Moneyball - Michael Lewis [38]
Runs Created = (Hits+Walks) x Total Bases/(At Bats+Walks)
Crude as it was, the equation could fairly be described as a scientific hypothesis: a model that would predict the number of runs a team would score given its walks, steals, singles, doubles, etc. You could plug actual numbers from past seasons into the right side and see if they gave you the runs the team scored that season. James was, in a sense, trying to predict the past. If the actual number of runs scored by the 1975 Boston Red Sox differed dramatically from the predicted number, his model was clearly false. If they were identical, James was probably onto something. As it turned out, James was onto something. His model came far closer, year in and year out, to describing the run totals of every big league baseball team than anything the teams themselves had come up with.
That, in turn, implied that professional baseball people had a false view of their offenses. It implied, specifically, that they didn’t place enough value on walks and extra base hits, which featured prominently in the “Runs Created” model, and placed too much value on batting average and stolen bases, which James didn’t even bother to include. It implied that sacrifices of any sort were aptly named, as they made no contribution whatsoever. That is: outs were more precious than baseball people believed, or seemed to believe. Not all baseball people, of course. The Jamesean analysis was consistent with an approach to the game championed most vocally by the former manager of the Baltimore Orioles, Earl Weaver. Weaver designed his offenses to maximize the chances of a three-run homer. He didn’t bunt, and he had a special taste for guys who got on base and guys who hit home runs. Big ball, as opposed to small ball.
But once again, the details of James’s equation didn’t matter all that much. He was creating opportunities for scientists as much as doing science himself. Other, more technically adroit people would soon generate closer approximations of reality. What mattered was (a) it was a rational, testable hypothesis; and (b) James made it so clear and interesting that it provoked a lot of intelligent people to join the conversation. “The fact that the formulas work with the accuracy that they do is a way of saying there are essentially stable relationships between batting average, home runs, walks, other offensive elements—and runs,” wrote James.
This kind of talk was catnip to people whose lives were devoted to discovering stable relationships in a seemingly unstable world: physicists, biologists, economists. There was a young statistician at the RAND Corporation, a future chair of the Harvard statistics department, named Carl Morris. “I’d been thinking about advanced ideas in baseball analysis,” said Morris, “and was impressed that someone else was, too, who wrote about it in a very interesting way.” Morris counted the days until the next Baseball Abstract appeared. James pointed the way to big questions that Morris could address more rigorously than even James could.
There was also a bright young government economist with the Office of Management and Budget named Eddie Epstein. He stumbled across the Abstract and decided he was in the wrong line of work. “I read the Abstract,” he said, “and the light bulb went off: I can do this! The way Bill laid out very clearly what could be gleaned from these mountains of baseball data. In the past an awful lot was thought to be unknowable.” Epstein began to pester Edward Bennett Williams, the owner of the Baltimore Orioles, for a job.
Then there were the few hobbyists who had been active before James began writing his Abstracts. Dick Cramer was a research scientist for the pharmaceutical company then called SmithKline