Baseball Maverick Page 9

  Alderson ordered an early Bill James Baseball Abstract by mail and credits James with introducing him to rigorous statistical analysis of baseball. But James was off in Kansas, which was a long ways away from California. Alderson needed someone in California to develop these ideas into practical applications, and he found that someone on his commute back and forth to work.

  His house on Green Street was well situated for a quick drive through the heart of San Francisco and onto the Bay Bridge with its sweeping views, and Alderson loved those drives. “I’d go up to Broadway and through North Beach past Carol Doda’s—where a bunch of Marines spent an evening in 1971, on the corner of ­Columbus—down to the Embarcadero Freeway, the Bay Bridge, and the East Bay,” he says. “I could get from Green Street to the Coliseum in twenty to twenty-five minutes. It was an easy commute, picturesque route, and about the right amount of time to listen to NPR.”

  The local NPR affiliate, KQED, had a recurring five-minute segment by someone named Eric Walker, who would discuss his thoughts on baseball and statistics during morning drive time. Walker’s segment, sponsored by Kaypro computers, was syndicated to about twenty other stations and led to his being asked by Celestial Arts, a small publisher in Millbrae, just south of San Francisco, to do a book. The Sinister First Baseman was published in 1982.

  Alderson first heard Walker on the radio and then picked up a copy of his book and liked what he saw. The Sinister First Baseman, great fun to read now, is all over the place. Written in prose that is by turns baroque and Victorian, it careens here and there with undisguised glee. As former Giants manager Frank Robinson put it in his foreword, “This is a baseball book that incorporates mythology, Greek philosophers, anatomy, history, and anthropology, to name only a few of the subjects touched on seriously, sarcastically, or just plain humorously.” Often reading Walker, he sounds so much like the guy next to you on BART talking about UFOs that it takes a little work to notice that, yes, he’s actually making a lot of sense: “I repeat: a fan’s only right is to buy or not buy,” he writes at one point. “Disagree with that, and the Kremlin would love to talk with you at length. I am just as frustrated as you—and very possibly a lot more so—with the brainlessness in the current baseball scene … but we don’t own the game.”

  The best line in the whole book might be: “We must learn to see with the eyes of today, and not insist on looking through the dusty spectacles of yesterday.” Walker was well aware that the importance of on-base percentage was hardly a new idea. What was new was technology. With personal computers now becoming available, and already being used by the Oakland A’s as he was writing, rigorous analysis of data could add depth and detail to the study of how the game was actually played and what actually worked and did not.

  Walker was a free spirit, not without his quirks, who felt comfortable going to great lengths to get his ideas across, even with very little validation that the rest of the world found them interesting or valuable. He was part of a tradition going back to Branch Rickey, who hired a number cruncher named Allan Roth and came up with on-base percentage. Walker had grown up a baseball fan in New York, gotten away from it, then fallen back in love later in life, armed with an engineer’s mentality and an eagerness to probe more deeply. The event that changed his life was reading a book called Percentage Baseball by Earnshaw Cook. “It was a terrific book,” he told me. “Cook was an extremely clever man and, as he admits in the introduction, one of the worst writers in the world. He came close to getting a job with the Kansas City A’s and he talked himself out of it by being too arrogant. This book, written about the time Bill James was getting ready to go to elementary school, laid the groundwork: The laws of nature are the laws of nature, math is math, physics is physics, the way it works is pretty much the way it works.”

  Frank Deford had given Cook’s ideas a big plug back in the March 6, 1972, issue of Sports Illustrated, writing, “For more than a decade Earnshaw Cook, a retired Baltimore metallurgist, has been trying to convince baseball’s bosses that playing the sacred percentages is, to be blunt, dumb baseball. In 1964 Cook brought out a 345-page book, Percentage Baseball, that was full of charts, curves, tables and complicated formulas that sometimes went on for the better part of a page. The book dared to suggest that either: a) baseball is not using the best possible odds on the field, or b) mathematics is a fake.”

