Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) (33 page)

Voros asked himself another question: from year to year is there
any
correlation in a pitcher’s statistics? There was. The number of walks and home runs he gave up, and the number of strikeouts he recorded were, if not predictable, at least understandable. A guy who struck out a lot of hitters one year tended to strike out a lot of hitters the next year. Ditto a guy who gave up a lot of home runs. But when it came to the number of hits per balls in play a pitcher gave up, there was no correlation whatsoever.

It was then that a radical thought struck Voros McCracken:

What if the pitcher has no control of whether a ball falls for a hit, once it gets put into play?

Obviously some pitchers give up fewer hits than others, but that might be because some pitchers had more strikeouts than others, and, therefore, allowed fewer balls to be put into play. But it was generally assumed that pitchers could affect the way in which a ball was put into play. It was generally assumed that a great pitcher, like Randy Johnson or Greg Maddux, coaxed hitters into hitting the ball in a way that was less likely to become a hit. The trouble with that general assumption is that it didn’t square with the record books. There were years when Maddux and Johnson were among the worst in baseball in this regard.

If Voros McCracken was right, then what had heretofore been attributed to the skill of the pitcher was in fact caused by defense, or ballpark, or luck. But the examples of Greg Maddux and Kevin Millwood suggested that defense and ballparks might be of secondary importance. They pitched in front of the same group of fielders, and, usually, in the same ballparks. That led Voros to a second radical thought:

What if what was heretofore regarded as the pitcher’s responsibility is simply luck?

For a century and a half pitchers have been evaluated, in part, on their ability to prevent hits once the ball is put in play. A pitcher who suffered a lot of balls falling for hits gave up more earned runs and lost more games than one who didn’t. He was thought less well of than a pitcher against whom balls in play were caught by fielders. A soon-to-be unemployed young man, soon to be back living with his parents in Phoenix, Arizona, begged to differ. He was coming to the conclusion that pitchers had no ability to prevent hits, once the ball was put into play. They could prevent home runs, prevent walks, and prevent balls from ever being put into play by striking out batters. And that, in essence, is all they could do.

Voros McCracken had a radical theory. And he was staring at a lot of hard evidence supporting it.

What happened next bolsters one’s faith in the American educational system: Voros McCracken set out to prove himself wrong. He wrote a computer program that paired major league pitchers who had very similar walks, strikeouts, and home runs—but had given up very different number of hits. He located ninety such “pairs” from the 1999 season. If hits per ball in play were indeed something a pitcher could control, Voros reasoned, then the pitchers who had given up the fewer number of hits in 1999 would proceed to give up fewer hits in 2000. They didn’t. There was, in fact, no correlation from one year to the next in any given pitcher’s ability to prevent hits per balls in play.

Instead, baseball kept thrusting before Voros beguiling situations explained by his theory. A couple of months into the 2000 season, for instance, the newspapers were full of stuff about how heretofore mediocre White Sox pitcher James Baldwin, off to a great start, had somehow become the next Pedro Martinez. Voros looked more deeply at the numbers and saw that Baldwin had extremely low number of hits for the number of balls he’d put in play. His earned run average was sensational—because he’d been lucky. Sure enough, the hits started falling and Baldwin regressed to mediocrity and people stopped putting his name in the same sentence with Pedro Martinez.

For pretty much the whole of 2000 Voros McCracken, as he put it, “went looking for a reason Maddux got hit in 1999, and to this day I’m still looking for it.” At length, he penned an article revealing his findings for baseballprospectus.com. Its conclusion: “There is little if any difference among major league pitchers in their ability to prevent hits on balls hit into the field of play.” ESPN columnist Rob Neyer saw Voros’s piece and, stunned by both the quality of the thought and the force of the argument, wrote an article about Voros’s article. Several thousand amateur baseball analysts wrote in to say that Voros’s argument, on the face of it, sounded nuts. Several suggested that “Voros McCracken” might be a pseudonym for Aaron Sele, a well-hit pitcher then playing for the Seattle Mariners.

