next pitch on a line, but first baseman Doug Mietkiewicz caught it. Somehow Chamberlain was one out away from escaping this sticky mess. He needed only to retire catcher Victor Martinez to turn over the lead and the final three outs to Rivera. Chamberlain, however, let loose yet another wild pitch, and Sizemore came barreling home to tie the game. Chamberlain had thrown 343 pitches in the major leagues and only one of them had been a wild pitch. Now, completely bugged, he had thrown two in a span of 10 pitches.
The Yankees had lost a lead with Chamberlain on the mound for the first time, and done so in a manner bizarre enough to make Stephen King envious: one walk, one bunt, two wild pitches and one million midges. During the entire rally neither the baseball nor the midges ever left the infield. Chamberlain hit Martinez with a pitch and walked Ryan Garko before he finally ended the nightmare by striking out Jhonny Peralta.
The Yankees still had hope. After all, Carmona, the Cleveland pitcher who had allowed only two hits over eight innings, would have to deal with the midges himself in the top of the ninth inning while facing the top of the prodigious Yankees lineup.
“I was standing there coaching third base,” Bowa said, “and the next thing I knew it was the return of these bugs. I said, ‘What the fuck are these?’ And the third baseman said, ‘Oh, they come out every now and then.’ I mean, I could hardly see. And they're all over your skin. They weren't biting or anything. It was just a nuisance. Hindsight being 20/20, we should have said,’Everyone get off the field.’ It would have been like a downpour, where you say, ‘We can't play in these conditions.’ “
Something very strange happened, though. Carmona pulled his cap down a little lower and threw the baseball as if the midges around him and on his face and neck did not exist. He gave the appearance of a man in a crisp suit walking down the street in a rainstorm, oblivious to the extreme conditions. Behind him, the Cleveland infielders gave none of the burlesque histrionics seen from Jeter and Rodriguez. The swarm had not minimized, but the Indians gave the appearance otherwise.
“I thought there were clearly differences to how the two teams were reacting to it,” general manager Mark Shapiro said. “But our year had been one to give our team multiple valid excuses. Snow-outs, home games on the road, home games in Milwaukee, no off days in forever … our guys just never gave in to it, which was an affirmation to what tough players they are. You talk about tough players and a team approach, that's what we hope to build here as a culture. It's less about feel good things, less about objective things, and it is the manager that can help implement that culture in a clubhouse.”
Carmona would have to face the best Yankees hitters in the ninth inning of a tie game in the playoffs with insects surrounding him and sticking to him. What happened next was a triumph of the Cleveland Indians organizational intellect. As much as any other, this one inning would confirm exactly how a middle-market team erased the competitive advantage the Yankees enjoyed in their championship seasons over the rest of baseball, and the Indians had done so with a payroll that amounted to less than one-third of what the Yankees were spending on players.
The postmodern general manager prototype, Shapiro, in his wrinkle-free crisp khakis and sports shirt, sits at his sleek desk in front of his computer, navigating through his team's propriety and copyrighted software program, DiamondView, the program so valuable that the Arizona Diamondbacks once only half jokingly were asked to consider trading it for Carlos Quentin, their top power-hitting prospect. Not even a server to be named later could have convinced Cleveland's general manager to give up the computational brains of the organization. Shapiro looks as if he might well be running a private hedge fund or operating a technology startup from his office above Progressive Field in Cleveland.
Fueled by bottled water and energy bars, Shapiro spends every day searching for any ground, everywhere from the sandlots of the Dominican Republic to the kudzu-like blogosphere, for any incremental edge that will make the Indians better and more efficient than they were and, in turn, bring them closer to cutting into the huge advantage the Yankees enjoyed because of their revenues.
Shapiro, Princeton-educated, the son of a powerful sports agent, a history major who played collegiate football but not a day of professional baseball, was exactly the kind of hands-on, business-savvy chief executive that has become necessary for teams to cut into the Yankees’ advantage. The general manager genus that existed when the Yankees were winning championships was marked by men who would make baseball decisions by the seat of their pants—or perhaps a barstool—and knew little about the business side of the organization. These were baseball men, and proud of it, whose responsibility rested almost entirely with player acquisition. They sought or kept almost no business intellect.
“At some point ownership decided with all the dollars at stake they wanted to talk with someone—not all ownership—that they had a comfort level with from a business standpoint,” said Shapiro. “That doesn't diminish the human side of the game. It doesn't diminish the necessity for baseball acumen or scouting to play a role in decision making. But at the top a lot of ownerships decided they wanted someone that had a combination of skill sets, instead of just being one of evaluation, of just picking 25 players. That's the delineation here. The job shifted, from picking 25 guys to building and running an organization. A CEO of a baseball organization.”
