The Only Rule Is It Has to Work Read online

  Fortunately for the Stompers (and my sanity), we don’t always strike out. Our first “yes” comes from Kristian Gayday. (“He’ll be popular on LGBT night,” Theo says.) Gayday, an Indiana native, played shortstop in his final season last spring at Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne, a Division I school where he’s still working as a student assistant. