Baseball Maverick Page 8

  To implement their plans, they needed not only the computers but a modem connection to a PDP-10 mainframe computer at Digital Equipment Corporation in Philadelphia that would crunch the numbers every night based on the information gathered and spit data back out. Levine also had to write software to run these computers, and fortunately, he had the perfect partner. After the flattering Sports Illustrated article about Levine had come out, he was contacted by a scientist named Richard D. Cramer, who had a degree from Harvard, a PhD from MIT, and a passionate interest in baseball statistics. Cramer started crunching baseball numbers on computers in the 1970s, and he was an early member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and a cofounder of its Statistical Analysis Committee.

  “He said, ‘Maybe we can partner,’” Levine recalls. “So he and I became partners in STATS Inc.: Sports Team Analysis and Tracking System.”

  The acronym was Levine’s idea; developing the software for what came to be known as the Edge 1.000 system fell to Cramer. As Alan Schwarz wrote in The Numbers Game, “Cramer tackled the input algorithms. Pete Palmer, Cramer’s SABR friend at the American League statistics house, wrote the FORTRAN mainframe code.”

  As Levine pointed out, the Edge 1.000 system was basically doing what former Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver used to do. “He’d have all these cards about matchups,” he said. “The computer could automate them and make them available for the play-by-play broadcasters as well as the manager, as well as the staff. That’s what was new.”

  Another priority was to upgrade the system for selling tickets. The Finley-era approach was to print out tickets for every game of the season all at once and put them in shoe boxes. “Roy had decided that selling tickets out of shoe boxes was not exactly the way he wanted to do things,” says Linda Alderson. “Roy hired me to do exactly what I had graduated up the computer ladder to do, which was interface between the guy he had hired to be ticket manager and these guys he had hired to write the code. We had to be able to make special packages of tickets, not just individual tickets or season tickets. It was absolutely brand new. The Toronto Blue Jays came to look at our system at the A’s to study it.”

  From a paltry 306,763 fans in 1979 to 842,259 a year later in Billy Martin’s first season as A’s manager, turnout continued to grow, reaching 1.3 million in 1981, the first full season with the Haas family as owners. Andy Dolich, executive vice president of business operations, oversaw an effort to improve as many aspects of the fan experience at the ballpark as possible. They upgraded the food and replaced old, broken seats with new orange seats, part of a million-dollar upgrade to the stadium, including $250,000 for a state-of-the-art scoreboard where they could feature something called dot racing. They also brought music to the ballpark in a new way. “As far as I know, we were the first team to start it,” Eisenhardt told me. “We started playing ‘Celebration’ when we would win and played it when a guy hit a home run.”

  In the early ’80s, the future radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh was working for the Kansas City Royals in group sales. He also started playing music between innings, complete with sound effects, as Zev Chafets explained in his book Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One, but it did not go over well with the Royals. “They didn’t like it when I played Michael Jackson,” Limbaugh told Chafets. “They used to say, ‘Where do you think we are, Oakland?’”

  The fans responded to Billy Martin’s heart-on-his-sleeve style, so the team decided to go for it and soon “Billy Ball” was born. “The point of the advertising program was not to come up with some gimmicky promotional thing, but to create the sense that the team had a lot of personality and cared about the fans,” Eisenhardt said. The A’s were 18-3 by the end of April, a record, and they were having a blast. Chronicle sportswriter Bruce Jenkins still can’t believe what he saw—or averted his eyes from—on A’s charter flights back then. “A typical A’s team charter in the Billy Martin era: You’re heading east, it’s mayhem, Billy’s in his cups, wicked card games in the back, two completely buxom, comely stewardesses with their tits hanging out,” Jenkins says. “In the back you have Billy with these tawdry but beautiful stewardesses.”

  It was a fun time to be around the A’s and Levine felt a sense of finally breaking through. For years he’d gone door-to-door trying to find owners of sports teams who would hear him out and try his ideas, and he’d had quite a few successes by then. But this was something that could have an impact on baseball for years to come. Their innovations on multiple fronts could—and did—prove influential.

  To move forward with the computer experiment Eisenhardt had requested, Levine needed someone to sit in the radio booth with announcers Bill King and Lon Simmons and feed data into the computer. They posted notices at college campuses around the Bay Area and ended up hiring Jay Alves, who had played baseball at Half Moon Bay High and was the statistician for the football team. He graduated from the University of Arizona in 1977 and worked for two years as a weekend sports anchor on Channel 9 in Tucson. Alves started in August 1981 as the A’s “Apple computer operator,” as he was listed in the 1982 media guide. “I traveled with the club,” Alves says. “I sat with Bill and Lon and would give them information. The computer would crash in the middle of the game and then you’d have to redo the whole thing. You had those floppy disks. It was the green screen computer, the very beginnings of Apple. At the time it was just to track pitches and to track locations, thinking that you could eventually use that as a tool for pitchers and defensive placements, which is what they do now. It was mostly a broadcast tool.”

  “The A’s had every statistic you ever wanted, Jay Alves sitting up in the booth with us,” Simmons told me. “We had enough information, we could have carried on a broadcast six or seven hours after the game.”

  Billy Martin was old school all the way and let everyone know how crazy he found all this stuff with computers. “He found it threatening because he had it all up in his head,” Eisenhardt told me. “I kept telling him, ‘Billy, this isn’t for you, I’m not trying to change anything you do. This is for us to help us understand.’”

  Alderson started full time with the A’s in October 1981, five months after Linda gave birth to their son, Bryn, but the full extent of his role at the time was understated. The version that reporters often accepted was that he came to the A’s as a “general counsel,” which made sense; it just didn’t tell the full story: Eisenhardt always had in mind for Alderson to be more than merely a lawyer. The first A’s media guide that mentions Alderson, the 1982 guide, lists him fourth on the depth chart, with the title “Vice President & General Counsel,” behind only Eisenhardt (president), Wally Haas (executive vice president), and Carl Finley (vice president, baseball administration).

  “Roy was doing both things at the time, running the organization and sort of playing GM,” Wally Haas explained to me. “He realized he couldn’t do that, so he brought Sandy on to be the GM. It was the greatest move he made, frankly.”

  “I told Sandy, ‘I can’t call you the general manager,’” Eisenhardt remembers. “I wanted him to be running the entirety of it. I think that was the job I designed for him.”

  “He didn’t say, ‘Would you be the general counsel?’” Alderson recalls. “It was really, ‘I need some help over here. Would you be willing to come over and help me out?’ There wasn’t a job description. I just did whatever was needed. I had a kind of open portfolio. I was really learning the business, learning baseball, and doing it quietly. I didn’t have any single area of responsibility. There wasn’t much for me to screw up other than a few contracts.”

  At first under the Haas family ownership, Billy Martin was general manager as well as field manager, taking over the title from Finley himself. “I didn’t want that title,” Eisenhardt told me. “It implied a baseball knowledge. Billy didn’t want a general manager looking over his shoulder. That was a free giveaway. I said, ‘OK, fine, kicking and screaming, I will give in.’” Managing many of the same players who just two
years earlier had finished the 1979 season with a dismal mark of 54-108, Martin in 1981 was both an excellent tactical manager, making all the right moves, and a charismatic motivator. Martin led the A’s to the ALCS for that strike-shortened season and was giddy to be facing his old team, the Yankees. It was, clearly, one of Martin’s finer hours, even if the Yanks did sweep the A’s in three straight games. “Of course we’re disappointed,” Martin told reporters afterward. “I’m disappointed because we didn’t play the way we had during the year. That’s the frustrating part… . We’ll be there next year.”

  Jay Alves, the team’s computer operator, was enlisted to help ­Alderson prepare for the arbitration case with Rickey Henderson, coming up in February 1982. “There wasn’t computer-generated data then,” Alderson says. “We had to create that ourselves. The statistical analysis we were doing for salary arbitration was pretty basic. There was some fear that if you got too esoteric, it would be portrayed by the other side as deceptive.”