In 2002, Shapiro's second year as general manager, the Indians spent $24 million on player development and scouting, more than all but two teams in baseball and a 50 percent increase in their R&D from three years earlier. They obtained 22 prospects from outside the organization that year alone, including Sizemore, Phillips, Lee, Travis Hafner, Coco Crisp and Ben Broussard, all of them soon to be bona fide big leaguers. The Indians knew that the currency of information was gaining in value around baseball. If ball-clubs could not match the Yankees’ resources, which allowed New York a wide margin of error, those teams could use intellect— specifically, the gathering and analysis of information—to operate more efficiently.
Shapiro made some mistakes early in his tenure, but learned from those w
hile building an organization that was at the cutting edge of the information age that was just dawning in baseball. For Shapiro, it wasn't just about getting information; it was also about using it wisely and efficiently.
“Somewhere along the line we realized you have so much information that we were spending approximately 50 percent of our time assembling it and 50 percent of our time analyzing it,” Shapiro said. “That's when we created DiamondView, and DiamondView really evolved where now we spend 10 percent of the time assembling the information and 90 percent of the time evaluating it.”
The Indians created DiamondView in the spring of 2000, though it began as a rather simple venture. Shapiro wanted an easy way to track and rank the major league and minor league players in every organization as a way to identify players the Indians might pursue in trades. DiamondView originally relied only on the reports from Cleveland scouts to grade the players. Over the years, however, DiamondView has grown into a complex, vast program to compile, store and analyze all kinds of information. For example, every morning at 6:45 DiamondView electronically collects game information, injury reports and transactions on the nearly 6,000 players in professional baseball and updates the profiles on those players.
“For any player …,” Shapiro explained. “So you pull up, say, Jared Weaver of the Angels. It's got your basic biographical facts, the history of all the reports on him, going all the way back to his time as an amateur in college. You can actually pull up one of those reports and look at it … here's our scouting director's report on him. He was obviously a little bit light. Our area scout was more accurate. So that's the actual report on him. Again, it's a question of what's available to us here … There are journal entries, which could be anything from Baseball America articles to a spring training look to blog reports, to the 16PF test—a psychological test in college—and we actually have our own psychological test in there also … Now these are newspaper articles that might contain something interesting toward building a biographical background on the guy … physical attributes … when he hit different top prospect lists. … Now this happens to be a guy who we haven't had any trade discussions on, but I'll show you a guy that we have.”
Every conversation with player agents about players is also logged into DiamondView. “When we talk about a guy, we have a history of every agent's conversation,” Shapiro said, “like when a guy's a free agent. Every conversation. So you have a history and start to learn who's lying and who's not lying. You can say,’Okay, we know this agency. They lie. They told us this was out there.’ We have it. We recorded the conversation afterward, just in notes. And there's a clear pattern here. It's good information.
“So it's not a question of having the information. Every organization has it. It's a question of having it accessible quickly. I think there are at least 15 teams that have a lot of objective analysis, their own proprietary smart guys, mathematicians, smart guys turning out stats … How much they factor in decisions and how much they weigh it, how they use it, I'm not sure. But how accessible is it? How many teams have everything together: stats, scouting reports, video, contractual information, the history, college stuff … I don't think very many have that all together in one place.”
The Indians, of course, also have their own proprietary information, such as the psychological tests, which they give to every player in their system. They also try to give it to amateur players that they scout, though resistance to the test from agents and colleges often forces the club to approach the players about it in summer leagues, such as the Cape Cod League.
“Now you start to get into what kind of things we do that are creative,” Shapiro said. “Stats, objective analysis … There's a lot of unique, proprietary information. Very unique. It's all mixed in here.”
The Oakland Athletics found an inefficiency to exploit almost a decade ago with an emphasis on on-base percentage while the rest of baseball remained focused on batting average. The Indians exploited an inefficiency by using DiamondView to quickly collect and analyze the flood of information pouring into the game. Like marine recovery teams searching for buried treasure in the vastness of the oceans, smart ballclubs constantly are looking for the next inefficiency to exploit.
With Carmona on the mound in Game 2 of the 2007 ALDS was every incremental improvement by Cleveland—advanced medical and prehabilitation systems, proprietary software, statistical analysis, biomechanics, sports psychology, a holistic approach to player development, a redefining of the general manager as a CEO, and more money to invest in those developments because of revenue sharing and central fund distributions from revenue streams that didn't exist when the Yankees were winning championships.
All of that happened while the Yankees, in a relative sense, slept. The Yankees’ response to the growth of revenue and intellect around the game had been to keep patching the roster with expensive veterans, regardless of what they may bring to the clubhouse culture. A barren farm system had given them little room to consider much else.
