Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) (9 page)

With that, he concluded his fruitless argument with his talent. He decided that his talent was beside the point: how could you call it talent if it didn’t lead to success? Baseball was a skill, or maybe it was a trick: whatever it was he hadn’t played it very well. In his own mind he ceased to be a guy who should have made it and became a guy upon whom had been heaped a lot of irrational hopes and dreams. He had reason to feel some distaste for baseball’s mystical nature. He would soon be handed a weapon to destroy it.

S
ANDY ALDERSON
has a clear memory from earlier that spring of 1990, of Billy Beane taking batting practice. He didn’t know much about Billy and wondered what kind of player he was. “He was very undisciplined at the plate,” Alderson said. “Not a lot of power. I remember after I watched him very specifically asking: why is this guy even on the team?” Not that it mattered. Tony La Russa was the A’s manager and, in the great tradition of big-shot baseball managers, he paid only faint attention to what the GM had to say.

That was one of the many things about baseball Alderson was determined to change. When Billy came to work inside the A’s front office in 1993, he walked into the early stages of a fitful science experiment. When Alderson had been hired as the A’s general manager a decade earlier, he’d been a complete outsider to baseball. This was rare. Most GMs start out as scouts and rise up through the baseball establishment. Alderson was an expensively educated San Francisco lawyer (Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School) with no experience of the game, outside of a bit of time on school playing fields. He was also a former Marine Corps officer, and his self-presentation was much closer to “former Marine Corps officer” than “fancy-pants lawyer.” “Sandy didn’t know shit about baseball,” says Harvey Dorfman, the baseball psychologist Alderson more or less invented. “He was a neophyte. But he was a progressive thinker. And he wanted to understand how the game worked. He also had the capacity to instill fear in others.”

When Alderson entered the game he wanted to get his mind around it, and he did. He concluded that everything from on-field strategies to player evaluation was better conducted by scientific investigation—hypotheses tested by analysis of historical statistical baseball data—than by reference to the collective wisdom of old baseball men. By analyzing baseball statistics you could see through a lot of baseball nonsense. For instance, when baseball managers talked about scoring runs, they tended to focus on team batting average, but if you ran the analysis you could see that the number of runs a team scored bore little relation to that team’s batting average. It correlated much more exactly with a team’s on-base and slugging percentages. A lot of the offensive tactics that made baseball managers famous—the bunt, the steal, the hit and run—could be proven to have been, in most situations, either pointless or self-defeating. “I figured out that managers do all this shit because it is safe,” said Alderson. “They don’t get criticized for it.” He wasn’t particularly facile with numbers, but he could understand them well enough to use their conclusions. “I couldn’t do a regressions analysis,” he said, “but I knew what one was. And the results of them made sense to me.”

Alderson hadn’t set out to reexamine the premises of professional baseball but he wound up doing it anyway. For a long stretch, his investigations were largely academic. “You have to remember,” he said, “that there wasn’t any evidence that any of this shit worked. And I had credibility problems. I didn’t have a baseball background.” The high payroll Oakland teams managed by Tony La Russa had done well enough in the late 1980s and early 1990s that Alderson felt he should “defer to success.” For more than a decade he could afford to do this. Since the late 1970s the A’s had been owned by Walter A. Haas, Jr., who was, by instinct, more of a philanthropist than a businessman. Haas viewed professional baseball ownership as a kind of public trust and spent money on it accordingly. In 1991, the Oakland A’s actually had the highest payroll in all of baseball. Haas was willing to lose millions to field a competitive team that would do Oakland proud, and he did. The A’s had gone to the World Series three straight seasons from 1988 to 1990.

Deferring to success became an untenable strategy in 1995, when Walter Haas died. His estate sold the team to a pair of Bay Area real estate developers, Steve Schott and Ken Hofmann, who were, by instinct, more businessmen than philanthropists. Schott and Hofmann wanted Alderson to continue running the team but on a much tighter budget. “We had new owners who weren’t going to spend any money,” said Alderson. “They made it clear that this had to be a business. And so we suddenly were put in the position of: we can only afford a one-tool player. Which tool is it going to be?” What—and this is what the question amounted to—was the efficient way to spend money on baseball players? The first, short answer, according to a pamphlet commissioned by Alderson, was to spend it on hitters. The pamphlet was written by a former aerospace engineer turned baseball writer, Eric Walker. Fielding, Walker wrote, was “at most five percent of the game.” The rest was pitching and offense, and while “good pitchers are usually valued properly, good batters often are not.” In Walker’s words:

Analyzing baseball yields many numbers of interest and value. Yet far and away—far, far and away—the most critical number in all of baseball is 3: the three outs that define an inning. Until the third out, anything is possible; after it, nothing is. Anything that increases the offense’s chances of making an out is bad; anything that decreases it is good. And what is on-base percentage? Simply yet exactly put, it is the probability that the batter will not make an out. When we state it that way, it becomes, or should become, crystal clear that the most important isolated (one-dimensional) offensive statistic is the on-base percentage. It measures the probability that the batter will not be another step toward the end of the inning.

Alderson’s reference point for running an organization was the time he’d spent as an officer in the Marine Corps. He approached the A’s farm teams the way the Marine Corps approached its boot camps. The individual star was less important than the organization as a whole, and the organization as a whole functioned well only if it was uniformly disciplined. Once he decided that hitting was the most important tool and everything else was secondary, Alderson set about implementing throughout the organization, with Marine Corps rigor, a uniform approach to hitting. The approach had three rules:

1. Every batter needs to behave like a leadoff man, and adopt as his main goal getting on base.

2. Every batter should also possess the power to hit home runs, in part because home run power forced opposing pitchers to pitch more cautiously, and led to walks, and high on-base percentages.

3. To anyone with the natural gifts to become a professional baseball player, hitting was less a physical than a mental skill. Or, at any rate, the aspects of hitting that could be taught were mental.

By 1995, Alderson had created a new baseball corporate culture around a single baseball statistic: on-base percentage. Scoring runs was, in the new view, less an art or a talent than a
process.
If you made the process a routine—if you got every player doing his part on the production line—you could pay a lot less for runs than the going rate. Alderson was building a system with Marine Corps intolerance for exceptions to the rules. “Sandy produced this long paper about the pros and cons of selective hitting,” recalled Karl Kuehl, who was in charge of implementing Alderson’s rules. “He wanted to really push the kids coming up through the minor leagues. No one had ever heard of on-base percentage, but when your being called to the major leagues depends on your on-base percentage, it gets your attention.” The system’s central tenet was, in Alderson’s words, “the system was the star. The reason the system works is that everyone buys into it. If they don’t, there is a weakness in the system.” The unacceptable vice in a minor league player was a taste for bad pitches. The most praiseworthy virtue was the willingness to take a base on balls. No player was eligible for minor league awards, or was allowed to move up in the system, unless he had at least one walk in every ten bats.

The effect of Sandy Alderson’s new rules was interesting to anyone who believed the pitcher, not the hitter, was chiefly responsible for the base on balls. More or less overnight, all of the A’s minor league teams began to lead their respective leagues in walks. To ensure they never lost that lead, Alderson routinely reviewed the batting statistics of the teams, and leaned on managers whose teams were not walking. He noticed, for instance, that the Oakland Double-A affiliate was the exception in the organization: its players weren’t drawing walks at the same frantic rate as the A’s other minor league teams. “I got my reports,” he said. “I can see they aren’t taking any walks. I called the manager and said, ‘They go up or you’re fired.’ And they went up. Quickly.”

Even after the Marine Corps had come to the Oakland A’s there remained a weakness in the system: the major league team. The mere presence of a free-swinging light hitter like Billy Beane on the big club in 1990 proved that Alderson’s views were not the controlling ones. Around the big league clubhouse the GM trod more gingerly than around the minor league clubhouses. Alderson didn’t march into Tony La Russa’s office and tell him, “The walks go up or you’re fired.” No one did. There was no very good reason for this; it’s just the way it was, because the guys who ran the front office typically had never played in the big leagues.

The need to treat the big league team as the sacrosanct province of people who
had
played in the big leagues struck Alderson, who liked the idea of order and discipline cascading unimpeded from the top, as a kind of madness. “In what other business,” he asked, “do you leave the fate of the organization to a middle manager?” But that is what the Oakland A’s, along with the rest of major league baseball, had always done. Tony La Russa was a middle manager and Tony La Russa had his own ideas about how to score runs, and those ideas guided the bats of his hitters. A player would come up through the A’s farm system being told that he needed to be patient, that he needed to take his walks; and then the moment he got to the big club, he was told to unleash his natural aggression. Even players brainwashed by Alderson’s minor league system in the new approach were susceptible to these arguments. Given the slightest opening, many of them regressed, and began hacking away. “It may have something to do with how dominant these players are as they come up,” said Alderson. “Patience and discipline at the plate has never been reinforced. They say, ‘They’re not paying me to walk.’ And so if you don’t lean on them, they don’t.”

