Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) (13 page)

In 1985, STATS Inc. gave up trying to sell their superior data to teams and began to sell it to fans. Their timing could not have been better: the baseball fan was changing in a way that made him a natural customer of STATS Inc. A new kind of fan, with a quasi-practical interest in baseball statistics, had been invented. In 1980 a group of friends, led by
Sports Illustrated
writer Dan Okrent, met at La Rotisserie Française, a restaurant in Manhattan, and created what became known, to the confusion of a nation, as Rotisserie Baseball. Okrent can plausibly be said to have “discovered” Bill James. Okrent was one of those seventy-five people who, in 1977, ran across the one-inch ad in
The Sporting News
James took out and sent off his check to Lawrence, Kansas. Back came an unpromising mimeograph. Then he read it. “I was absolutely dumbstruck,” he said. “I couldn’t believe that (a) this guy existed and (b) he hadn’t been discovered.”

Okrent flew to Lawrence to make sure James indeed existed, then wrote a piece about him for
Sports Illustrated
. It was killed: James’s arrival on the national sporting scene was delayed by a year, after the
Sports Illustrated
fact-checker spiked the piece. “She went through it line by line,” recalled Okrent, “saying, ‘Everyone knows this isn’t true. Everyone knows that Nolan Ryan attracted a bigger crowd when he pitched, that Gene Tenace was a bad hitter, that…’” Conventional opinions about baseball players and baseball strategies had acquired the authority of fact, and the
Sports Illustrated
fact-checking department was not going to let evidence to the contrary see print. The following year, an editor who had been unable to shake Okrent’s piece from his mind asked Okrent to try again. He did, and the piece was published, and Bill James was introduced to a wider audience. The year after that, 1982, a New York publisher, Ballantine Books, brought out the
Baseball Abstract
, and made it a national best-seller.

Many of James’s new readers were Rotisserie Baseball fanatics. The game, which sought to simulate an actual baseball game, put the players in the role of general manager of a team of real life baseball players, which he picked himself from actual teams. Each morning he’d get up and go to the box scores in the newspaper to calculate how his “team” had done. Over the next decade some immeasurable but vast number of Americans—millions, certainly—took to the game, many of them obsessively. That they should have developed a special interest in Bill James was strange, in a way. The fantasy games were premised on the old-fashioned statistics, the pre-Jamesean understanding of baseball. The general manager of a Rotisserie team measured his success by toting up batting averages, RBIs, stolen bases, and so on. To win one’s Rotisserie League you needed to behave pretty much like bone-headed general managers. You needed to overpay for RBIs and batting averages and stolen bases; you had no use for on-base and slugging percentages. You certainly didn’t need access to the growing corpus of new baseball knowledge. Rotisserie Baseball was, if anything, a force for encouraging the conventional view of baseball.

Nevertheless! The fans were more keenly interested in the information they needed to make intelligent baseball decisions—even if they themselves did not directly benefit from making intelligent baseball decisions—than the people who ran the real teams. They needed it, or thought they needed it, to win their fantasy games. As James later admitted, the desire to win these games had been a chief motive for his original rethinking of the game. Before the sophisticated baseball fantasy leagues there had been sophisticated table-top baseball games. “I used to be in a table-game league,” James confessed to his readers a decade later. “This was ten, twelve years ago…. It was during this period, in trying to win that league, that I became obsessed with how an offense works and why it doesn’t work sometimes…with finding what information you would need to have to simulate baseball in a more accurate way. I had thought about these things before, of course, but to win that damn [table league] I had to know.”

James knew better than just about anyone on the planet just how many people were taking to these fantasy games, and how widespread was the desire to play at being the general manager of a big league baseball team, and, therefore, how deep the interest in baseball statistics. He became an investor and creative director of the newly energized STATS Inc. The company grew rapidly—ESPN was a customer from the start and
USA Today
soon became one. It became the leading source of information to the baseball fan until it was sold in 1999 for $45 million to Fox News Corporation.

