The Only Rule Is It Has to Work Page 5
In his day job, John says, he uses an “incredibly powerful magnet to strike atoms of carbon and hydrogen with a long series of very short radio wave pulses, tuned in a highly precise way to a very specific power and frequency, in order to change the orientation of how they’re spinning in a test tube, so that if I use a special piece of electronics afterwards to listen to them as they return to their normal spin orientation I can learn exactly how they’re all connected to each other in the molecule they form.” By night, he wastes time working for us, joining a long line of supersmart people who might have cured cancer if they’d never come across a dumb game in which grown-ups hit cowskin with sticks.
John’s first self-assigned task is to pull play-by-play logs from Pointstreak and parse the textual descriptions of events into database entries that he can query to answer our questions. This takes two months of sporadic work sandwiched around his other obligations: It’s not uncommon for John to send us a lengthy email explaining an attached spreadsheet and then sign off by saying, “My kid just woke up crying,” or, “Sorry this took me so long, my daughter was sent home sick from daycare.” The process takes longer than we’d like, but that’s the bargain we’ve struck with all of our helpers. Free assistance comes at a cost: We get equipment and brainpower that we wouldn’t have access to otherwise, but we’re never anyone’s top priority, and there’s no hotline we can call to demand immediate assistance.
Once John’s Pointstreak parsing is complete, we pepper him with research requests. Every query tells us something else about our new ecosystem, like a sortie in a real-time strategy game that reveals a little more of the map. We’re relieved to have John as our email lifeline, but once the season starts there will be times when we need answers more quickly than we can count on getting them from a guy who could be bouncing atoms off other atoms at any given time. Ideally, we’d like some of this information to be automated, updated daily, and available online.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from observing major league teams, it’s that every analytically oriented front office needs a fancy private information portal with a tongue-in-cheek name, such as the Astros’ “Ground Control,” the Pirates’ “MITT” (Managing, Information, Tools, and Talent), and the Yankees’ “BASE” (Baseball Analytics & Statistics Engine). John calls our web interface “The Grapevine,” so named because he hopes it will be how we knew ’bout the Pacifics’ plans to make us blue (and also so named because we’re in wine country). It’s not pretty. It’s not even password-protected. But it is a very rich resource, complete with pages for every player and team. On The Grapevine we can instantly compare anyone’s performance to that of a league-average player, look up custom stats including pitches per plate appearance, swing rate, and contact rate, and find the batter vs. pitcher splits that are missing from Pointstreak: righty/lefty, home/away, starter/reliever, and time through the order. Best of all, the site is a Ben and Sam exclusive. Managers love splits and matchup stats (maybe more than they should), and we just became the Stompers’ sole source. That’s got to be good for something.
In most ways, we discover, the Pacific Association isn’t dramatically different from the baseball we know. “These guys, the difference between them and Tony Gwynn is a hundredth of an inch, a fraction of a second,” Theo says. “It’s not like they’re out there bagging groceries and they miss the bag.” Home field advantage, that mysterious force that pervades all sports, is exactly the same: The team with last licks wins 54 percent of the time. But every league has a unique, identifiable fingerprint. Runs are more plentiful in the Pacific Association, largely because balls in play become hits more often than they do in the majors. It’s not your kid’s Little League, where errors can propagate in an infinite sequence of spiked throws and kicked balls, but almost every player on the field is less sure-handed than the shakiest guy on a big league roster, the player no one wants the ball to be hit to with the tying run on base.
To dig for more differences, John calculates the average value of each event—strikeout, walk, double, and so on—by determining its typical impact on a team’s odds of scoring runs. After comparing those values to their big league analogues, he concludes that strikeouts are more costly in the Pacific Association, which confirms our intuition that this would be true in an environment where putting the ball in play is more likely to lead to a runner on base. We make a mental note to give a slight preference to contact hitters.
John also sends us park factors, which tell us how much each park inflates or suppresses certain outcomes for left- and right-handed hitters by comparing players’ performance at each venue to the same players’ performance elsewhere. We find that Arnold Field is the best place in the Pacific Association to hit homers—not a surprise, in light of its short fences down the line—but that trait doesn’t increase scoring. That’s probably because it’s also the worst place to hit doubles: Like a less pronounced Polo Grounds, it’s so deep to center that balls launched straightaway never clear (or even come near) the fence. We’re a little disappointed by the league’s lack of extreme environments, which might have allowed us to target a certain type of hitter who best suits our park. There doesn’t appear to be a Petco Park or a Coors Field—MLB’s opposite offensive poles—in the bunch.
With our stats in order, we turn our attention to scouting, another cornerstone of a successful front office. Since the Pacific Association is a four-team league, there will never be more than two games taking place at any one time. We want to be at all of them, at least until we have a handle on the regular players. But we can’t do this by ourselves. We need a minimum of one person—but preferably two—at road games, both to set up a camera and to operate BATS. And we need a minimum of two in Arnold Field, where someone has to sit at a computer in the press box and oversee the PITCHf/x software that tells Sportvision’s cameras what they’re seeing. Sam and I will rotate through these roles, but we want at least one of us in the Stompers’ dugout during games. Given those requirements and constraints, we’ll have to outsource some of the scouting.
