The Only Rule Is It Has to Work Page 2
I grew up five years later, after the steroids era had given athletes comic-book bodies. I had no illusions about displacing Alex Rodriguez, but I could see myself as the successor to the New York Yankees’ general manager, Brian Cashman. GMs and other team executives look the way we would if we wore more expensive suits. They’re the sports heroes of the computer age, and they’ve instilled in us the oh-so-tantalizing notion that we could do that. Thinking along with the GM is the new national pastime. In its most mocked form, this fetish for front offices is known as “rosterbation,” a word that captures a fan’s sometimes-delusional attempts to engineer the perfect transaction. In its most mainstream form, it’s fantasy sports, a multibillion-dollar industry now served by an array of statistical resources so granular and accessible that anyone can retrieve far more data from a home computer than Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane did in his famous Moneyball season.
My mental montage was more sedate than Sam’s, but still satisfying: Making the perfect pick on draft day. Swindling a rival team in a trade. Landing the high-priced free agent who lays waste to the league. I came closer to my dream than Sam did to his: I became a baseball operations intern for the Yankees straight out of college, sitting with other interns in an office inside Yankee Stadium where every so often Cashman himself would walk by, saying hello (or activating his beloved handheld fart machine) on his way to continue trade talks or address the press. He knew, and we knew, that everyone in the room had designs on his job.
I had good timing: It was 2009, the year the Yankees beat the Philadelphia Phillies to win their first World Series since their (most recent) dynasty team. After Game 6, in which New York’s Andy Pettitte outdueled a past-his-prime Pedro Martinez in Pedro’s last-ever outing, I sipped champagne in the clubhouse while CC Sabathia smoked a cigar, Kate Hudson lounged on A-Rod’s lap, and Kurt Russell talked intently to Mark Teixeira. After the fans had reluctantly cleared out, the players had hit the town, and the empty stadium was ours again, I did tipsy cartwheels on the field with the rest of the front office. Later that week, I rode on a duck boat with the rest of the interns in the ticker-tape parade as a horde of pinstriped strangers on lower Broadway chanted, “WHO-ARE-YOU? WHO-ARE-YOU?” and bombarded us with whole rolls of toilet paper. For the rest of the off-season, I slipped on my lanyard and badge as self-importantly as if I were putting on an actual uniform. My MLB.TV account had no blackout restrictions. I felt as if I belonged in baseball.
But the following spring, my time as an insider ended, almost without warning. On a day like any other, Cashman came in and told us he’d been ordered to bring in new blood, that the legal department was worried about interns staying more than a year, and that his hands had been tied by a hiring freeze. I tried not to be bitter about the news that the World Series–winning Yankees, who regularly dropped hundreds of millions on free agents who weren’t worth the money, couldn’t afford to convert a few underpaid interns into underpaid full-timers. It stung even more when the “hiring freeze” turned out to be a comforting fiction: Two of the senior interns got to stay as full-fledged staffers. My skill set, it seemed, just wasn’t special enough for the team to make an exception.
So what do you do when the guy whose job you grew up wanting to do kicks you (very gently) to the curb? I could have tried to parlay my year with the Yankees into another team internship, eventually ascending to a GM role with another organization and, in my moment of triumph, exacting revenge for my freeze-out by taking Cashman to the cleaners in a lopsided deal. Instead, I steered into the skid and went back to the baseball writing I’d begun in college. In time, I came to believe that the Yankees had done me a favor by pushing me into a role for which I was a far better fit. But now, having spoken to Dan Evans, I see a way to bypass the intern stage and skip directly to running a team. I’m eager to test myself, even in an upstart indy league. Neither Sam nor I had ever completely let go of that one special fantasy, the last lingering what-if: Could we “crack” baseball if we could borrow a GM’s job and live it for a single season? How would we be altered? And how would we alter a team?
Unfortunately, we don’t know anyone with six figures to throw away on someone else’s wish fulfillment. Evidently Dan doesn’t either: The new Northern League never gets off the ground. Sam and I don’t dismiss our vision of running an indy team, but without an obvious outlet we put it on the back burner. And the longer it sits there, the sillier and less realistic it seems.
It took a podcast conversation to inspire this far-fetched idea; it takes another to make it more real. Sixteen months and hundreds of Effectively Wild episodes later, a listener’s email prompts us to admit on the air that we’ve never attended an independent-league game. Some hours after that show ends, a message appears in Sam’s inbox. “I hear you’re looking for an invite out to an independent league game,” writes Tim Livingston, the director of broadcasting and media relations for the Sonoma Stompers, a franchise in the fledgling, four-team Pacific Association of Professional Baseball Clubs, which rose out of the ashes of the North American League (itself a chimera created from the remnants of three earlier leagues). “I think it would be great if you could come by to watch.” So does Sam.
2
SONOMA DREAMING
I fell in love with baseball because it brought me into a world of grown-ups: advertisements for plumbers unions and Budweiser and equipment-rental stores interspersed with fights on the field, $5,000 giveaways for a grand slam in the fifth, the occasional on-field cuss picked up by the broadcasts, and the constant cycling in of ballplayers who had been swapped like trading cards. In this world, I felt as smart and informed as the adults I still had trouble talking to about anything else.
That’s what led to my first baseball writing. It was a day game in the summer of 1988. Day games were salvation, three hours in the afternoon when my chores pulling weeds or watering plants could have a dramatic soundtrack. It didn’t seem fair that my dad had to miss these games when he went to work, so one afternoon I sat at my desk with a notebook and a pencil and a radio, and I wrote down everything that happened, relying on the broadcasters’ selective attention to fill in the details. I took those notes and wrote up a game story so my dad could read about it when he came home. I decided then that after my Hall of Fame playing career was over I would become a baseball writer.
I sort of kept that dream going—“writer” stuck, but “baseball” wandered away, and the Hall of Fame playing career is still waiting. I became a newspaper reporter in Orange County, California, covering everything from a lady’s lost cat to the federal education budget. I read Baseball Prospectus on my lunch break, printing out each day’s articles and hiding under a stairwell so I wouldn’t be disturbed, but baseball was just a hobby.
Eventually, the sports section pulled me in to write about “stat stuff,” and from there Ben found me and brought me to Baseball Prospectus, where I now get an eighteen-hour head start on all the reading that I used to do at lunch.
One perk of the job is that I can do it from anywhere, so, stupidly, I ended up in the most expensive housing market in the country: the San Francisco Bay Area, where my wife had taken a job teaching Mandarin to elementary school students. It’s a solid baseball region—two MLB clubs, a high-A team in San Jose, top draft prospects cycling through Stanford’s and Cal’s spring schedules, but, so far as I knew, no independent-league baseball. When Tim Livingston emailed to invite me to Sonoma, where under the cover of vineyards a self-sustaining league was operating, I made plans to go up and shadow Sonoma’s general manager, the too-good-to-be-truly-named Theo Fightmaster. I figured I’d write a piece for BP about how a GM builds a pennant contender at this level, especially in the team’s expansion season. A little slice of life for September.
Organized baseball has been played in Sonoma for more than a century, and the locals still brag about the days when Joe DiMaggio played summer ball in Sonoma County. Arnold Field, the Stompers’ home park, stands just up the street from Sonoma Pl
aza, the site of the Bear Flag Revolt, a one-month uprising of American settlers against the Mexican government in 1846, in the opening days of the Mexican-American War. More important (to present-day residents), the plaza allows open containers and houses Town Square and Steiners Tavern, the two bars on opposite sides of the square. Start at the north end of the plaza and stroll past the one-story homes and wine-tasting rooms on First Street West, and you’ll soon arrive at Arnold Field, which is shrouded in greenery until you’re almost on top of it and can spot the light towers stabbing out of the treetops. The field, which is also home to Babe Ruth baseball in the summer and high school football in the fall, has unusually elongated dimensions: It’s Lilliputian down the lines (304 to left, 311 to right), shallow in the alleys (331 and 345), and Brobdingnagian to center (435), where the tallest of the hills surrounding Sonoma serves as a scenic batter’s eye.
Arnold is a beautiful ballpark at first glance, although a closer inspection reveals its amateurish quirks. I pace the bases and discover that third base is a foot closer to home than the rest of the bases are to each other—and then I measure again, and again, and again, and once more, because this seems somehow central to the soul of this league. There’s a goalpost in right-center, completely in play. The grass lacks that greener-than-green, well-manicured big league look. The PA system is warbly, the lights are dim, and the ads are sometimes misspelled. The anthem singer forgets her words midway through, but instead of powering on she starts over from the beginning, earning twice the applause a perfect rendition would merit. The players’ clubhouse is tiny and sweats body heat like dryer exhaust; there’s no clubhouse bathroom, just an outdoor Porta Potti protected from public use by a handwritten “Players only!” sign taped to the door. Pregame meals are a tub of peanut butter and Costco-brand white bread, served on a card table. Most players, I learn that night, earn significantly less than $1,000 a month and live off the largesse of local host families, regular folks who let players sleep in a spare room (or two, or three, plus sometimes a couch, a trailer, the garage, or a corner of the kitchen) in exchange for season tickets and nothing else. A player’s incentives clause could be a case of beer, and a struggling team might have to slash salary to make its meager payroll in the second half of the season.
The park’s official capacity is 1,450, though the Stompers rarely test its limits. On the day I visit, they come pretty close, more because baseball dignitary Dusty Baker is visiting and signing autographs than because of the playoff implications of the game against the Vallejo Admirals. The Pacific Association plays a seventy-eight-game split schedule, with the champion of the first half playing the champion of the second half in a winner-take-all title game. The Stompers and Admirals are trying to prevent the San Rafael Pacifics, the league’s flagship franchise and first-half victors, from taking the second half too. It’s not looking good, since the Stompers and Admirals have to beat up on each other while the Pacifics face the Pittsburg Mettle, the doormats of the league. Earlier in the month, the Stompers started sixty-seven-year-old former major leaguer Bill “Spaceman” Lee against Pittsburg as a publicity stunt. Lee went 5 1/3 innings in a 6-3 Stompers win, becoming the oldest pitcher ever to win a professional game.
Fightmaster the man is as memorable as Fightmaster the surname. As a big, bad-bodied first baseman, he topped out in junior college, save for the one time when he tried to walk on to Arizona State. He quickly walked off, although he left with a story about getting into an intrasquad game against Dustin Pedroia. He tried coaching and fantasy games, but they didn’t scratch his, er, sports itch, so he started writing about baseball for local media outlets. One of those stories was about Mike Shapiro, the man who brought baseball to San Rafael. After he read the story, Shapiro offered Fightmaster a job with the Pacifics as director of operations, and two years later when the Pacifics formed the Stompers to keep an even number of teams in the league, Theo was promoted to Sonoma’s GM. Despite his martial name, he’s an easygoing guy, thoughtful, quick-witted, and cultured. The Stompers are a family affair for him—his wife is wandering around, sometimes selling concessions; his mom, in a Black Eyed Peas sweatshirt, is here, too—but it’s a more-than-full-time job, of which only a few hours a day are spent doing what he wants to do: baseball stuff.
During the hours I spend with him, I see Theo scramble to assign a ceremonial first pitch, clean up litter, tend to ticket and concession sales, keep kids from infiltrating the field, and send a beer (Lagunitas, a Stompers sponsor) to Baker. At most games, he watches an inning or three before he has to grill burgers or replace tapped-out kegs, or go back to the Stompers’ office to count tickets and wish they’d sold more. He’s always stressed about expenses and looking for ways to recoup costs: Any fan who turns in a foul that falls in the stands gets a snack item for free, because each ball costs the club about five bucks. Once, a visiting manager asked Theo for an on-the-house hot dog. Theo had to turn him down.
This, of course, puts a tremendous strain on his ability to eke out victories. He doesn’t have a vast scouting network—he compares his player-acquisition process to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, trying to draw significant information out of brief, flickering shadows.
“What about Moneyball stuff?” I ask. “Is there much opportunity to do that sort of stuff here?”
“You could definitely find inefficiencies,” he says. “But if I had another set of hands, I’d have them handing out programs or selling sponsorships, not scouting our opponents.”
He wants badly to win—he wants especially to beat the Pacifics, who own the club but give him only two thirds the payroll that San Rafael gets—but he’s not selling a winning club. He’s selling the small-town experience of being at a ballpark on a mild summer night. “The owners’ objective,” he tells me, “is basically this vision of a family of four leaving the game, the kids got to high-five the mascot, they got a foul ball, they’re walking to their car and saying, ‘What a fantastic night at the park. By the way, who won?’”
I watch the Stompers lose. I watch the Colombian starting pitcher get injured, and I see how heartbroken Theo is, knowing that, at this level, the player is responsible for his own, potentially expensive recovery—and that, if it takes too long, the player will likely have to leave the country. I see Theo groan when an important runner is held at third, his emotions getting the better of his business-first spiel. I go home and follow along as the Stompers go 3-5 to finish the season in third place, while the Pacifics end on a 6-2 run to win the second half and the Pacific Association championship. It wasn’t a fair fight, I think.
After my trip to Sonoma, I call Ben, and we agree that if we’re ever going to pursue our dream of running a team, we’d be hard-pressed to find a better environment than Sonoma, or a more congenial and supportive colleague than Theo Fightmaster. And so, in late October 2014, I drive to a high-rise office building overlooking San Francisco Bay, where the Pacifics/Stompers owner, Eugene Lupario, runs the professional-staffing company he cofounded. Theo is there, too. I feel like a pitcher with a three-ball count and the bases loaded: I have to be perfect if I’m going to convince them to buy into the plan Ben and I want to put in place, or else I may never get this chance again. I grab a piece of hard candy from the unattended reception desk, tuck it into my cheek for comfort, and throw my pitch: We’re legit, experts in the field, constantly surrounded by brilliant baseball minds and ready to put in crazy baseball-exec hours. We can give the Stompers the baseball operations department they lack, expand their player pool, generate publicity, and free up Theo to focus on the business side. We will, we believe, make the Stompers the best independent-league team in the country—or, at least, in the Pacific Association. All we ask for is a pro team to play with.
“So if you took over our baseball operations department,” Lupario asks, “what would you do?”
In the span of a single intake of breath, I flip through the possibilities. Optimized lineups, with each hitter in his sabermetrics-approved place? Too bo
ring, too small. Social mapping to engineer clubhouse chemistry? Too sinister, sounds like we’re Big Brother.
Finally I blurt, “There’s no rule that says you have to have three men in the outfield and four in the infield. We’d like to try five-man infields.”
Silence. Then Fightmaster, who sees in this proposal the chance to be part of something that changes baseball forever, smiles. Lupario, a businessman through and through, doesn’t join him. Too nervous to stop myself, I keep going: “And probably six-man, too.”
Fightmaster and Lupario look at each other. Lupario raises his eyebrows. And then, swayed by Theo’s what-the-hell look of optimism, he agrees.
We’re going to get our opportunity. We’re taking our talents, such as they are, to Sonoma.
* * *
Although Ben and I are on the public front lines of baseball’s analytical movement, we’ve fought our battles from the safety of our screens: Our ideas about baseball are academic, theoretical, never exposed to tobacco spit and stray infield pebbles. We talk to pro athletes often, but only to inquire, not to tell them what to do. We pick up and drop players from our fantasy teams, but we don’t have to break the bad news in person and look them in the eye as we let them go. We’ve been armchair GMs, backseat drivers. So as we grip the wheel, we wonder: Can a creative, incisive use of numbers really sharpen the performance of players who’ve never been able to fulfill their major league dreams? Can we become as proficient at analyzing players’ personalities as we are at analyzing their stats? Or will the game’s human element build barriers that we’ll be too out of our element to break down?
After a half decade of writing for a fairly closed circle, we actually want to hear the best arguments against us. One way to encounter those arguments is to read the scolds and the trolls who mock us for our spreadsheets (sure) and our slide rules (never seen one), but they’re so scoldy and trolly. Another is to try to anticipate those arguments as best we can, but our personal biases undoubtedly limit our imaginations. No, the best way to find the vulnerabilities in our beliefs is to test them in an uncontrolled, unpredictable, real-world environment.