The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed (8 page)

The costs of riding the umpire include: noticing the opportunity for a double-switch, identifying a minor defensive adjustment, stealing signs, or talking up a player who’s in a funk. These certainly seem minor, and may be minor, but often these are the kinds of sensitivities we hear about when players talk about great managers.

The fans pay a price too. MLB is constantly trying to speed up what many perceive to be a slow game. Those instances where umpires must engage in banter with managers and players add up. I’d guess that lobbying takes up between five to ten minutes of every baseball game. That’s time that could have spent working, playing with a daughter, going fishing, or getting to bed just a little bit earlier. The loss may be small, but when you consider that there is nothing to be gained from all of this arguing, it doesn’t seem like we’d be losing much but the spectacle of manager tantrums.

Still, lobbying umpires is a skill that some managers possess or lack. After hearing Tony La Russa complain about Bobby Cox’s on-field banter during a Cardinals-Braves series in May 2005, I set out to try and identify how much influence particular managers have over umpires during the course of a game. It is hard to find. The parties involved could not be expected to give up much information. Managers and umpires tend to exaggerate their ability or inability to influence calls. A manager who says he doesn’t influence calls could lose his job, as could an umpire who admits to being influenced by managers. No one has an incentive to be honest, but economists don’t give up when witnesses get hostile. To gauge manager influence, all we need is a situation where we can view calls where influence isn’t likely. Luckily, an experimental automated pitch tracking system, known as Questec, used in ten ballparks, creates the conditions for a natural experiment.

The Questec system uses computerized imaging technology to map balls and strikes during a game. While Questec requires a human operator to set the top and bottom of the strike zone for every player (so must the umpire), the system maps each pitch location and identifies each as a ball or strike, based on whether or not a pitch passed through an objective strike zone. These calls have no impact on the game; in fact, the balls and strikes are not “called” by the computer until after the game is over. Umpires still call the official balls and strikes; however, unlike in non-Questec parks, there is a historic trail to which the umpire’s record can be compared by league officials. Any pressure an umpire feels to bias close calls in one direction or another will be a matter of public record within MLB. And umpires know that there are plenty of umpires waiting in line to take their jobs if they should be deemed anything but impartial judges of the rules of the game.

While there may be some influence on balls and strikes in Questec parks, it is reasonable to assume that it will be less pronounced. So we can compare the balls and strikes—as measured by the strikeout-to-walk
ratio—in games managed inside and outside Questec parks over a two-year span. We use the strikeout-to-walk ratio because a pitcher that is getting more beneficial calls is going to be able to strike out more batters and walk fewer batters. While not all of the pitcher’s strikeouts will be the result of called strikes without a swing, batters will be more likely to strike out and less likely to walk if they have to defend a bigger strike zone.

To begin, I looked at the strikeout-to-walk ratio on the pitching side of the baseball. That is, how did the ratio of strikeouts-to-walks change for a manager when his team pitched inside and outside of Questec parks? To avoid the influence of the home crowd of the manager, I only looked at a manager’s away games. The ballparks in which Questec is used are listed in Table 5.

One problem with looking at the raw difference between how pitchers perform inside and outside of Questec parks is that there may be other influences that are to blame for any difference. Therefore, I used multiple regression analysis to isolate the effect of individual managers on the strikeout-to-walk ratio in Questec parks. Multiple regression allows me to control for outside influences on the strikeout-to-walk ratio other than the managers and Questec. Some other potential impacts on the strikeout-to-walk ratio are the quality of the pitchers on the manager’s team, the quality of the batters on the opposing team, subtle differences in the park (e.g., the hitting background, altitude, etc.), and the use of the designated hitter. Therefore, I included the following “control variables” in the multiple regressions to account for these potential influences:

I also included variables that indicated who the manager was and when Questec was in use. This information allowed me to see how each manager’s impact on the strikeout-to-walk ratio changed when his team played in a Questec park. Table 6 lists the impact of each manager in Questec parks on his pitchers’ strikeout-to-walk ratio. The greater the negative number, the greater the manager’s decline in the ratio (meaning fewer strikeouts and/or fewer walks) in Questec parks, which indicates that this manager’s pitcher performed better outside Questec parks. It is outside these parks that managers will have influence on balls and strikes.

Most managers experience no statistical difference between Questec and non-Questec parks (rounded to three decimal places). Only two managers have a statistically significant impact on the strikeout-to-walk ratio, which means we can say with a high degree of confidence that these impacts are very unlikely to occur via random chance. And right at the top of the list is Tony La Russa (who managed the St. Louis Cardinals during this time frame), whose quote about Bobby Cox (of the Atlanta Braves) working the umpires started this chapter. It turns out that maybe Cox should have been the one doing the complaining.

La Russa’s ability to sway umpires is not surprising considering that he is a lawyer, the most popular pedigree for professional lobbyists. I wouldn’t be surprised if La Russa is quite adept at manipulating umpires on the field and off through MLB’s umpire evaluation system. Certainly Tony La Russa has no moral high ground to accuse any other manager for influencing the game through umpires, since in Questec parks his pitchers’ strikeout-to-walk ratio falls by nearly one. And if Bobby Cox is low-class for his manipulation of umpires, La Russa must be the scum of the universe.

And then look at Bob Brenly, formerly the manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks and now a television commentator. Why is he so “bad”? First, it’s not clear that he is bad at working the umpires. Although his impact is large, it’s not statistically significant, which means we can’t say that his improvement in Questec parks is outside the realm of random chance. I wonder if his arguing skills are so weak that he ends up hurting his pitchers. Or maybe other managers take advantage of him when Questec is not around and he can’t counter with anything. But a more flattering possibility is that he protected his hitters to the extent that it hurt his pitchers. That wasn’t such a bad strategy given the good pitching he had during these years in Arizona— Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling didn’t need much help from the umpire. This indicates that maybe we need to look at manager influence on hitters as well as pitchers. Maybe a manager can argue to increase or shrink the strike zone, but it applies equally on both sides of the ball.

In order to examine this possibility, we can use the data to focus on the hitting side. I used the exact same sample and control variables, except I looked at the strikeout-to-walk ratio for the manager’s players when they bat. Table 7 lists the impacts. This time a positive number is consistent with good lobbying for the manager’s hitters. Batters want fewer strikeouts and more walks, and when the strikeout-to-walk ratio rises in Questec parks it indicates that hitters are losing that benefit. There doesn’t seem to be any inverse relationship between arguing for pitchers and hitters, and only Ned Yost’s impact was statistically significant.

However, the fact that a few managers might have a slight influence over umpires is not the real story here. Overall, it appears that most managers don’t seem to have any real impact in arguing balls and strikes, which is consistent with rent-seeking outcomes. Everyone wastes energy arguing, but nothing is gained. I think the tables are instructive not in showing differences between managers, but that very few are different. Only three managers showed any statistically significant impacts (names in italic) in Questec parks.

The lesson for rent seeking in baseball is the same for rent seeking in society. Lobbying for special favors is something to be discouraged because, in the end, nothing is gained from the effort expended. Put Questec in every major-league ballpark to keep managers focused on the winning the game through baseball strategy rather than trying to
manipulate the enforcement of the rules within the game. Maybe some fans will miss the elaborate tantrums of grumpy old men out there on the field, but I sure won’t.

Part Two

ALMOST OFF THE FIELD

5

How Good Is Leo Mazzone?

—LEO MAZZONE
²³

DURING THE 2004 OFF-SEASON the Braves said good-bye to resurrected pitching ace Jaret Wright, after he signed a large free agent deal with the New York Yankees. Many Braves fans were not worried. “Leo Mazzone can fix anyone,” they said. “Bologna,” I responded. “He’s just been lucky, and we’re focusing on the success stories and ignoring the failures. What we need is a study of all the players Leo has coached, and then we’ll see he isn’t so great.” I soon found out how wrong I was.

Coaches and managers don’t just throw tantrums on the field. Through coaching and training they help the players improve skills and give their best in the most important games. But how much do they help really? Assigning individual responsibility for success and failure is never simple in a team game. This is true not just in sports, but in all group activities. Is the success of a Fortune 500 company due to a brilliant CEO, an efficient workforce, or just dumb luck?

We like to celebrate not just the players on the field, but the managerial brains that organize and coach players to succeed. The question is, how much does the off-the-field part of the organization contribute? Everyone knows the famous managers—Connie Mack, Sparky Anderson, Leo Durocher, and Casey Stengel, just to name a few—maybe even a coach or two. But how good are they really? Unfortunately, win-loss records of coaches don’t have much to say on the subject. Some coaches have the good fortune to coach several exceptionally talented athletes, while others are left to oversee near-minor-league teams. Determining the influence of any coach would require an experiment with coaches being randomly assigned players. Then we could compare the success of the coaches with different players. If one coach was better than the others, he should get more out of players when they are with him.