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

Oakland A’s front office actually might be onto something. The man who spoke for all insiders was Joe Morgan, the Hall of Fame second baseman, who was in the broadcast booth for the entire five-game series between the A’s and the Twins. At some point during each game Morgan explained to the audience the flaw in the A’s thinking—not that he had any deep understanding of what that thinking entailed. But he was absolutely certain that their strategy made no sense. When the A’s lost the first game, 7-5, it gave Morgan his opening to explain, in the first inning of the second game, why the Oakland A’s were in trouble. “You have to manufacture runs in the postseason,” he said, meaning bunt and steal and in general treat outs as something other than a scarce resource. Incredibly, he then went on to explain that “manufacturing runs” was how the New York Yankees had beaten the Anaheim Angels the night before.

I had seen that game. Down 5-4 in the eighth inning, Yankees second baseman Alfonso Soriano had gotten himself on base and stolen second. Derek Jeter then walked, and Jason Giambi singled in Soriano. Bernie Williams then hit a three-run homer. A reasonable person, examining that sequence of events, says, “Whew, thank God Soriano didn’t get caught stealing; it was, in retrospect, a stupid risk that could have killed the whole rally.” Joe Morgan looked at it and announced that Soriano stealing second, the only bit of “manufacturing” in the production line, was the cause. Amazingly, Morgan concluded that day’s lesson about baseball strategy by saying, “You sit and wait for a three-run homer, you’re still going to be sitting there.”

But the wonderful thing about this little lecture was what happened right under Joe Morgan’s nose, as he was giving it. Ray Durham led off the game for Oakland with a walk. He didn’t attempt to steal, as Morgan would have him do. Scott Hatteberg followed Durham and he didn’t bunt, as Morgan would have him do. He smashed a double. A few moments later, Eric Chavez hit a three-run homer. And Joe Morgan’s lecture on the need to avoid playing for the three-run homer just rolled right along, as if the play on the field had not dramatically contradicted every word that had just come out of his mouth. That day the A’s walked and swatted their way to nine runs, and a win—in which Chad Bradford, returned to form, pitched two scoreless innings. Two days later in Minnesota, before the third game, Joe Morgan made the same speech all over again.

As it turned out, the A’s did everyone in baseball a favor and lost to the Twins, in the fifth game.* The two games they won the scores were 9-1 and 8-3. The three games they lost the scores were 7-5, 11-2, and 5-4. These were not the low-scoring games of Ray Durham’s play-off imagination. And yet virtually all of the noisy second-guessing after their defeat followed the line of reasoning laid down by Ray Durham and Joe Morgan. One of the leading Bay Area baseball columnists, Glenn Dickey of the San Francisco Chronicle, explained to his readers that “The A’s don’t know how to ‘manufacture’ runs, which kills them in close games in the postseason. Manager Art Howe, who believed in ‘little ball’ before he came to the A’s, has become so accustomed to the walk/homer approach that he can’t adjust in the postseason.” In late October, Joe Morgan will summarize the Oakland A’s problems in print: “The A’s lose because they are two-dimensional. They have good pitching and try to hit home runs. They don’t use speed and don’t try to manufacture runs. They wait for the home run. They are still waiting.”

In the five-game series, Scott Hatteberg went 7-14 with three walks, no strikeouts, a home run, and a pair of doubles. He scored five runs and knocked in three. Chad Bradford faced ten batters and got nine of them out, seven on ground balls. The tenth batter hit a bloop single. Bradford snapped out of his slump after the twentieth win. His confidence returned about the same time Scott Hatteberg started telling him what the hitters said on the rare occasions they got to first base against him. After Anaheim’s second baseman, Adam Kennedy, blooped a single off Bradford, he turned to Hatty and said, “Jesus Christ, there’s no way that’s eighty-four miles an hour.”

All of the commentary struck the Oakland A’s front office as just more of the same. “Base-stealing,” said Paul DePodesta, after the dust had settled. “That’s the one thing everyone points to that we do. Or don’t. So when we lose, that’s why.” He then punched some numbers into his calculator. The Oakland A’s scored 4.9 runs per game during the season. They scored 5.5 runs per game in the five-game series against the Twins. They hadn’t “manufactured” runs and yet they had scored more of them in the play-offs than they had during the regular season. “The real problem,” said Paul, “was that during the season we allowed 4.0 runs per game, and during the play-offs we allowed 5.4. The small sample size makes that insignificant, but it also punctuates the absurdity of the critiques of our offensive philosophy.” The real problem was that Tim Hudson, heretofore flawless in big games, and perfect against the Minnesota Twins, had two horrendous outings. No one could have predicted that.

The postseason partially explained why baseball was so uniquely resistant to the fruits of scientific research: to any purely rational idea about how to run a baseball team. It wasn’t just that the game was run by old baseball men who insisted on doing things as they had always been done. It was that the season ended in a giant crapshoot. The play-offs frustrate rational management because, unlike the long regular season, they suffer from the sample size problem. Pete Palmer, the sabermetrician and author of The Hidden Game