The Curious Have Won
Isn’t it odd how people tend to show up late to a party? What I have learned over the years is that it’s pretty lame to show up exactly on time. This is what basically is happening in the MLB right now. The idea of sabermetrics has been around since the 70s, but it wasn’t until the late 1990s we saw a general manager recruit and add players based off sabermetric stats. It took a curious general manager from a failing organization to stick his neck out and since then, every team in baseball has been showing up to join the party.
The curious have won.
Billy Bean, drafted in the first round by the Mets in the 1980 MLB draft had so much talent and potential to be an extraordinary ball player. But, in a league as competitive as the MLB, he eventually got washed out and ended his short playing career rather quickly. For the years to come he became a scout for the Oakland Athletics organization, where he worked his way up to become their General Manager in 1997.
With the introduction of Billy Bean in the front office, also brought the introduction of a new way to manager a team. Bean used sabermetrics, inspired by Bill James, to inform his decisions and take an economic approach to valuing and acquiring players. The A’s were not one of the wealthier teams in baseball. They couldn’t go out and buy the multi-million dollar players it takes to build a championship winning team, so Bean had to come up with something different if he wanted to be successful.
Big name teams with big time budgets could go out and get whoever they wanted. With the A’s minuscule payroll, Billy Bean found undervalued players, that the big name teams wouldn’t even bat an eye at.
In an interview with theguardian.com, Bean describes the value of a player and how he gives credit to players that don’t usually receive it:
“Our aim is to properly allocate credit and blame to a player. In baseball you can do something poorly and still get credit. A pitcher could throw a bad ball, the batter hit a screaming line drive, and an outfielder make a fantastic diving catch. Yet when you look at a historical database, 80% of the time when a ball is struck with that trajectory and velocity it is a hit. So because a superior defender caught it on that play, you should probably credit the hitter in some way and take away from the pitcher. Traditional stats don’t do that. They only credit outcome. They don’t credit process.”
The A’s under Billy Bean have had the fifth best winning percentage in base, while having the fourth-lowest total payroll. The story of Billy Bean and his ball team became such a sensation that it was turned into a book, then a movie. In the 2011 movie, Moneyball, Brad Pitt plays Billy Bean, and it gives the viewer a better understanding of the sabermetric system Bean used to find undervalued players and take Oakland, with its small payroll, to the 2002 playoffs.
Before the 2002 MLB season, Billy Bean hired a young man by the name of, Paul DePodesta. Bean hired the Harvard grad as his assistant to incorporate sabermetrics. Bean and DePodesta did a lot of brain storming and in this clip from the movie, Moneyball, DePodesta (played by Jonah Hill) gives Billy a short run-down on how to create a winning team that will favor their small budget.
What Billy Bean has done for the A’s organization has shaped them into a successful organization, but never the best. Bean has taken the A’s to a few playoff appearances but doesn’t have a trophy to show for it. So is sabermetrics really the key to building a successful ball club?
A young Yale graduate by the name of Theo Epstein has proved to the baseball world that you can build a championship team using sabermetric principles.
After the Boston Red Sox tried, and failed to make Billy Bean the highest paid General Manager in baseball, they settled with a 28-year-old from an Ivy league school, who majored in law to be their GM, the youngest in major league history. And it essentially has changed the game forever.
The Red Sox were a well-scrutinized organization with a lot of money, but little success. Having won their last world series title in 1918, the Red Sox were experiencing a brutal title drought. So this typically ordinary, and conservatively ran organization picked up this young GM and the rest was history.
Epstein got to work quick when he came to the Red Sox. He began signing players that were either castoffs or veteran afterthoughts. Those players were relief pitcher Ramiro Mendoza, third baseman Bill Mueller, and first baseman David Ortiz. He found these players by looking at statistics no other GM’s were looking at. And, as we know today, David Ortiz ended up paying off big time, and being perhaps the biggest pickup Epstein has made in his young career so far.
Epstein also signed a relief pitcher, Bronson Arroyo, off waivers and brought over Kevin Millar, a first baseman/outfielder from the Marlins. In just a few weeks, Theo picked up a huge chunk of the Red Sox team that would go on to win their first World Series in 86 years, in 2004.
According to the movie “Moneyball” a couple of the holy grail stats are on-base and slugging percentage. In Epstein’s first year as GM for the Sox, they led the majors in both of those holy grail statistics.
After losing in the 2003 American League Championship Series in a devastating game 7 walk-off to the cross-town rivals, the New York Yankees, Epstein continued to push for that ring. Terry Francona was who Theo first had his eyes on. A manager out of Philadelphia, Francona went on to be arguably one of Boston’s best managers of all-time. The eight years that Francona was there, he coached them to eight winning season and two World Series wins.
Epstein also traded for all-star pitcher, Curt Schilling and signed closing pitcher, Kieth Faulk. Midway through the 2004 season, Epstein traded the face of the organizations franchise, Nomar Garciaparra, for shortstop Orlando Cabrera, and first baseman Doug Mientkiewics.
A 2004, World Series championship trophy was the outcome.
Most recently, you may have heard of Theo Epstein taking the Chicago Cubs, who had a 108-year title drought to their first World Series victory since 1908. For the first time in baseball, the hero has not been focused around the player, but the executive.
The entire league has witnessed the success and wanted in on the party. Of the 26 General Managers hired after Epstein took over the Red Sox, 12 have Ivy League degrees while most of the rest attended elite private schools. The game has changed from baseball historians with knowledge of what makes a major league player, to star students of business who are sabermetrically inclined the instant they walk into the front office.
The New York Yankees General Manger, Brian Cashman, was a history major and ballplayer at a Catholic school in his youth. Now he is a successful, multi-million dollar GM. When asked about the recent splurge baseball front offices are having when it comes to hiring these General Mangers from top-notch schools he said, “Bottom line is this is big business, because we can measure everything that’s taking place on the field and analyze in a very specific way performance and projected performance, this should be run like a Wall Street boardroom where you pursue assets.”
General Managers like Cashman are getting use to seeing fresh faces like Epstein step in and take over a team.
Mike Chernoff was a Princeton graduate and former baseball player. And, today he is the General Manager for the Cleveland Indians at just 34 years old. Upon graduating from Princeton with an economics degree, he received an internship with the Indian’s organization. He started as the Indian’s sole in-house analyst.
This was in 2003, right around the whole “moneyball” movement was going on with Billy Bean and the Oakland Athletics. Chernoff quotes, “The Indian’s didn’t have an analytics department — I was the analytics department”. The Indian’s organization has kept Chernoff around for multiple years now, and just recently he has been promoted as their General Manager, at 34 years old. Just recently this past year, the Cleveland Indians appeared in their first World Series appearance since 1997.
All major league front offices now have departments dedicated to just analytics on players. These young, smart graduates are some of baseballs new faces. If you would like to read more about all 30 MLB teams and their GM’s, you can check out this article by ESPN.