Bill James also read Rob Neyer’s article. James wrote in, and said Voros McCracken’s theory, if true, was obviously important, but that he couldn’t believe it was true. He—and about three thousand other people—then went off to disprove it himself. He couldn’t do it, and the three thousand other guys couldn’t either. About the most they could suggest was that there was a slight tendency for knuckleballers to control hits per balls in play. Nine months later, of his mammoth
Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract
, James laid out Voros McCracken’s argument, noted that Voros McCracken “is NekcarCcM Sorov spelled backwards,” then went on to make four points:

1. Like most things, McCracken’s argument can be taken too literally. A pitcher does have
some
input into the hits/ innings ratio behind him, other than that which is reflected in the home run and strikeout column.

2. With that qualification, I am quite certain that McCracken is correct.

3. This knowledge is significant, very useful.

4. I feel stupid for not having realized it 30 years ago.

One of the minor consequences of Voros McCracken’s analysis of pitching was to lead him to Chad Bradford, Triple-A pitcher for the Chicago White Sox. Voros had developed a statistic he could trust—what he called DIPS, for defense independent pitching statistic. It might also have been called LIPS, for luck independent pitching statistic, because the luck it stripped out of a pitcher’s bottom line had, at times, a more warping effect than defense on the perception of a pitcher’s true merits. At any rate, Chad Bradford’s Triple-A defense independent stats were even better than his astonishingly impressive defense dependent ones. (Chad pitched a total of 202
²
/
₃
innings in Triple-A, with an earned run average of 1.64.) And so Voros McCracken snapped up Bradford for his fantasy team, even though a player did a fantasy team no good unless he accumulated big league innings. “Basically,” said Voros, “I was waiting for someone to see what I’d seen in Bradford and put him to use.”

He waited nearly a year. Inadvertently, Voros McCracken had helped to explain why the White Sox thought of Chad Bradford as a “Triple-A guy.” There was a reason that, in judging young pitchers, the White Sox front office, like nearly every big league front office, preferred their own subjective opinion to minor league pitching statistics. Pitching statistics were flawed. Maybe not quite so deeply as hitting statistics but enough to encourage uncertainty. Baseball executives’ preference for their own opinions over hard data was, at least in part, due to a lifetime of experience of fishy data. They’d seen one too many guys with a low earned run average in Triple-A who flamed out in the big leagues. And when a guy looked as funny, and threw as slow, as Chad Bradford—well, you just knew he was doomed.

If one didn’t already know better, one might think that Voros McCracken’s article on baseballprospectus.com would be cause for celebration everywhere inside big league baseball. One knew better.
Voros
knew better. “The problem with major league baseball,” he said, “is that it’s a self-populating institution. Knowledge is institutionalized. The people involved with baseball who aren’t players are ex-players. In their defense, their structure is not set up along corporate lines. They aren’t equipped to evaluate their own systems. They don’t have the mechanism to let in the good and get rid of the bad. They either keep everything or get rid of everything, and they rarely do the latter.” He sympathized with baseball owners who didn’t know what to think, or even if they should think. “If you’re an owner and you never played, do you believe Voros McCracken or Larry Bowa?” The unemployed former paralegal living with his parents, or the former All-Star shortstop and current manager who no doubt owned at least one home of his own?

Voros McCracken’s astonishing discovery about major league pitchers had no apparent effect on the management, or evaluation, of actual pitchers. No one on the inside called Voros to discuss his findings; so far as he knew, no one on the inside had even read it. But Paul DePodesta had read it. Paul’s considered reaction: “If you want to talk about a guy who might be the next Bill James, Voros McCracken could be it.” Paul’s unconsidered reaction: “The first thing I thought of was Chad Bradford.”

V
OROS M
c
CRACKEN
had provided the theory to explain what the Oakland A’s front office already had come to believe: you could create reliable pitching statistics. It was true that the further you got from the big leagues, the less reliably stats predicted big league performance. But if you focused on the right statistics you could certainly project a guy based on his Triple-A, and even his Double-A, numbers. The right numbers were walks, home runs, and strikeouts plus a few others. If you trusted those, you didn’t have to give two minutes’ thought to how a guy looked, or how hard he threw. You could judge a pitcher’s performance objectively,
by what he had accomplished.

Chad Bradford was, to the Oakland A’s front office, a no-brainer. “It wasn’t that he was doing it differently,” said Paul DePodesta. “It was that the efficiency with which he was recording outs was astounding.” Chad Bradford had set off several different sets of bells inside Paul’s computer. He hardly ever walked a batter; he gave up virtually no home runs; and he struck out nearly a batter an inning. Paul, like Bill James, thought it was possible to take Voros’s theory too literally. He thought there was one big thing, in addition to walks, strikeouts, and home runs, that a pitcher could control: extra base hits. Chad Bradford gave up his share of hits per balls in play but, more than any pitcher in baseball, they were ground ball hits. His minor league ground ball to fly ball ratio was 5:1. The big league average was more like 1.2:1. Ground balls were not only hard to hit over the wall; they were hard to hit for doubles and triples.

That raised an obvious question: why weren’t there more successful ground ball pitchers like Chad Bradford in the big leagues? There was an equally obvious answer: there were no ground ball pitchers like Chad Bradford. Ground ball pitchers who threw overhand tended to be sinker ball pitchers and they tended to have control problems and also tended not to strike out a lot of guys. Chad Bradford was, statistically and humanly, an outlier.

The best thing of all was that the scouts didn’t like him. The Greek Chorus disapproved of what they called “tricksters.” Paul thought it was ridiculous when the White Sox sent Chad back down to Triple-A, but he could guess why they had done it. Once upon a time he had sat behind home plate while Chad Bradford pitched; he’d listened to the scouts make fun of Chad, even as Chad made fools of hitters. The guy looked funny when he threw, no question about it, and his fastball came in at between 81 and 85 mph. Chad Bradford didn’t know it, but as he dropped his arm slot, and took heat off his fastball, he was becoming an Oakland A. “Because of the way he looked, we thought he might be available to us,” said Paul. “Usually the guys who are setting off bells in my office are the guys everybody knows about. But nobody knew about this guy, because of the way he threw. If he had those identical stats in Triple-A but he threw ninety-four, there is
no way
they’d have traded him.”

Already Billy Beane was finding that guys he wanted magically became less available the moment he expressed an interest in them. At the end of the 2000 season he finally called the new White Sox GM, Kenny Williams, who had replaced the old White Sox GM, Ron Schueler, and said, very casually, that he was looking for “a guy who could be a twelfth or thirteenth pitcher on the staff.” Someone in the White Sox farm system. Someone maybe in Triple-A. He was willing to give up this minor league catcher in exchange for a Triple-A arm, Billy said, and he didn’t much care which one. He asked the White Sox to suggest a few names. It took Kenny Williams a while to get around to him, but finally he mentioned Chad Bradford. Said he hated to even bring Bradford up because the young man had just called in from Mississippi and said his back was hurting, and he might need surgery. “He’ll do,” said Billy.

Chapter Eleven

THE HUMAN ELEMENT

E
ARLIER THAT HISTORIC
September evening, before Chad Bradford took the mound, a traffic jam extraordinary even by Northern California standards stretched as far as the eye could see. The Oakland A’s ticket office had never experienced anything quite like the crush of the previous two days. When the Kansas City Royals came to town, the A’s sales department expected about ten thousand fans to turn up. In just the last twenty-four hours more than twenty thousand people had stopped by, in the flesh, to buy seats in advance. Before the game, an aerial view of Oakland would reveal nearly everyone in sight heading toward the Coliseum. Billy Beane alone was heading away from it.

Billy hadn’t the slightest intention of watching his team make history. It was just another game, he said, and he didn’t watch games. “All they provide me with is subjective emotion,” he said, “and that can be counterproductive.” He figured he could give a few press interviews, and then slip away in his Range Rover to Modesto. In Modesto, on the same night the Oakland A’s were trying to win their twentieth game in a row, the Visalia Oaks were playing the Modesto A’s. Both teams were Single-A affiliates of Oakland. Most of the players the A’s had drafted a few months before played for one or the other. Billy could stand to watch young men who still had time and space to fail: Nick Swisher, Steve Stanley, Mark Teahen, and Jeremy Brown. Especially Brown, the bad body catcher from Hueytown, Alabama. Everyone had laughed when the Oakland A’s drafted Brown in the first round. Every day Brown was more interesting to Billy.