Baseball Maverick Page 33
“Flores comes up with the bases loaded, and he’s up there hacking at the first pitch,” Alderson told me from Tennessee. “He got jammed and hit a dribbler to first base.”
That was typical of the larger pattern.
“Our whole approach to offense has deteriorated,” Alderson told me. “It’s just disappeared… . We can’t just throw up our hands and say, ‘We’re not being selective at the plate anymore, so much for that.’ I’m hoping guys like d’Arnaud and Flores and den Dekker and Lagares develop the selectivity over time. They don’t have it yet.”
Alderson may never have stood at home plate to face a major-league pitcher, but he’d defused North Vietnamese explosives. He’d had people shoot at him. He was no stranger to keeping his head under pressure. He understood that hitters, facing very human choices, were sometimes going to make the wrong call. Anomalies were not the issue. Repeated bad choices were the issue. Regression from disciplined hitters like Lucas Duda, whose combination of power and on-base percentage had turned him into the team MVP for the year, was the issue.
“Even Lucas Duda has become an overly aggressive hitter now,” Alderson continued. “He’s doing well, but in my view he’s become overly aggressive. Sometimes guys get overly aggressive, sometimes they get overly passive. It’s never a straight line. But at this particular moment, we’ve gone way off course.”
I asked Alderson if he expected immediate results, meaning that night in the final game against the Nationals. He said it was hard to turn anything around in one day, but there needed to be a shift in approach soon. The Mets went out that night and again played poorly, running their home losing streak against Washington to eleven straight. Collins decided it was time to call a rare hitters’ meeting. This, for professional ballplayers, was a little like being held after school for a scolding from the teacher. It’s a rule of thumb that in the age of Twitter teams are hesitant to call such meetings, since embarrassing details often are leaked and the mere fact of calling a meeting can make a team look like it’s panicking. But those risks were far outweighed by the need for action—and Collins felt in his gut that with a passionate, upbeat speech, he could offer a fresh reminder and help jolt the team’s young players back into a better frame of mind.
“We are dealing with human beings,” he told me that week. “These are not robots. So a lot of times they can go off into a different path, sometimes unintentionally.”
Collins’ words were not so much the point.
“Hey, look,” he told his players. “We’ve got to stay with it. It works. You’re going to get yourself behind [in the count] every once in a while, but you’ve got to have confidence in your ability.”
The impact of Collins’ words came from his conviction, his passion, and his optimistic belief that his players could and would adopt his message. That struck a chord and made it easy for the players to respond well.
“He brought us all together and kind of reminded us to wait for your pitch, not get too overly aggressive, just wait for your pitch,” Travis d’Arnaud told me.
“Terry’s always a positive manager,” Lucas Duda said. “He’s always got something positive to say. This game is built on negativity. So you kind of need that extra little push, I guess… . The gist of it was just be selectively aggressive.”
Flores’ take on the meeting was a little different, since he almost always smiles when he talks about baseball, and Duda almost never does. For Flores, Collins’ message was to relax!
“I think we all have the talent and we all can hit,” he told me. “We’ve been trying to make things happen too bad. We go out there and we have men on second and we’re thinking, ‘We’ve got to do it! We have to make this happen!’ I don’t think it works that way. You have to just relax and get a pitch. Sometimes we forget: It’s just a game!”
The hitters’ meeting was one detail of a long, grinding season. It was barely touched on in the press. But the manager’s intervention with his team probably saved his job. He had demanded higher standards. In doing so, he not only ended up achieving immediate results, but he also gave the players something to think about. Over their next four games after the Collins speech, all against the Cubs, they would continue to struggle with their bats, starting a run of four straight games in which they mustered only four hits in each. But that Friday night, August 15, and then again on Saturday, they worked counts and earned bases on balls—seven on Friday, five on Saturday—and as a result piled up a total of ten runs over the two games, and two victories, despite the pathetic hit totals. In contrast, they’d cranked out nine hits each of their first two games of the Nationals series, but with zero walks, and had eked out a total of three runs over those two losses.
It’s a rare case where a chart truly makes a larger point:
Aug. 12
9 hits
0 walks
Lose 7–1
Aug. 13
9 hits
0 walks
Lose 3–2
Aug. 14
3 hits
2 walks
Lose 4–1
Aug. 15
4 hits
7 walks
Win 3–2
Aug. 16
4 hits
5 walks
Win 7–3
Aug. 17
4 hits
2 walks
Lose 2–1
Aug. 18
4 hits
2 walks
Lose 4–1
“It was a great meeting,” Collins told me that Wednesday in Oakland. “Our guys get it. We’re not hitting the ball, but yet, one day we had four hits and had seven walks and we ended up winning the game. We scored seven runs. So it works.
“Our approach is: Hunt for a fastball, and if you get a fastball, do some damage with it. It’s an aggressive patience, where you’ve got an attitude of ‘Hey, I’m ready to hit my pitch, but if that’s not my pitch, I’ve got to be able to say, “OK, I’m taking this.”’ Even if you know it’s going to be a strike. If you say, ‘I’m looking for a fastball away,’ and here comes a fastball in, due to the time frame it takes to make the adjustment, you’re not going to hit it good.”
Did it bother him when Alderson turned up the heat the previous Wednesday night, saying there would be accountability?
“No, no, it’s accountability,” he said. “It all funnels back to the manager. I’m the guy that’s got to get this point across. I make sure my hitting coaches are on board with it. OK, they are. Now they’re around those guys a lot more than I am. I’ve got other things. But ultimately I’m the guy who has got to reinforce what they’re talking about, because when it comes from me, it’s got to have some pressure to it… . I make sure they understand: If you don’t want to buy into this, I’ll then go to Sandy and we will find the guys who do buy into it.”
23
BACK TO WHERE
IT ALL STARTED
The 242 first-year MBA students packed into UC Berkeley’s Andersen Auditorium for orientation week in late August 2014 were in for a surprise. Up onstage, Haas School of Business lecturer Gregory La Blanc was trying to build anticipation.
“Do you think that being a baseball general manager is a difficult job?” he asked the students. “Is it a job you would undertake? If you had to ask one of these general managers a question, what would it be?”
Sandy Alderson and Billy Beane, making a rare joint appearance, were announced to a jolly round of applause and walked through the auditorium to sit up onstage. Alderson, the students were told, had built the Oakland A’s team that won the World Series in 1989, a fact that many of them had not known.
“He also hired Billy Beane,” La Blanc added.
Introducing Beane, he noted that he’s “perhaps most famous for having bee
n played by Brad Pitt in the movie Moneyball,” which even students born in Bangalore or Belfast knew all too well.
Alderson had not been to an A’s game in Oakland for more than a decade, back in his time working for the commissioner’s office as a top deputy to Bud Selig tasked with overseeing umpires. This was the day of his first return to the Coliseum as Mets general manager, a day that would churn up in him an almost feral competitiveness. For weeks leading up to this day, the A’s had the best record in baseball and looked poised to make a strong run into the postseason. More than a month before the gathering in Berkeley, Beane had made a splash with a blockbuster trade with the Chicago Cubs, dealing Oakland’s 2012 first-round pick, shortstop Addison Russell, widely talked about as a likely star of the future, and their 2013 first-round choice, Billy McKinney, as well as pitcher Dan Straily and a player to be named later. In return the A’s landed two front-line starting pitchers, Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel. As if that huge deal were not enough, the A’s then traded Yoenis Céspedes, their offensive leader and an electric presence in the outfield with a Roberto Clemente–like penchant for throwing out runners; in return, they landed established big-game pitcher Jon Lester from the Red Sox.
The 2014 A’s, like so many other A’s teams, were seen as a scrappy, plucky, fun-loving bunch of young guys, and the team was bathed in the continuing glory of being Billy Beane’s team. The irony was that, by 2014, the Mets were more Moneyball in the truest sense of the term than the A’s themselves were. As owner Lew Wolff was never uncomfortable acknowledging, the A’s made money. Every year the team cleared at least a few million dollars in profit, thanks to revenue sharing,which funneled back to majority owner John Fisher and his family, to Wolff and his family, and also to Beane, who owned a small share of the team. Beane had gradually built up more and more credibility, and Wolff let Beane be Beane. By 2014 Beane could conceive of deals—and even increases in payroll—without worrying about too much nettlesome oversight from above; he and Wolff would talk things through, and sometimes the owner would talk Beane out of a rash idea, but if Beane believed strongly in a move, the move was likely to happen.
The Mets started 2014 with a payroll only a few million higher than that of the A’s. Over the course of the season, as the A’s made moves to improve, the teams’ payrolls converged and, depending on whose math you wanted to believe, the Mets were actually being outspent by the A’s, they of the dumpiest-stadium-in-baseball ignominy. These were not, however, points raised before the fresh-faced MBA students in the Berkeley auditorium that day.
“I’ve always thought that what you can measure, you can improve,” Alderson said at one point. “The problem is the game is played by human beings. We have this approach toward hitting, which is really the Moneyball approach: You try to get on base, and on-base percentage is important. The last five or six games that we’ve played, we haven’t had more than four hits, and the only two games we won, we actually had some walks in them, but we haven’t been hitting. So the approach is there, the organizational concept, everybody understands what we’re trying to do, and yet there are significant, hopefully episodic failures.”
“You’re getting madder and madder,” Beane taunted good-naturedly.
They were two decades on from the years when Beane would trail Alderson at spring training, wearing a matching outfit, and yet still they looked almost as if they’d coordinated their outfits, both in loafers, button-down shirts, and khakis.
“I remember when being with Sandy, working together, some of the stuff that we used to do, it was pencil-and-paper collected,” Beane said. “Nowadays it’s captured with technology, so it’s much more predictive and much more accurate. And really, our sort of rise was somewhat parallel with Silicon Valley and the rise of data. For us, it’s not perfect, but we’re trying to create an arbitrage between our decision-making, which hopefully most of the time is objective, and the subjective decision-making of our competitors. The hardest thing about using data and numbers is the first time you’re wrong, everybody’s like, ‘Oh, that number stuff doesn’t work.’”
Beane, knowing it was coming, paused for the warm wave of laughter.
“We celebrate intuition without going back and seeing how many times we’re wrong,” he continued. “When you have data and you have facts, you can look back, as opposed to making a decision from your gut and not really knowing why you were right or wrong at the end of the day.”
A little later, Beane added in remarks that made everyone think of his recent deal-making: “Nobody cares about algorithms the next day when you trade their favorite player. So the Rubicon for sports is going over there and having quantitative evidence, and making the decision in the face of everybody. Not everybody has an opinion on the new search engines, but everybody has an opinion on sports, and it’s usually very emotional.”
Alderson and Beane were in a sense having two different conversations. Befitting two men who had worked so closely, one almost an extension of the other, their terms of reference and key ideas overlapped. The main difference between them was their relationship to time. Alderson had throughout his years in baseball taken an approach that sought to build over time; Beane tended to want to go for it more in the here and now.
“One of the interesting things about Moneyball, I felt,” Alderson said, “was that, at least to the extent that it dealt with certain elements of valuation, like on-base percentage and things of that sort, the inefficiency in the market with respect to those particular elements disappeared pretty quickly. One of the reasons was the book didn’t necessarily cause a revolution among baseball executives. It caused a revolution among baseball owners, owners who had thought for a long time that maybe we could bring some of the business propositions and principles that exist in my real-estate business or my financial business to baseball, but were always turned back by people like me who said, ‘Hey, wait a minute, you can’t really understand this game. It’s unique. We have a particular set of expertise and knowledge and you just need to stay out of the room.’
“I think what Moneyball did was pretty quickly to confirm for owners that the business wasn’t that different, and as a result it was kind of a top-down revolution in baseball. At this point everybody is trying to do it. But some are better than the others, and hopefully what is important is not just understanding the concept, but actually executing the concept… . How do you actually create that value, as opposed to going out and buying it?”
This was an important question. In fact, it was a moment that leaped out as being a major step forward from the familiar review of Moneyball concepts that had been kicking around in baseball and business. This was the very essence of the approach Alderson had been following with the Mets: creating value. It sounded homely and modest as a notion, compared to the killer-app drama of finding glaring market inefficiencies and exploiting them, which sounded almost like magic. Creating value was, in contrast, honest work: It happened only with a steady, consistent approach. The Mets under Alderson had come to understand that by investing resources into establishing a truly systematic approach to developing their minor leagues, and by taking an open-minded, try-anything-that-might-work attitude, they could remove much of the doubt of creating value in their system.
“Our goal was to take the talent and make sure it gets better by 30 percent,” Alderson added. “If the talent’s not any good, it’s still got to get better by 30 percent.”
And if the talent is good, the Wheelers and deGroms and Syndergaards of the world, then improving it by 30 percent counts as a potential game changer. The Mets’ idea was that if you stockpiled enough talent to start, and then had a system in place to have across-the-board development, some prospects might wash out or plateau, but the net result would be acceleration toward a critical mass of talent. The organization would have top-level players to stock the big-league club and enough prospects to trade for missing pieces without leaving its minor-league system devoid of talent.
In the view of many in
baseball, that was what the A’s had done by going for it with the trade for Samardzija and Hammel, giving up two first-round picks. It was a calculated gamble. If it paid off with a World Series appearance, then it might well be worth it. But making changes could have unpredictable results, too. Over their first twelve games after the Céspedes deal, the second of the two trades, the A’s were 7-5, but then they fell into a five-game losing streak that had people wondering if the trade had knocked the A’s off their stride in some fundamental way. Now they had two games against the Mets.
“These games are big for Oakland, because they’ve hit a rough patch and they need to get back on track for their own peace of mind, if nothing else,” Alderson told me on the short drive from Berkeley down to the Oakland Coliseum. “Whether you’re in contention or not, every game matters to you. Each game has its own emotional importance to people who are on either side, if for no other reason than peace of mind and satisfaction for a few hours.”