Before it had a chance to become a proper argument, the conflict between the old and the new baseball men was resolved by the budget crisis. Tony La Russa left when the new owners renounced the old habit of bankrolling millions of dollars in losses. Alderson set out to find a manager who would understand that he wasn’t the boss, and landed upon the recently fired manager of the Houston Astros, Art Howe. “Art Howe was hired to implement the ideas of the front office, not his own,” said Alderson. “And that was new.”

B
ILLY WOULD SAY
later that his wife left him because she was unnerved by his intensity—that she could even see it in his hands when he drove an automobile. At any rate, he soon found himself out of not only a baseball uniform but a wife as well. Baseball marriages were like that: their most vulnerable moment was immediately after a player retired, and it dawned on husband and wife that they’d actually be spending time together. “They end when the career ends,” said Billy. “Until then you can put up with anything because you’re always leaving the next day.” His wife moved back to San Diego and took their infant daughter, christened Casey, with her. Billy spent his weeks scouting and his weekends speeding down, and then back up, the highway between Oakland and San Diego. He couldn’t afford the plane tickets.

His motor was still fueled less by desire than anxieties—and he now had two of them. One was that he wouldn’t know his own daughter. The other was that he wouldn’t cut it in the front office. “If baseball’s all you can do and you know that’s all you can do,” he said, “it breeds in you a certain creative desperation.” When he wasn’t speeding down some California highway he was jetting around the country watching games and listening to the other scouts talk about players. Whatever shred of doubt he’d had that most of them had no idea what they were talking about, he lost.

What he hadn’t lost was his ferocious need to win. He had just transferred it to a different place, from playing to making decisions about players. But this time he had guidance—from a graduate of not one but
two
Ivy League colleges—and he was willing to follow it. “What Billy figured out at some point,” said Sandy Alderson, “is that he wanted to be me more than he wanted to be Jose Canseco.” In 1993 Alderson, impressed by the creative enthusiasm with which Billy seemed to attack every task he was given, brought him into the front office, made him his assistant, and told him his job was to go out and find undervalued minor league players. And then he handed Billy the pamphlet he’d commissioned from Eric Walker.

When Billy read Walker’s pamphlet, he experienced—well, he couldn’t quite describe the excitement of it. “It was the first thing I had ever read that tried to take an objective view of baseball,” he said. “Something that was different than just a lot of people’s subjective opinions. I was still very subjective in my own thinking but it made sense to me.” It more than made sense to him: it explained him. The new, outsider’s view of baseball was all about exposing the illusions created by the insiders on the field. Billy Beane had himself been one of those illusions.

Billy wasn’t one to waste a lot of time worrying about whether he was motivated by a desire to succeed or the pursuit of truth. To his way of thinking the question was academic, since the pursuit of truth was, suddenly, the key to success. He was bright. He had a natural coruscating skepticism about baseball’s traditional wisdom. He could see that Eric Walker’s pamphlet was just the beginning of a radical, and rational, approach to the game—one that would concentrate unprecedented powers in the hands of the general manager. Where had Eric Walker come from, he wondered, and was there any more behind what he’d written? “Billy shed every one of his player-type prejudices and adapted,” Alderson said. “Whereas most of the people like him would have said, ‘That’s not the way we did it when I played.’” In answer to Billy’s question, Alderson pointed to a row of well-thumbed paperbacks by a writer named Bill James, who had opened Alderson’s eyes to a new way of thinking about baseball. Alderson had collected pretty much everything Bill James had written, including four books self-published by James between 1977 and 1980 that still existed only as cheap mimeographs. Sandy Alderson had never met, or even spoken to, Bill James. He wasn’t a typical baseball insider but he still recognized a distinction between people like himself, who actually
made
baseball decisions, and people like James, who just wrote about them. But he had found James’s approach to the game completely persuasive, and had reshaped a professional baseball organization in James’s spirit. That’s why he had hired Eric Walker, in the hope of “getting some Bill James–like stuff that was proprietary to us.”