  Alderson squared off against a team of six lawyers including Steve Fehr, whose brother Donald Fehr assisted the Players Association in the Seitz decision. “He just blew them away,” Alves says. “On our side it was just Sandy and me, the bobo, handing him pieces of paper when he needed them. Sandy was a lawyer, but he was also a baseball man. These other lawyers came in and I just realized, ‘They don’t know the game nearly as well as Sandy does.’ He had briefs ready that I had typed up on the word processor, arguments that should have been brought up that he’d thought of, and these other lawyers didn’t even think of them.”

  The problem was Henderson, then twenty-three, was too damn good. He’d led the A’s in batting average (.319) and on-base percentage (.408) in the strike-shortened 1981 season. The arbitrator awarded Henderson the salary he sought, $535,000, the third highest ever awarded by an arbitrator at that point, rather than the $350,000 the A’s had put forward. “I of course was devastated that we lost,” Alderson recalls.

  In 1981 the A’s had come flying out of spring training and won their first eleven games, on their way to an 18-3 April. In 1982 they were 11-11 in April and twelve games under .500 and dropping by June 24. Martin’s mojo had left him. “As great as he was in ’81, the greatest ever, to my mind, he was just that bad in ’82, and just that nasty, drunk and swearing at his own players in the hotel lounge,” Bruce Jenkins told me.

  Martin became increasingly erratic and more and more of a challenge for A’s ownership.

  “I think partly why Roy brought Sandy on frankly was so he had somebody else also to deal with Billy Martin, who was a complicated guy, as good a manager as you could ever have, but also obviously had this other side of him,” Wally Haas says. “So Sandy got the short straw.”

  Eisenhardt could see something slipping away.

  “I loved Billy,” he says. “He had some problems that caused his personality to change. He managed by intimidation, and intimidation as a leadership style works up to a point, then the players figure out how to sit down at the other end of the bench. The half-life of that style is definitely measurable. In ’80 he had done a great job with the team and in ’81 he did a great job with the team. In ’82 things started to fall apart.”

  Martin flew off the handle when Alderson offered support to Tony Phillips after Martin sent him down to Triple-A to discipline him for arriving late to a game. “When Billy got wind of my conversation with Phillips, he went nuts,” Alderson says. “I was only trying to be helpful to the kid, helping him deal with it and taking him to the airport, just to soften the blow a little bit. Besides, Billy was late to the ballpark all the time. I didn’t tell Phillips, ‘Hey, you shouldn’t have been sent down.’ There was none of that.”

  Back in New York, George Steinbrenner was sending out indications that he might want Martin to manage the Yankees for a third time. The A’s were at home against the Brewers on a Thursday afternoon in August and gave up five unearned runs in a 10–6 loss. Martin was in a dark mood afterward.

  “Billy had a tax problem,” Steve Vucinich says. “I think he wanted an extension or some money and Sandy said no, and it just pissed off Billy and he started drinking in his office. The next thing we knew the office was destroyed. The TV was broken, pulled off the wall; the refrigerator was on its side. Billy had cut himself and there was blood on the walls.”

  “I think Billy’s whole second-half behavior was about Sandy,” says Bruce Jenkins. “You talk about two opposites! This guy is taking over?”

  “It was a big deal. Is Billy the manager or is he the manager and the general manager?” Alderson remembers. “And it wasn’t clear, really. Pretty much by default it was Billy running the show.”

  Martin had enjoyed free rein and did not like having his authority questioned. He asked for a definition of roles. Alderson called Martin’s attorney, Eddie Sapir.

  “I can remember saying something lawyerlike, like, ‘We’re ­going to stand by the four corners of the contract.’ It was such a cheap response,” Alderson says. “There was nothing in the contract that talked about Billy being the general manager. I wasn’t really part of the decision-making group at the time, but Billy viewed me as a real threat. There’s no question about that. That’s why he blew up when I got involved with Phillips. That’s when he blew up and destroyed his office.”