Fortunately, our podcast audience is a farm system for potential Stompers assistants. When we put out a call for NorCal residents—the more baseball experience, the better—with free time to invest in the Stompers, we’re swamped with responses, some so impressive that we have to double-check the address line to confirm that they’re intended for us. “I currently work as a corporate attorney with a large international law firm but am considering a career change,” a fortysomething listener named Zach writes. “Although I don’t live in Northern California, if the role sounds interesting (and you are interested in using me), I can handle my own transportation and living arrangements.” He attaches a résumé, which informs us that he’s a partner at a well-known firm, lives in a sleek Fifth Avenue skyscraper, and has an Ivy League undergrad degree and a JD from a prestigious law school. The résumé wraps up with a two-page “transaction list” that includes several mergers and sales for sums in the billions. He might be history’s most overqualified applicant for any position, period.
We’re not going to ask Zach to leave his high-powered, high-paid, low-fulfillment life to serve as a summer intern for a low-level independent baseball team. But the fact that a successful professional who’s probably billing four figures an hour even entertained the idea of moving across the country to be at our beck and call reminds us of something that we’ve previously only experienced from the other side of the application process: Millions of people really, really want to work for professional sports teams. At our busiest, saddest, and most sleep-deprived moments this summer, we’ll still be living the dream.
The applicants we ask to come meet us in spring training—all locals, ranging in age from their early twenties to their midforties—include only one lawyer, as well as one recent law-school graduate who’s studying for the bar exam. The latter is Zak Welsh, who grew up in Berkeley and worked as a home clubhouse attendant for the San Francisco Giants for seven seasons, including the 2010
and 2012 championship years. While with the Giants, he regularly logged games with BATS, which immediately makes him my favorite. When we feel the firmness of his handshake and the unwavering weight of his eye contact, we hire him as our advance scouting coordinator. We hope he’ll be the point person for the rest of the staff, keeping track of equipment, organizing assignments, and ensuring that the video from each game ends up in some sort of central repository.
The lawyer is Michael Conlan, who’s hoping to retire to Hawaii on his online poker profits. He’s joined by Mr. Mellow, Noah Clark, a Sacramento drummer and music teacher with wavy blond hair, sandals, and a scout-approved straw hat; Tom Keown, a biomedical engineering major who’s about to start medical school; Kortney Hebert, a Louisianan chef who left Lafayette after Hurricane Katrina and makes a mean gumbo; and a few other volunteers whose enthusiasm outpaces their scouting résumés: Brett Handerson, Leland Bailey, Mark Reynolds, and Spencer Silva.
Some members of our scouting staff are stuck in that aimless after-college period when no one knows what to do. Others are flirting with baseball before committing to a real job that they’re about to begin, or using it as an outlet from an established career. One of them is going through a divorce and hoping to use the Stompers as a distraction from an unhappy home life. None of them has any scouting experience. But whatever it is that we’re doing, Sam and I couldn’t do it without them. We buy them a radar gun for road games so they’ll at least look legit.
* * *
For the blissful few hours between the realization that we’re running the Stompers and the onset of abject terror, there’s only upside, unsullied by concerns about which tactics we’re going to try or whether the players will pick on us. But soon—so soon that it seems almost unfair, as if our brains should lay off and let us enjoy this—the joy of dream fulfillment is tainted by a familiar feeling of self-doubt. We’ve succeeded in convincing Theo that we’re worth working with, but we haven’t quite convinced ourselves, let alone a group of professional players.
The best way to ease our anxiety, put our stamp on the Stompers, and ensure that the team can perform functions such as hitting, fielding, and pitching—which our research suggests are all pretty important—is to sign a full complement of players. (We won’t be so unorthodox that we can do without those.) The Pacific Association has smaller rosters than the ones we’re used to: twenty-two players, as opposed to the typical twenty-five. The smaller roster size will limit our capacity to experiment once the games begin, but for now it gives us the sense that we have a head start, as if we’ve crossed off the free space on our baseball bingo card. The catch is that we’re having a hard time winnowing the pool of potential players from “everyone in the world” to a top ten to fifteen. Everyone who’s been in baseball for years has a long list of “his guys,” people he’s played with or watched play whom he’d recommend for a roster spot if he had the chance. Given our inexperience, that kind of patronage isn’t a possibility: Everyone we’ve played with is roughly as bad at baseball as we are. We’re the baseball-operations equivalents of singles milling around a middle-school dance: We know potential partners are out there, but we’re neither practiced nor plugged-in enough to pick anyone up.
It’s not as if we know no players personally. In fact, we’re well connected to one: Sam’s cousin Pete, a skilled defensive catcher at California State University–Chico, who’s recuperating from surgery to fix a fractured glove hand. Sam sounds him out, but Pete tactfully turns him down, explaining that he’s waiting for callbacks from contacts in the Frontier League and the American Association. It’s an inauspicious start: We’re 0-for-1 on persuading blood relatives—and catchers who currently can’t catch—to play for our team. Sam chooses this time to tell me, almost as an aside, that his standard response to extreme pressure is to dissociate from whatever he’s doing, using withdrawal from the world as a protective shield. This revelation doesn’t do wonders for my own mounting anxiety.
