The Extra 2% (22 page)

How does a team go from the worst record in the majors one season to an American League pennant—and one of the biggest year-to-year turnarounds ever—the next?

By losing. On purpose.

The 2007 Tampa Bay Devil Rays weren’t the 1919 Black Sox. No shady mobsters convinced players to throw games. Joe Maddon did everything he could to squeeze every last win from the roster he was given. No one made a grand announcement during spring training that the D-Rays would lose 96 games. But Andrew Friedman knew his team wasn’t ready to compete. Not with most of its best talent either still in the minors or not quite ready to perform well in the majors. And certainly not in the American League East, baseball’s toughest division and the single biggest hurdle for any team to overcome in any major American sport.

So the Devil Rays hatched a plan. Rather than conducting exhaustive searches for talent or spending millions of dollars on players
who could help the team win a few more games, the D-Rays would let nature take its course.

“Winning 66 or 71 games didn’t make a dramatic difference to us,” said Friedman. “It was about putting ourselves in a position to win 92-plus.”

Just not immediately.

The team that jogged onto the turf at Tropicana Field in 2007 wasn’t all bad. The offense that year was actually decent, finishing eighth in their league in runs scored and fourth in weighted on-base average (a catchall stat that runs along a similar scale to regular on-base percentage but also takes into account slugging percentage and other factors). Two players, first baseman Carlos Peña and center fielder B. J. Upton, enjoyed career years, ranking among the top performers in the majors at their respective positions.

But oh, that pitching. And ouch, that defense.

The Devil Rays posted a 5.53 team ERA in 2007, by far the worst mark in the majors. James Shields and Scott Kazmir formed an effective (and young) tandem at the top of the rotation. But the other six pitchers who started games that year put up impossibly ugly numbers. Jae Weong Seo allowed 104 base runners and 11 home runs in 52 innings, for an 8.13 ERA. Casey Fossum got belted for 109 hits and 15 bombs in 76 innings, logging a 7.70 ERA. Edwin Jackson, owner of the
lowest
ERA among all starters not named Shields or Kazmir, went 5-15, giving up 195 hits and 88 walks in 161 innings and 5.76 earned runs per nine innings. You could see the Devil Rays at least trying to cobble together a decent rotation. Jackson was a highly touted right-hander acquired in a trade from the Dodgers. J. P. Howell was a first-round pick of the Royals who Friedman hoped would bounce back after falling out of favor in Kansas City. Andy Sonnanstine was already a success story, having battled his way to the majors on the strength of pinpoint control and being projected as a fourth or fifth starter who could keep his team in games.

The bullpen—showing hardly a glimmer of promise—was another story. As shaky as the starting pitchers were, the relievers were
far worse, their 6.16 ERA dwarfing the largesse of any other team. The numbers failed to tell the full story. The pitchers deployed to handle the bullpen’s workload that season were the living embodiment of baseball dumpster-diving. The motley crew included a cavalcade of undrafted free agents, minor league lifers, and pitchers years past not-all-that-impressive peaks. Two of the relievers hadn’t thrown a single major league pitch the year before. The results would have been hilarious if they weren’t so sad.

There was the 21–4 loss to the Yankees that still haunts Shawn Camp’s dreams. Camp threw 1⅓ innings and surrendered five runs on nine hits; his sixth inning went home run, strikeout looking, double, ground-rule double, home run, single, ground-rule double. There was the 12–11 loss to the Blue Jays, which saw Tampa Bay blow an early 8–1 lead and an 11–6 lead heading to the bottom of the ninth. The 14–8 loss to the Marlins might have been the topper. The best D-Rays reliever that night was shortstop Josh Wilson, who pitched a scoreless ninth after the three guys before him yielded eight runs in two innings.

There were only two plausible explanations for not only the bullpen’s results in 2007 but also the lack of ability among the club’s relief corps: either Andrew Friedman and his staff were the worst assemblers of bullpen talent in decades, or the Devil Rays had no interest in paying more than the minimum for their pen that year, figuring a few extra wins saved wouldn’t make a difference and their resources would best be saved for when the team was ready to contend.

As bad as Tampa Bay’s pitching was in ’07, a more pervasive problem infected that team, one that made run prevention nearly impossible and needed to be fixed before the Devil Rays could ever hope to win: the defense was historically awful. The D-Rays ranked last or nearly last in the majors in every fielding category. Going by old-time stats, their .980 fielding percentage tied for second-worst in baseball. More advanced stats painted an even uglier picture. Mitchel Lichtman’s “ultimate zone rating” figured the Devil Rays’ defense cost the team 47.5 runs (nearly five wins) that year, the
second-worst mark in MLB. John Dewan’s “plus/minus” system tabbed the D-Rays at –107, meaning that Tampa Bay made 107 fewer defensive plays than an average team—the worst mark by any team from 2006 through 2008.

But no metric was crueler to the Devil Rays than “defensive efficiency rating,” a statistic invented by Bill James that measures the percentage of balls in play turned into outs.
Baseball Prospectus
tracks the stat all the way to 1954—and no team had ever been worse than the 2007 D-Rays. In 2007, Tampa Bay converted just 65.6% of balls in play into outs; looked at another way, opponents hit a stratospheric
.344
when putting the ball in play against Rays pitching.

Though the extent of the defensive meltdown was a surprise, the Devil Rays knew going in that 2007 would be a down year for them. The team’s double-play combination alone was the source of much tsuris for D-Rays fans. The team installed Brendan Harris at shortstop, thus handing the most important position on the diamond to an infielder with limited range. Josh Wilson, who also played some shortstop, was even worse. Ty Wigginton, a bruising 230-pounder who made up for his decent power with stone hands and even less range, manned second base. Still, Wigginton was a far sight better than the man he replaced. Though enlightened teams knew that errors and fielding percentage were lousy ways to measure defensive aptitude, even the most hard-core stathead had to acknowledge that B. J. Upton’s 12 errors in 48 games at second base were not going to get it done. Upton, an ex-shortstop and ex–third baseman, finally wound up in center field.

Like the abominable bullpen, the Devil Rays’ defensively challenged middle infielders were mere placeholders, low-priced players plugged in while the front office continued to search for talent that could make up part of the next—the first—Tampa Bay contender. If those players happened to perform even worse than expected, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Tampa Bay had spent the first eight years of its existence losing unintentionally, resulting
in a slew of high draft picks. Though the team might’ve won a few more games with slightly better players in ’07, Friedman didn’t much mind when the D-Rays’ worst record in the majors landed them the number-one overall pick in the 2008 draft.

“It wasn’t about constructing an optimal twenty-five-man roster,” Friedman said of the ’07 season. “A move we didn’t make in 2007 allowed us to make certain moves in the off-season.”

The lousy defense’s huge impact on the pitchers’ ’07 results confirmed the convictions of the Devil Rays’ brain trust. They had already delved into defensive analysis before the ’07 meltdown. The baseball operations department was jammed with number crunchers who for years had followed the impact of defense on run prevention and on wins and losses. James Click, the team’s manager of baseball research and development, invented an advanced defensive stat of his own, two years before the team hired him: park-adjusted defensive efficiency, or PADE. If bad defense could so profoundly wreck a season, they realized, what would happen if Tampa Bay trotted out a lineup full of good, even great defenders?

Friedman would later say, “We certainly appreciated how defense and pitching were intertwined.” But there was more to it than that. When the A’s, Red Sox, and a handful of other teams went searching for undervalued baseball commodities, they stumbled upon on-base percentage—especially players who produced high OBPs by dint of hefty walk rates. Load your roster with a bunch of players who knew how to take ball four and you’d score more runs, wear down opposing pitchers more quickly, and, best of all, do all of that without busting the payroll.

In the rush to acquire on-base machines, though, defense hadn’t merely been overlooked. It had been shoved aside. Big, hulking sluggers like Adam Dunn, once knocked for their high-strikeout counts, became nearly deified in sabermetric circles for their combination of power and patience. But for all the good 40 homers and 100 walks a season could do, Dunn would give much of that value back in the outfield with his suspect range and poor instincts. And
he wasn’t alone. The prototypical “toolsy” player who could run, cover a lot of ground, and catch the ball—and perhaps struggle some to get on base—had become passé in some quarters.

This was surprising, given the game’s history. “The best player in a nine is he who makes the most good plays in a match,” sports-writer Henry Chadwick wrote about defense—
in 1870
. Many of the most famous plays in baseball history featured glove work, from Willie Mays’s over-the-shoulder catch off Vic Wertz 450 feet from home plate in the 1954 World Series to Bill Buckner’s agonizing misplay of Mookie Wilson’s slow roller in Game 6 of the ’86 Series. Yet thanks to souped-up home run totals and a newfound appreciation for ninety-foot jogs to first base, many teams’ interest in defense, at least temporarily, had gone the way of the bullpen cart.

“Five years ago, defense was still a pretty nebulous subject,” said Steve Moyer, president of Baseball Info Solutions. BIS produces pitch-by-pitch, spray-chart hit location and pitch-charting data, which help teams isolate the effects of pitching and defense and evaluate pitchers and fielders accordingly. The changes Moyer saw from 2005 to 2010 in teams’ attitudes toward the value of defense were, he said, “huge. People didn’t talk about it at all before.”

An increasingly available stream of play-by-play information started to change all that. Suddenly, analysts could see what happened with every batted ball, which fielders were in position to field them, and how they fared when they tried. Many teams still ignored the advanced defensive stats, preferring to trust scouts’ eyes instead. A few clubs dipped their toes into the water, at least glancing at a few numbers when making personnel decisions.

But no team embraced defensive analysis as early, or as devotedly, as the D-Rays. Rather than relying on others’ work, they built their own database, incorporating everything from scouting information to minor league and major league stats for everyone in the organization—and other teams too. Using existing advanced statistics from Lichtman, Dewan, Tom Tango,
Baseball Prospectus
, and other leading analysts, they created their own proprietary measures for hitting, base running, pitching, and defense. What they found
convinced them that they could vastly improve the ball club, very quickly, with just a few well-placed moves.

“If you look at statistics like [wins above replacement] over the past few years, and then specifically at the spread between offensive and defensive contributions, you find that players would get penalized for having higher defensive value,” said
Diamond Dollars
’ Vince Gennaro. “The undervaluation of defense was just waiting to be exploited.”

If the Devil Rays were going to exploit market inefficiencies and compete on a small budget, they could take comfort in knowing that other teams in similar situations had succeeded before them. The A’s, Twins, and Marlins had all won with low payrolls, using a variety of approaches ranging from old-school talent evaluation to advanced analytical systems. The D-Rays would take a different tack, drawing on years of lessons learned by Friedman on Wall Street. At the heart of that approach was a practice known as arbitrage. Arbitrage refers to any financial transaction in which you simultaneously buy one thing and sell another. The thing you’re buying is cheaper than the thing you’re selling, thus netting you a profit. An arbitrageur can complete such a transaction using any number of financial instruments, including stocks, bonds, derivatives, commodities, and currencies. He always believes he has better information than the other guy and can thus make the best trades—of equities, of gold … or of cleanup hitters.