The Indians signed Fausto Carmona as a free agent out of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on December 28, 2000, three weeks after he celebrated his seventeenth birthday. He was a tall, skinny kid—six-foot-three and only 160 pounds—with an 83-mph fastball. The Indians gave him a signing bonus of $10,000.
“It wasn't brilliant scouting,” Shapiro admitted.
Carmona was nothing special. Every year the Indians, like most teams, would sign about 15 of these raw, mostly underweight kids from Latin America, the same way somebody might buy 15 lottery tickets. The investment was a pittance to major league teams— $150,000 for 15 players—but the potential payoff was enormous if even one of those fliers made it to the big leagues.
If anyone wondered why professional baseball was acquiring a more Latin American presence, the decisions by the Indians on amateur players in 2000 provided one clue. Teams like the Indians knew Latin America offered a much bigger bang for the player development buck than the stateside high school and college kids who went through the First-Year Player Draft. The Indians spent a combined $2.25 million just on their first two picks of the draft, Corey Smith, a high school shortstop from New Jersey taken 26th overall, and Derek Thompson, a lefthanded high school pitcher from Florida selected 37th overall. Neither of them ever played a day in the big leagues for Cleveland. For a fraction of the money they burned on those two top picks—less than 7 percent—the Indians could sign 15 players out of Latin America, including a future 19-game winner who would finish fourth in the American League Cy Young Award voting.
“You don't sign anyone for $10,000 anymore,” Shapiro said. “Now it's 50. The new $10,000 is $50,000.”
The Indians kept Carmona in his home country for his first professional season, assigning him to the Dominican Summer League. The next year he reported to Cleveland's minor league camp in Winter Haven, Florida, where the education of a pitcher truly began. The Indians provided English classes for Carmona and other young Latin players. (They have since added the equivalent of secondary school education programs for such players. The players attend these schools in the Dominican in the off-season to earn the equivalent of a General Education Degree.) They provided nutritional and dental assistance. (Carmona had significant dental issues that compromised his eating habits, not an uncommon trait from a part of the world where good, affordable dental care is not readily available.) A nutritionist provided educational seminars for the Latin American players and even escorted them on field trips to local grocery stores to teach them how to shop and what to buy.
The Indians assigned Carmona to Burlington, where he pitched well and showed exceptional control for a teenager. The next year they sent him to Lake County in Class A ball. “That's when he jumped up,” Shapiro said. Carmona went 17-4 with a 2.06 ERA. This was 2003, when Moneyball began to change the vocabulary of scouting and player development, so at first blush Carmona's numbers might have been met with some skepticism because he was not a big strikeout pitcher, a preferred trait among the statistic
al analysts. But Shapiro saw the value in his entire statistical profile rather than one column.
“You look at the strikeouts to innings pitched,” Shapiro said, referring to Carmon's pedestrian 5.04 strikeouts per nine innings in 2003. “But he had few walks and was an extreme groundball pitcher. Pure objective analysis? Some people would devalue him to some extent because his strikeouts were not that great. But the walks were still low and the groundball to flyball rate was so high.”
Carmona continued to improve and grow. He impressed his coaches with his work ethic. Even after clocking in his usual six innings or so of work, Carmona, rather than retreating to the training room for the usual ice therapy for a pitcher's arm, would run or bike for another 15 minutes. The Indians’ attention to prehabilitation also helped his development. Indians trainers found that Car-mona had a slight sway in his back, which would likely compromise his back and shoulder health over time, so they assigned him specific exercises to improve his core strength and posture. By 2006 Cleveland decided that Carmona, now 22 and about 220 pounds, and throwing his fastball 95 miles per hour, was ready for the big leagues.
Carmona initially had disastrous results. Pitching mostly out of the bullpen, Carmona went 1-10, becoming only the eighth pitcher since 1901 to post a winning percentage worse than .100 in his first big league season.
The worst of it for Carmona was when the Indians, desperate for late-inning help, decided to try him as a closer in the middle of the season. Carmona blew ninth-inning leads in three straight appearances, losing each one of them on a walkoff extra-base hit, twice in Boston to the Red Sox and once in Detroit to the Tigers. It was the sort of nightmare that can ruin a career, especially for a rookie. What was happening to him? The Indians again put their holistic approach to work to find an answer. They looked for an objective reason why Carmona was getting hit so hard and they found it: a study of the digital video files of his outings revealed that his sinker had straightened out. And why had it straightened out? The same reason why the Indians wanted to try him as a closer in the first place: they knew he was wired to be a fierce competitor. In this case, given the high leverage created by a ninth-inning lead, Carmona was victimized by trying too hard to succeed. The harder he tried, the more his release point dropped, and the more his release point dropped, the less sink he generated on his pitches.