4
TRYOUTS
In the middle of March, Ben and I drive in early-morning silence, imagining a thousand ways to fail. Through an empty city and over a fog-thick bridge and down into Sonoma Valley, where Ben for the first time sees the vineyard-covered hills that barricade wine country from the rest of the Bay Area. It’s our first “official” day on the job.
The Stompers and the league’s other three teams are holding their annual tryout and draft. It’s in Sonoma at the junior varsity practice diamond, across the street from Arnold Field. Nobody expects to find the next Pacific Association All-Star here—more honestly, the front offices need to generate revenue somehow during the off-season, and they charge $100 per participant in an American Idol–style open call—but for the guys whose emails went unanswered, it’s a last, best chance to be more impressive in person than in a choppy highlight reel. A hundred or so ballplayers fly, drive, or bicycle to the one-day event knowing that, at worst, they’ll have a story they can impress future girlfriends with (“Yeah, thought about playing pro ball when I was younger. Even tried out for a club once…”) and, at best, they’ll earn an invitation to spring training. Just an invitation. The distinction between the best and the worst, we’re led to expect, is between pretenders who have no chance and pretenders who might at least earn the right to hang around for a couple more months. Ben and I dread finding out which category we belong in.
Ballplayers line up for registration, shoulders back, socks high, wearing batting practice T-shirts from their most impressive-sounding former team—in most cases, college. (A Division I school gets your name circled in our notebooks.) Last year, Theo tells us, the turnout looked like “a bunch of dads,” but this year it’s 85 percent boys, 15 percent men, including the fifty-five-year-old knuckleballer who compared himself to Jackie Robinson. They stretch with purpose and try to make themselves handsome, posing for imagined scouts, not knowing which of the nonathletic thirtysomething dudes circling in sneakers actually has decision-making power. Ben and I, inadvertently matchy-match in rust corduroy pants and black hoodies, grab clipboards and wait for the glow of authority to halo us. Our team’s new owner, Eric Gullotta, who bought the team two months earlier and inherited two statheads, delivers our Stompers hats. We’re with the team.
It’s not just Ben’s first day on the job, but also his first day in Sonoma. He quickly gets a feel for its blend of small-town innocence, hippie-burnout liberalism, and excess-money eccentrics. It’s a place where people keep going to their pediatricians well after they turn eighteen. Where everybody can point out “the sex spot” up on the hill overlooking Arnold Field (and a nearby cemetery). After Ben walks into town to look at a cottage for rent near the ballpark, he comes back like he’s under a spell. “I saw a pet pony,” he says slowly. “On a leash.”
Sure, everybody but us knows the pony guy. They tell us he comes from old Sonoma money—streets are named after his family. The local legend says that the little horse makes him feel safe, and that the city approved a service-animal permit so it could stay by his side. The long knife he straps to his cutoff denim shorts provides further protection.
Ben likes it here.
We move the aspiring ballplayers into right field for the 60-yard dash. There’s an extremely good reason we have them run the 60: They expect us to. When they watch the NFL combine, there’s always a measured sprint. If they’re going to pay $100 to tell their future girlfriends about their pro baseball tryout, there’d better be a combine-style measured sprint to make it real. So even though the grass is drenched with March morning dew, making the runs slow and sloppy, we make them run.
The rest of the coaches all but ignore this formality, which is no more interesting to them than the registration and the stretching. Two teams don’t even send a staff member out to the finish line to record times. But Ben and I are as focused as a liquor store owner tracking a group of teenagers in his shop. It’s our first day, and we are in full try-hard mode. We’re recording everything—the way they register and
the way they stretch, their handshakes and their undershirts. We’re still unsure which data will unlock these players’ biographies for us, so we collect it all. We also recall Branch Rickey’s philosophy of scouting: The most important tool, in any era or environment, is speed, “the only common denominator of offense and defense, and the best single indicator of major league potential.” We load and cock our pro-style stopwatches, and as fast as these kids can skid past us in pairs we record their times.
There are no 6.5s.
There is an 8.8 and there is a 7.3 and there is an 8.1 and there’s even a 6.9 and there are a lot in the middle. We lie to kids who ask us for their times, offering them an idealized version of their best self while noting on paper the reality: not fast, not graceful, not controlled, not for us. (Maybe they all think they’re 6.5s because no one ever tells them the truth.) Like the big guy standing at the starting point, tryout participant no. 173. He looks like David Ortiz with a few extra pounds, which is not a flattering body type on a kid at this level. “Uh-oh,” I say, as the kid readies for a signal. “This could be ugly. This could be a nine.” Fehlandt yells “Go!” and the tractor ride begins.…
Except the big dude can move. He keeps pace with his race partner, then begins pulling away, picking up speed as he settles into a smooth, symmetrical running stroke. His 250 pounds whoosh past us, and his time is well faster than the median. Ben looks over and smiles. So far as we can tell, no other team at the tryout has just seen this kid run. We have, for the first time this year, in the smallest and subtlest way, built an information advantage.