Moneyball - Michael Lewis [116]
Voros McCracken’s astonishing discovery about major league pitchers had no apparent effect on the management, or evaluation, of actual pitchers. No one on the inside called Voros to discuss his findings; so far as he knew, no one on the inside had even read it. But Paul DePodesta had read it. Paul’s considered reaction: “If you want to talk about a guy who might be the next Bill James, Voros McCracken could be it.” Paul’s unconsidered reaction: “The first thing I thought of was Chad Bradford.”
VOROS McCRACKEN had provided the theory to explain what the Oakland A’s front office already had come to believe: you could create reliable pitching statistics. It was true that the further you got from the big leagues, the less reliably stats predicted big league performance. But if you focused on the right statistics you could certainly project a guy based on his Triple-A, and even his Double-A, numbers. The right numbers were walks, home runs, and strikeouts plus a few others. If you trusted those, you didn’t have to give two minutes’ thought to how a guy looked, or how hard he threw. You could judge a pitcher’s performance objectively, by what he had accomplished.
Chad Bradford was, to the Oakland A’s front office, a no-brainer. “It wasn’t that he was doing it differently,” said Paul DePodesta. “It was that the efficiency with which he was recording outs was astounding.” Chad Bradford had set off several different sets of bells inside Paul’s computer. He hardly ever walked a batter; he gave up virtually no home runs; and he struck out nearly a batter an inning. Paul, like Bill James, thought it was possible to take Voros’s theory too literally. He thought there was one big thing, in addition to walks, strikeouts, and home runs, that a pitcher could control: extra base hits. Chad Bradford gave up his share of hits per balls in play but, more than any pitcher in baseball, they were ground ball hits. His minor league ground ball to fly ball ratio was 5:1. The big league average was more like 1.2:1. Ground balls were not only hard to hit over the wall; they were hard to hit for doubles and triples.
That raised an obvious question: why weren’t there more successful ground ball pitchers like Chad Bradford in the big leagues? There was an equally obvious answer: there were no ground ball pitchers like Chad Bradford. Ground ball pitchers who threw overhand tended to be sinker ball pitchers and they tended to have control problems and also tended not to strike out a lot of guys. Chad Bradford was, statistically and humanly, an outlier.
The best thing of all was that the scouts didn’t like him. The Greek Chorus disapproved of what they called “tricksters.” Paul thought it was ridiculous when the White Sox sent Chad back down to Triple-A, but he could guess why they had done it. Once upon a time he had sat behind home plate while Chad Bradford pitched; he’d listened to the scouts make fun of Chad, even as Chad made fools of hitters. The guy looked funny when he threw, no question about it, and his fastball came in at between 81 and 85 mph. Chad Bradford didn’t know it, but as he dropped his arm slot, and took heat off his fastball, he was becoming an Oakland A. “Because of the way he looked, we thought he might be available to us,” said Paul. “Usually the guys who are setting off bells in my office are the guys everybody knows about. But nobody knew about this guy, because of the way he threw. If he had those identical stats in Triple-A but he threw ninety-four, there is no way they’d have traded him.”
Already Billy Beane was finding that guys he wanted magically became less available the moment he expressed an interest in them. At the end of the 2000 season he finally called the new White Sox GM, Kenny Williams, who had replaced the old White Sox GM, Ron Schueler, and said, very casually, that he was looking for “a guy who could be a