  For example, Deford continued, “The sacrifice bunt is one of the least productive plays in baseball. The fact that it is negative strategy, says Cook, ‘is validated beyond reasonable doubt.’”

  Walker agreed about the sacrifice bunt—and then some. He argued that the ultimate key to winning in baseball was to avoid outs and to put runners on base. Never give an out away, he argued. “In baseball, some numbers are known, some are not, and the meaning of most of them can be debated,” Walker wrote. “But there’s one number everyone knows and agrees with: three. Three outs and you’re gone. Period. The end. All runners cancelled, all theories moot, all probabilities zero. That number must, in any rational evaluation of the game, dominate planning.”

  This was the kind of lucid insight, polished to a gemlike clarity, that Alderson could put in his back pocket and carry around with him. Walker had worked with the San Francisco Giants as a consultant preaching the importance of on-base percentage. “I was on good terms with [manager] Frank Robinson,” he told me. “I was kind of a fixture in his office. There’s the chair, there’s the desk, and there’s Eric Walker.” Walker enjoyed talking to Robinson, but he never had much influence with Giants general manager Tom Haller and was on the lookout for a more receptive GM.

  Walker wrote to the A’s in 1982 offering to do some number crunching for them, having no idea if he’d ever hear back. He did. “I sent them a letter of inquiry,” Walker told me. “I was told after the fact that Sandy had listened to me on the radio and was familiar with my book.”

  “Hash me up a sample of what you can do,” Alderson told Walker during their first meeting at the A’s offices.

  For his sample, Walker produced a thirty-two-page report in September 1982 that he sent to Alderson—earning, he recalls, $500 for his work. Walker could not have known that Alderson once spent a summer at Langley reading and sorting CIA cables from all over the world, but clearly he was evoking clandestine intelligence work when he stamped an upper-case confidential across the top of the first page of the report, followed by the oakland athletics: a quantitative analysis by mathematical methods.

  “It is elementary that the more runs a team scores and the fewer runs it gives up, the more games it will win,” the first page of Walker’s report began. “Less elementary is the fact that this relationship can be quantified. The statistical equation relating runs, opponents’ runs, and win-loss percentage is:

  “In modern times, to be a realistic contender a team must be capable of approximately .600-level baseball; lower percentages can sometimes win Flags, but .600 is a realistic level.”

  One of Walker’s key conclusions in the report was that, compared to offense and pitching, the impact of defense on winning games is “generally much overestimated”—at least when one focused on regular-season competition, which was what Walker was doing. Given the emphasis on offense, then, Walker focused on that season’s A’s players and also on potential trade targets, relying on a statistic he created called “SX” for “scoring index,” generated using figures for at bats, walks, hits, total bases, and games played.

  The Walker report was pointed on the topic of Tony Armas, acquired by Finley from the Pirates in an eight-player swap early in 1977. He tied for the league lead in homers in 1981 and was fourth in 1980. Walker preferred the upside of young Mike Davis, who hit .400 in limited action. “At almost any currently plausible performance levels, Davis’ value is significantly higher than Armas’,” Walker wrote. “Experience has proven again and again that (over 1000 BFPs) career levels are the best predictors of coming results; Armas’ good 1980 should not obscure the point. Unless Davis bo
mbs badly, he clearly should displace Armas.”

  When Walker turned in the report, Alderson read it and told him, “I thought this was interesting.” Two and a half months later, the A’s traded Armas and Jeff Newman to the Red Sox for Carney Lansford, Garry Hancock, and a minor-leaguer.

  Walker’s most directed recommendation of a player to acquire was catcher Ron Hassey, in his fifth season with the Indians. The argument was that the A’s needed to upgrade and, of the options, “Hassey is essentially it,” Walker wrote. “Reliable report has it that his defense is at least very adequate, and his mediocre 1982 season should not obscure his strong and consistent career record.” Then in a note that could have anticipated Oakland’s eventual acquisition of Jeremy Giambi, he added: “His slowness as a runner is a liability, but one can’t have everything.”

  Walker was paid $5,000 a year to generate information and analysis for Alderson and the A’s. “I never got very much feedback,” Walker told me. “At the time for all I knew I was just throwing rocks in a dark cave.”

  The relationship—and the reports—continued for years. He and Alderson would talk periodically throughout the year, meeting a few times, though not on a set schedule. “My impressions were: Here’s a guy who speaks in complete grammatical sentences and expresses his thoughts clearly,” Walker says. “That registered with me. Very few people do that. You could see he was a very intelligent guy, and you could sense even through the velvet, there was iron there.”

  I asked Walker how much Alderson’s thinking shifted over the years as Walker worked on ever more sophisticated analytical tools to assist in baseball decision-making.

  “I don’t think it shifted a lot,” Walker said. “I think he was onto this from the very beginning. It’s self-proving. It’s like the law of gravity. You can argue about it all you want, but when you drop the rock, it falls. What analysis is about is understanding what helps to win ball games. It has to do with locating the best ballplayers. To this hour, walks are still underrated. Another shibboleth that gets passed around is that everyone understands the importance of walks. The undervalued part has always been walks.”

  “After reading Earl Weaver and reading The Sinister First Baseman and reading Bill James, it became clear to me that the Earl Weaver approach was superior and you could establish that mathematically,” Alderson told me. “Once you established a correlation between on-base percentage and slugging percentage with run production, then you also established a correlation between gross run production and win-loss percentage, and it became apparent that the best approach was high on-base percentage and hit the ball out of the ballpark, as opposed to batting average, as opposed to the hit-and-run and bunting.

  “For somebody like me, who was looking for a structure for talent evaulation, it wasn’t like I had to jettison twenty years of history in the game or a more traditional approach to the game, because I hadn’t been in the game. It was easier for somebody like me to go all in on this new approach. I wasn’t searching for a philosophy so much as a process by which one could make good baseball decisions. That process would involve information from a variety of sources, and what would those sources be and how would the different strands of information be weighted? Do you rely exclusively on a scout who has been doing it for fifteen years? Do you rely on some guy in Kansas who has come up with a different approach? Or do you try to come up with a way to utilize both?”

  To know for sure, Alderson had to understand both the guy in Kansas and his own scouts. Fortunately he had a job with a major-league team and could do just that. He could read James and Walker and then go watch baseball side by side with professional scouts who had spent decades studying—and thinking about—the game. It was like the difference between reading a book like Michael Herr’s Dispatches in a campus library in America and taking a bike ride through Huế.

  Alderson gave himself a game plan to maximize his chances of absorbing information and perspective from baseball people without putting people off, and he stuck to it with all the discipline of someone standing attention at the corner of Lyndon Johnson’s coffin.

  “One, I kept my mouth shut.

  “Two, I didn’t dress like a lawyer, which fit in nicely with the Haas family and Roy Eisenhardt.

  “Three, I tried to stay in decent shape, because acceptance comes in different ways. One, you’re nonthreatening; two, you’re respectable; three, in this case, trying to maintain some fitness without trying to mimic what was going on around me.

  “Four, I waited for opportunities to make a contribution. As Peter Ueberroth once told me, ‘Half of the battle is showing up.’”

  Showing up meant a lot of things. Sometimes it meant getting into his car and driving an hour and a half to Modesto to sit next to a scout and watch A’s prospects in game situations. “I would go watch games, even though I wouldn’t really know what in the hell I was looking at,” he says. “But I did have some basic principles in mind that were coming out of Bill James and Eric Walker. So it wasn’t so much scouting for tools as it was actually seeing a player who had only been a statistical entity, not a human being.”

  Alderson and the Haas family, in choosing a manger for the A’s in 1983, may have gone a little too far in the direction of choosing someone who would represent a departure from Billy Martin. Steve Boros, interviewed first, had done his homework about the team’s new regime, and he figured that if he mentioned computers, he’d have an edge; he was right. “We picked Steve Boros, who is now deceased, a great guy whose distinguishing quality may have been that he was an English literature graduate from the University of Michigan,” Alderson says. That December at the winter meetings, once the A’s had hired Boros, the Times quizzed him on his literary taste and informed readers that his favorite novel was The Great Gatsby and his favorite play was Death of a Salesman. Boros fit right in with Renaissance men like Eisenhardt, but Alderson smiles thinking about the team’s Boros period.