  The A’s announced in October 1982 that Martin would not be back as manager, despite having three years left on his contract. Alderson’s time to make his mark had come. The most important next step was hiring a replacement for Martin, and to compile a list of candidates, Alderson says, “most of our information came from Peter Gammons,” then a baseball writer for the Boston Globe. The A’s interviewed Jim Leyland, Jim Fregosi, Jimy Williams, Steve Boros, Hal Lanier, Ed Nottle, and Ray Miller. They put together a good group; every one of their candidates, except Nottle, the A’s Triple-A manager at the time, would soon end up with a big-league managing job.

  5

  COMPUTER HELPS A’S

  ZAP TIGERS

  Early in his time with the A’s, Alderson had let it be assumed that he knew less than he actually did about baseball; it was easier to learn that way and far better to surprise people than to have them muttering about how wildly you’d overstated your level of understanding. This strategy in part had to do with the environment around the A’s then, the cocksure Billy Martin embodying the idea that only a baseball lifer could really know the game, but it was fundamental to the Alderson code, drilled into him as a boy and above all as a Marine: Take on a job only when you believe you can do it well. Never make a promise until you’re ready to fulfill it.

  Alderson’s core beliefs about baseball started with the precept that it was smart not to swing at bad pitches, but instead to force a pitcher to come to you on your own terms; a hitter could be aggressive, even violent, but better to attack a hittable pitch after working the count than simply to flail away at anything that came up there. It was a philosophy that fit him to a T. Even in conversation, Alderson rarely replies to a comment or question unless he knows what he wants to say, and given the right opening, he seldom fails to pounce. The more he thought about examples from his own years as a baseball fan, the more he thought about Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver, a pioneer of statistical analysis who led the Orioles to victory in the 1970 World Series. Weaver also authored three books.

  “If you go back and read about Earl Weaver, his strategy was basically get people on base and hit a three-run homer,” he says. “There was another influential manager at the time, Gene Mauch, who was a proponent of small ball—bunt ’em over, get ’em over, yadda, yadda, yadda. Mauch never won a pennant. Plus, I always thought that the home run was more entertaining, although the Mauch approach can also be entertaining with these little elements. Everybody gets to clap when a guy gets a single. Everybody gets to clap when he steals second. Everybody gets to clap when he gets bunted to third. And then what happens? The next hitter can’t get him in from third with less than two outs. Baloney! Y
ou get a couple guys on and hit a bomb. That’s how you win games.”

  Alderson was an early reader of Bill James, the influential numbers guru. James started out putting his baseball thoughts down on paper while working as a night watchman at the Stokely–Van Camp pork and beans factory in Lawrence, Kansas, and attracted all of seventy-five purchases when he took out an ad in the Sporting News promoting his self-published first book, 1977 Baseball Abstract. James would never quite shake the rough edges of a guy who penned his bon mots and crunched his numbers in a factory that produced 90 million cans of pork and beans annually while other, less worthy individuals, as he saw it, were paid salaries by newspapers to sit in the press box. As influential as his love of numbers would be, James also spawned a school of sportswriting that saw as one of its imperatives a need to napalm-blast newspaper sportswriters with scorn. “If all of the newspaper stories that have been written about Billy Martin were put in a pile in the middle of New Jersey, it would be the best place for them,” James wrote in one of his early Abstracts.

  “His condescension comes through in his prose,” Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley wrote in 1982. Yardley also noted: “For six springs James, a practitioner of a black art called sabermetrics, ‘the mathematical and statistical analysis of baseball records,’ has been publishing an ‘abstract’ of the previous season’s statistics. Up to now he has been his own publisher.” Starting in 1982, the Abstract was published by Ballantine.

  James had a furious energy that won him die-hard adherents. There was something almost lovably cloddish in the way that James, fulminating about “hokum” spewed by others, could interrupt himself to go off on tangents like this one in 1982 on names, inspired by a mention of Milwaukee’s Gorman Thomas: “Did you know that players named Thomas have hit 682 home runs in major league play, the ninth highest total for any surname? They passed Mays last May with their 669th and are closing in on the Joneses, whose first in 1982 will be their 700th. The top ten names for home runs are Williams (1,762), Robinson, Johnson, Smith, Jackson, Aaron, Ruth, Jones, Thomas and Mays. More stuff you’d never know if you didn’t read the Baseball Abstract.”