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By Root 323 0

came when the beat reporter for the local team pulled back the curtain on the front office and revealed the shriveled-up fellow with bizarre facial hair punching numbers into a Mac. The brains of the operation! The crowd invariably shrieked and recoiled. The most dramatic Elephant Man moment was probably when an oddity named Mike Gimbel hired by the Boston Red Sox didn’t wait to be exposed but bodily hurled himself into the Boston sports pages, by claiming responsibility for the shrewd moves made by the Red Sox GM, Dan Duquette. The Boston Globe explained to Red Sox fans that this new intellectual force behind the team was “a Queens Community College dropout, a self-taught computer programmer and a Rotisserie League fanatic whose Brooklyn loft was raided three years ago by police because of his six pet caimans—South American alligators—that he kept in an indoor pond in his loft. The cops also confiscated his five turtles and an iguana.” The New England Sports Service ran the same story with the headline: Stats Freak Has Duquette’s Ear. “By day Gimbel lives in Brooklyn and works for the Bureau of Water Supply in New York,” it began, groping for just the right combination of words and images to infuriate the Red Sox season ticket holder. “It’s as if a computer savvy Ed Norton had become the Red Sox secret weapon. Gimbel is unorthodox in virtually every way. In 80 degree Florida weather yesterday, Gimbel appeared ready for a trip to Siberia, with long pants, a long sleeve shirt and a jacket. His approach to evaluating baseball is more out of the ordinary. He cautions against watching too many games….”

Duquette waited until the end of the season, then let Gimbel know his contract wouldn’t be renewed—thus proving to the world just how critical he was to the Boston Red Sox.

By the early 1990s it was clear that “sabermetrics,” the search for new baseball knowledge, was an activity that would take place mainly outside of baseball. You could count on one hand the number of “sabermetricians” inside of baseball, and none of them appears to have had much effect. After a while they seemed more like fans who second-guessed the general manager than advisers who influenced decisions. They were forever waving printouts to show how foolish the GM had been not to have taken their advice. A man named Craig Wright spent many frustrating years as the sabermetrician with the Texas Rangers, and then many more consulting other big league teams. He eventually quit his profession altogether. “I needed to be a GM if I was going to see my stuff ever used,” he said. “And I never even got asked to interview for a single GM job.” Eddie Epstein—the young government economist whose interest in baseball analysis had been inflamed by James’s writing—got himself hired by the Baltimore Orioles and the San Diego Padres but he, too, wound up quitting in a huff. The Padres executive responsible for hiring him, Larry Lucchino, freely acknowledged that the small group inside baseball searching for new baseball knowledge “was a cult. The cult status of it meant it was something that could be discarded easily. There was a profusion of new knowledge and it was ignored.”

Well into the late 1990s you didn’t have to look at big league baseball very closely to see its fierce unwillingness to rethink anything. It was as if it had been inoculated against outside ideas. For instance, a new kind of rich person named John Henry bought the Florida Marlins in January 1999. Most baseball owners were either heirs, or empire builders of one sort or another, or both. Henry had made his money in the intelligent end of the financial markets. He had an instinctive feel for the way statistical analysis could turn up inefficiencies in human affairs. Inefficiencies in the financial markets had made Henry a billionaire—and he saw some familiar idiocies in the market for baseball players. As Henry later wrote in a letter to ESPN’s Rob Neyer:

People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.