  “Steve would never argue with an umpire,” he told me. “He refused. He said, ‘Look, they’re not going to change their minds, so I’m not going to argue with them.’ I kept saying, ‘Look, Steve, this is part of the theater of the game and you have to do this. This is part of what fans expect, it’s what players expect, it’s part of your leadership role, it’s part of what you do as a surrogate for fans.’ I tried to get into this sort of intellectual discussion with him about arguing with umpires. I finally said, ‘Just one day decide you’re going to do it. Get in front of the mirror and practice, and just recognize that it’s not about principle, it’s not about something fundamental in your personal ethos, this is just part of the entertainment.’”

  The transition from Martin to Boros opened the way for a major leap forward in how much the A’s used computers as an analytic tool on the baseball side. Jay Alves was pleased to find Boros a far more receptive audience to all that they’d already been working on. “Billy didn’t care,” Alves said. “He was a gut guy. But when Steve Boros was hired, he had a lot of interest, and I would give him stuff from time to time.”

  Soon Matt Levine’s promise to Apple about getting reams of free publicity came through in spectacular fashion. The media attention was so abundant and breathless, it soon became a joke around the team.

  A brief sampling:

  COMPUTERBALL IS HERE!, Sport, April 1983

  COMPUTER HELPS A’S ZAP TIGERS, Miami Herald, May 13, 1983

  THE COMPUTERS OF SUMMER, Newsweek, May 23, 1983

  COMPUTERS GRAB PLACE IN BASEBALL, USA Today, September 28, 1983

  The Newsweek article, which reached the widest audience, focused on Boros and White Sox manager Tony La Russa as the first two skippers in baseball to use Apple II Pluses, noting, “The A’s inadvertently ushered in the computer era when they bought a system called Edge 1.000 for their broadcast team two years ago… . Today both teams employ computer operators who, by dint of some furious keyboard tapping, manage to record a highly nuanced, pitch-by-pitch account of each game.”

>   Ray Kennedy, writing about Boros in Sports Illustrated, observed, “Though traditionalists may shudder at the thought, it was inevitable that such a stat-happy pursuit as baseball would plug into a data bank. And Boros, forty-six, a Michigan grad who plans to take classes in computer science during the offseason, is in the forefront of a new wave of enlightened technocrats who are rewiring the game.”

  Like a lot of magazine articles, this one oversold the trend it was trying to highlight. Baseball was a long way from being rewired. The traditionalists were correct in pointing out that a lot less had changed than had remained fundamentally the same. A manager would always have to play at least the occasional hunch, but those choices would increasingly be made against a backdrop of precise information a manager could choose to heed or ignore as he saw fit. The true rewiring of baseball would take much longer. For that to occur, advances in technology were needed that could lead to a quantum leap forward in data collection and in new ways of seeing the game, akin to how the space telescope gave us previously unimaginable glimpses of the cosmos.

  6

  THE GOOGLE OF BASEBALL

  What the Haas family ownership pursued in the 1980s, with Alderson in the middle of the operation, was ahead of its time. Now their approach would be summed up as the Silicon Valley model: Find smart and creative-minded people, put them together in a work environment where they are taken care of and encouraged to love their jobs, give them plenty of space to try ideas that might be good or bad, and then build a community of people inspired to see the organization as innovative, fun, and effective. “The Haas family ran Levi Strauss in a very progressive way, very sensitive to their employees’ well-being,” Alderson says now. “I think that’s how we looked at the A’s. Google and Apple and these other places in Silicon Valley today are a contemporary version of what was going on with the Haas family forty years ago. But—this is probably my age speaking—it appears a little less genuine at Google and Apple. It has a lab rat feel to it, where everything is manipulated for productivity, like the contented cow gives more milk.”