Moneyball - Michael Lewis [41]
In 1984, James wrote to what was now a rapidly expanding crowd of baseball nuts and proposed a radical idea: Take the accumulation of baseball statistics out of the hands of baseball insiders. Build an organization of hundreds of volunteer scorekeepers who would collect the stuff you needed to know to reduce baseball to a science. “What I propose here, so far as I know for the first time in a century, is to start over…. I am proposing to re-build the box score, not around the old one, but around the tool from which the box score is assembled: the score sheet.” He then explained that much of the data collected by professional baseball teams—say, how right-handed hitters fared against left-handed pitching—wasn’t available to the public. Worse, baseball teams didn’t have the sense to know what to collect, and so an awful lot of critical data simply went unrecorded: how batters fared in different counts and different game situations, who was pitching when a base was stolen, how different outfielders affected the audacity of runners on the base paths, where hits landed and how hard they were hit, how many pitches a pitcher threw in a game. The lack of critical data meant that “we as analysts of the game are blocked off from the basic source of information which we need to undertake an incalculable variety of investigative studies.”
The movement to take the understanding of professional baseball away from baseball professionals, dubbed by James “Project Scoresheet,” soon combined with a small, failing business created by Dick Cramer, called STATS Inc., that was designed to do much the same thing. The goal of STATS Inc. had been, in Cramer’s words, “to set down the primary events that occurred in a baseball game as completely as possible.” Back in 1980, STATS Inc. had set out to sell this sort of information to baseball teams, but the teams wanted nothing to do with it. Cramer pressed on: to big league baseball games, beginning in the spring of 1981 with an exhibition game between the Chicago Cubs and the Oakland A’s (future A’s scout Matt Keough got the win), the company sent its own scorekeepers. Along with all the usual data, these poorly paid people recorded play-by-play information about the games that had never before been systematically collected: the pitch count at the end of at bats, pitch types and locations, the direction and distance of batted balls. They broke the field down into twenty-six wedges radiating out from home plate. A fly ball’s distance was judged to be where it landed; a ground ball’s, where it was picked up. If a player singled and advanced to second on an error by the right fielder, the play was recorded as two separate events. All of this was new and, to the movement analysts, essential if you wanted to get to the guts of the game.
The people who were paid to manage professional teams failed to see the point. They hadn’t even bothered to compile the information they needed to analyze their actions intelligently. Presented with new information by STATS Inc., they showed little interest in it, even when it was offered to them gratis. The CEO of STATS Inc., John Dewan, said that “You had general managers and managers who had played the game. How could someone who all they knew is computers tell them anything that would make them more successful? I remember calling the White Sox, almost as a matter of courtesy, and telling them ‘Hey, when Frank Thomas plays first base, he hits seventy points better than when he DH’s.’ Nobody cared to know it.” Every eighteen months STATS Inc. would hire another bright, well-educated young man who simply could not believe that major league baseball teams did not want to know things that might