The company was a success, but of a curious kind: what should have happened didn’t happen. What should have happened is this: real, as opposed to fantasy, general managers would engage with this new, growing body of knowledge. The Jamesean movement set the table for the geeks to rush in and take over the general management of the game. Everywhere one turned in competitive markets, technology was offering the people who understood it an edge. What was happening to capitalism should have happened to baseball: the technical man with his analytical magic should have risen to prominence in baseball management, just as he was rising to prominence on, say, Wall Street.

What the baseball professionals did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was to hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant. Some stat head would impress himself upon a general manager as the sort of guy who crunched numbers and the GM would find him a small office in the back.

The lack of discrimination of the few baseball GMs who went shopping for a James manqué led to what might be called
Elephant Man
moments. The
Elephant Man
moment came when the beat reporter for the local team pulled back the curtain on the front office and revealed the shriveled-up fellow with bizarre facial hair punching numbers into a Mac. The brains of the operation! The crowd invariably shrieked and recoiled. The most dramatic
Elephant Man
moment was probably when an oddity named Mike Gimbel hired by the Boston Red Sox didn’t wait to be exposed but bodily hurled himself into the Boston sports pages, by claiming responsibility for the shrewd moves made by the Red Sox GM, Dan Duquette. The
Boston Globe
explained to Red Sox fans that this new intellectual force behind the team was “a Queens Community College dropout, a self-taught computer programmer and a Rotisserie League fanatic whose Brooklyn loft was raided three years ago by police because of his six pet caimans—South American alligators—that he kept in an indoor pond in his loft. The cops also confiscated his five turtles and an iguana.” The New England Sports Service ran the same story with the headline:
Stats Freak Has Duquette’s Ear
. “By day Gimbel lives in Brooklyn and works for the Bureau of Water Supply in New York,” it began, groping for just the right combination of words and images to infuriate the Red Sox season ticket holder. “It’s as if a computer savvy Ed Norton had become the Red Sox secret weapon. Gimbel is unorthodox in virtually every way. In 80 degree Florida weather yesterday, Gimbel appeared ready for a trip to Siberia, with long pants, a long sleeve shirt and a jacket. His approach to evaluating baseball is more out of the ordinary. He cautions against watching too many games….”

Duquette waited until the end of the season, then let Gimbel know his contract wouldn’t be renewed—thus proving to the world just how critical he was to the Boston Red Sox.

By the early 1990s it was clear that “sabermetrics,” the search for new baseball knowledge, was an activity that would take place mainly outside of baseball. You could count on one hand the number of “sabermetricians” inside of baseball, and none of them appears to have had much effect. After a while they seemed more like fans who second-guessed the general manager than advisers who influenced decisions. They were forever waving printouts to show how foolish the GM had been not to have taken their advice. A man named Craig Wright spent many frustrating years as the sabermetrician with the Texas Rangers, and then many more consulting other big league teams. He eventually quit his profession altogether. “I needed to be a GM if I was going to see my stuff ever used,” he said. “And I never even got asked to interview for a single GM job.” Eddie Epstein—the young government economist whose interest in baseball analysis had been inflamed by James’s writing—got himself hired by the Baltimore Orioles and the San Diego Padres but he, too, wound up quitting in a huff. The Padres executive responsible for hiring him, Larry Lucchino, freely acknowledged that the small group inside baseball searching for new baseball knowledge “was a cult. The cult status of it meant it was something that could be discarded easily. There was a profusion of new knowledge and it was ignored.”

Well into the late 1990s you didn’t have to look at big league baseball very closely to see its fierce unwillingness to rethink anything. It was as if it had been inoculated against outside ideas. For instance, a new kind of rich person named John Henry bought the Florida Marlins in January 1999. Most baseball owners were either heirs, or empire builders of one sort or another, or both. Henry had made his money in the intelligent end of the financial markets. He had an instinctive feel for the way statistical analysis could turn up inefficiencies in human affairs. Inefficiencies in the financial markets had made Henry a billionaire—and he saw some familiar idiocies in the market for baseball players. As Henry later wrote in a letter to ESPN’s Rob Neyer:

People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage. Many people think they are smarter than others in the stock market and that the market itself has no intrinsic intelligence—as if it’s inert. Many people think they are smarter than others in baseball and that the game on the field is simply what they think it is through their set of images/beliefs. Actual data from the market means more than individual perception/belief. The same is true in baseball.

Henry was, unsurprisingly, a longtime Bill James reader. Even after he became the owner of a real big league baseball team, Henry continued to play in a sophisticated fantasy league in which he deployed Jamesean tools and, as he put it, “cleaned up. I won every year.” But the real baseball team he owned continued to be run as if Bill James had never existed, and it didn’t clean up anything but its shattered pride after ninety-eight losses.

The problem Henry faced was social and political. For a man who had never played professional baseball to impose upon even a pathetic major league franchise an entirely new way of doing things meant alienating the baseball insiders he employed: the manager, the scouts, the players. In the end, he would have been ostracized by his own organization. And what was the point of being in baseball if you weren’t
in
baseball?

Right from the start Bill James assumed he had been writing for, not a mass audience, but a tiny group of people intensely interested in baseball. He wound up with a mass audience and went largely unread by the people most intensely interested in baseball: the men who ran the teams. Right through the 1980s and 1990s, James experienced only two responses to his work from baseball professionals. The first was opportunism from player agents, who wanted him to help them to demonstrate, in salary arbitration meetings with the teams, that their clients were underpaid. The other was hostility from the subcontractors who kept the stats for Major League Baseball.

When the Jamesean movement first took shape, the attitude toward baseball statistics inside the company whose job it was to keep the official statistics for Major League Baseball was an odd mixture of possessiveness and indifference. In the late 1970s, the baseball writer Dan Okrent, with two colleagues from book publishing, went to pitch an idea to the CEO of the Elias Sports Bureau, Seymour Siwoff. The idea, recalled Okrent, “was to try to persuade him to collaborate with us on a painstakingly detailed, under-the-fingernails things you never knew book about baseball stats. The image is indelible: We are sitting there with this guy who looks like a superannuated ferret, his pale skinny arms protruding from the billowing short sleeves of his white-on-white shirt, and he brushes us off with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘Boys,’ he said, ‘nobody gives a shit about this stuff.’”

In 1985 the Elias Bureau finally woke up and published a book, a virtual twin in outward appearance to the
1985 Baseball Abstract
, called the
1985 Elias Baseball Analyst
. (The superannuated ferret was a co-author.) Although the company finally divulged some of the statistics they had long withheld from James and other analysts, they failed to do anything much with them. The writers imitated James’s prose style but, lacking anything interesting to say, they wound up sounding empty and arch. James was happy to confirm the casual reader’s impression that the Elias Bureau had a whiff of Salieri about it. “When the
Baseball Abstract
hit the best-seller lists,” James wrote in his final
Abstract
,

the [Elias Bureau] launched their own competitor, the main purposes of which were to:

a) make money

b) steal all of my ideas

c) make as many disparaging comments as possible about me

So that was a lot of fun.

The effect on James of being ignored by the people who stood to benefit the most from his work was to distance himself even further from those people. In his earlier writings James often tried to explain what he was up to, in such a way that it might invite baseball professionals to pay attention. His instinct, at first, was to assume that the people who actually managed baseball teams had some good reason for what they were doing, even when what they were doing struck him as foolish. A few years into his career, he clearly decided that baseball professionals would benefit from being smacked on the head by a two-by-four. In his commentary about the Cleveland Indians that year, for instance, he wrote that “during the winter I was told something about the Indians’ front office that really shocked me. They’re dumb. You know, not bright, slow.” He went on to explain how he at first refused to accept stupidity as an explanation for the Indians’ ineptitude because “there is so much hope invested in a ball club, there are so many people who care about the fortunes even of the Indians and who are honestly hurt, if only in passing (but we are all only passing) that it just seems inconceivable that these fortunes could be entrusted to someone who is incapable of taking care of them. Are children allowed to play catch with the family jewels?…I have a correspondent who is an avid Indians fan, a professor of math at a fine university. He understands what needs to be done. Why can’t he be given the job?”