Moneyball by Lewis, Michael (mobile ebook reader txt) 📕

Fifteen runs was not a trivial number. In the end, Paul concluded that Johnny Damon’s fielding was more important than Billy Beane believed—the first pamphlet Billy had read on the subject had said that fielding was “no more than 5%” of baseball—but not so much more that you wanted to pay Johnny Damon the $8 million a year his agent was asking for. And the truth was that you still couldn’t make perfectly definitive statements about fielding. “There was still no exact number,” Paul said, “because the system doesn’t measure where a defensive player started from. It doesn’t tell you how far a guy had to go to catch a ball.” What looked like superior defense might have been brilliant defensive positioning by the bench coach.

There was one other big glitch: these sorts of calculations could value only past performance. No matter how accurately you valued past performance, it was still an uncertain guide to future performance. Johnny Damon (or Terrence Long) might lose a step. Johnny Damon (or Terrence Long) might take to drink, or get divorced. Johnny Damon (or Terrence Long) might decide that he’d made enough money already and lose his middle-class enthusiasm for running down fly balls. In human behavior there was always uncertainty and risk. The goal of the Oakland front office was simply to minimize the risk. Their solution wasn’t perfect, it was just better than the hoary alternative, rendering decisions by gut feeling.

Of one thing they were certain: their system brought you a lot closer to the true value of a player’s performances than anything else like it. And it reinforced the Oakland A’s working theory that a guy’s hitting ability had a far greater effect than his fielding ability on a team’s performance. Albert Belle missed more fly balls than any other left fielder in baseball, but the system proved that he more than made up for it by swatting more doubles. Or as Paul put it, “The variance between the best and worst fielders on the outcome of a game is a lot smaller than the variance between the best hitters and the worst hitters.” The market as a whole failed to grasp this fact, and so placed higher prices than it should on defensive skills. Thus the practical answer to the question about Johnny Damon’s defense: it would probably cost more to replace than it was worth. Anyone who could play center field so well as Damon was either a lot worse offensively than Damon, or overpriced. The most efficient way to offset the loss of Johnny Damon’s defense was to add more offense.

The Blue Ribbon Panel Report believed that a poor team could never survive the loss to free agency of its proven stars. But the business was more complicated than that. The departures of Johnny Damon and Jason Isringhausen, both proven stars, were not great blows to the Oakland A’s. The loss of Isringhausen was not really a loss at all but a piece of ruthless profiteering. Damon’s was a loss but nothing like the $32 million for four years the Red Sox had guaranteed him. If the Oakland A’s had lost just those two players Paul’s computer might have predicted that the team in 2002 would win as many games as they had in 2001. But they’d also lost Jason Giambi, and Jason Giambi was another matter. Giambi was maybe the worst defensive first baseman in the big leagues but he was a machine for creating runs, one of the most efficient offensive players in the game. Worse, Giambi was back in Oakland, playing for the other team.

Chapter

VII

Giambi’s Hole

We’re going to run the organization from the top down. We’re controlling player personnel. That’s our job. I don’t apologize for that. There’s this belief that a baseball team starts with the manager first. It doesn’t.

—Billy Beane, quoted in the Boston Herald, January 16, 2003

The Oakland A’s clubhouse was famously the cheapest and least charming real estate in professional baseball and the video room was the meanest corner of it. Off-limits to reporters, just a few yards down the hall from the showers, the video room was where the players came to hide from newspaper reporters, and to study themselves. One wall was stacked with old tapes of A’s games, the other with decrepit video equipment. Stained Formica desks, a pair of old video screens on each one, squatted on either end of the room. The only decoration was a plastic map of the United States—because occasionally the players wanted to see which states they’d fly over on the next road trip—and two pieces of a bat split against one of the Formica desks by former A’s outfielder Matt Stairs. About six baseball players could fit inside the room at once, and often did.

Between Matt Stairs’s broken bat and the U.S. map usually sat a young man named Dan Feinstein—Feiny, everyone called him. Twenty minutes before game time all that was left of the players in the video room was Miguel Tejada’s Fig Newton wrappers. Feiny spotted them and shook his head. The A’s shortstop was one of those people who had to be told to clean up his own mess, and Feiny was one of those people who wouldn’t hesitate to do it.

Feiny was putting his college degree in medieval European history to work preparing videotapes for the Oakland A’s. He took pride in his decrepit little space. Feiny argued that while rich teams had far more expansive and tasteful facilities, they paid a price for their luxury: their players never had to share close quarters. They weren’t forced to get to know one another by smell. Feiny came to know all of the Oakland players, by smell and swing, and he was determined that they should also know themselves. The night I arrived, the A’s were playing the New York Yankees, for whom David Wells was scheduled to pitch. Next to Feiny there was a long row of tapes: