Moneyball - Michael Lewis [129]
In spite of the Oakland A’s fantastic success, there was a subtle pressure to change the way they did business. Most of it came from the media. About the fifteenth time he heard some TV pundit say that the Oakland A’s couldn’t win because they didn’t “manufacture runs,” Billy began to worry his coaches and players might actually believe it. He printed out the 2002 offensive statistics for the Oakland A’s and the Minnesota Twins and sat down with the coaches. The Twins team batting average was 11 points higher than the A’s, and their slugging percentage was 5 points higher. And yet they had scored thirty-two fewer runs. Why? Their team on-base percentage was a shade lower, and they’d been caught stealing sixty-two times, to Oakland’s twenty, and had twice as many sacrifice bunts. That is, they’d squandered outs. “They were trying to manipulate the game instead of letting the game come to them,” said Billy. “The math works. But no matter how many times you prove it, you always have to prove it again.”
The moment the play-offs began, you could feel the world of baseball insiders rising up to swat down the possibility that the 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