Moneyball - Michael Lewis [28]
When Alderson entered the game he wanted to get his mind around it, and he did. He concluded that everything from on-field strategies to player evaluation was better conducted by scientific investigation—hypotheses tested by analysis of historical statistical baseball data—than by reference to the collective wisdom of old baseball men. By analyzing baseball statistics you could see through a lot of baseball nonsense. For instance, when baseball managers talked about scoring runs, they tended to focus on team batting average, but if you ran the analysis you could see that the number of runs a team scored bore little relation to that team’s batting average. It correlated much more exactly with a team’s on-base and slugging percentages. A lot of the offensive tactics that made baseball managers famous—the bunt, the steal, the hit and run—could be proven to have been, in most situations, either pointless or self-defeating. “I figured out that managers do all this shit because it is safe,” said Alderson. “They don’t get criticized for it.” He wasn’t particularly facile with numbers, but he could understand them well enough to use their conclusions. “I couldn’t do a regressions analysis,” he said, “but I knew what one was. And the results of them made sense to me.”
Alderson hadn’t set out to reexamine the premises of professional baseball but he wound up doing it anyway. For a long stretch, his investigations were largely academic. “You have to remember,” he said, “that there wasn’t any evidence that any of this shit worked. And I had credibility problems. I didn’t have a baseball background.” The high payroll Oakland teams managed by Tony La Russa had done well enough in the late 1980s and early 1990s that Alderson felt he should “defer to success.” For more than a decade he could afford to do this. Since the late 1970s the A’s had been owned by Walter A. Haas, Jr., who was, by instinct, more of a philanthropist than a businessman. Haas viewed professional baseball ownership as a kind of public trust and spent money on it accordingly. In 1991, the Oakland A’s actually had the highest payroll in all of baseball. Haas was willing to lose millions to field a competitive team that would do Oakland proud, and he did. The A’s had gone to the World Series three straight seasons from 1988 to 1990.
Deferring to success became an untenable strategy in 1995, when Walter Haas died. His estate sold the team to a pair of Bay Area real estate developers, Steve Schott and Ken Hofmann, who were, by instinct, more businessmen than philanthropists. Schott and Hofmann wanted Alderson to continue running the team but on a much tighter budget. “We had new owners who weren’t going to spend any money,” said Alderson. “They made it clear that this had to be a business. And so we suddenly were put in the position of: we can only afford a one-tool player. Which tool is it going to be?” What—and this is what the question amounted to—was the efficient way to spend money on baseball players? The first, short answer, according to a pamphlet commissioned by Alderson, was to spend it on hitters. The pamphlet was written by a former aerospace engineer turned baseball writer, Eric Walker. Fielding, Walker wrote, was “at most five percent of the game.” The rest was pitching and offense, and while “good pitchers are usually valued properly, good batters often are not.” In Walker’s words:
Analyzing baseball yields many numbers of interest and value. Yet far and away—far, far and away—the most critical number in all of baseball is 3: the three outs that define an inning. Until the third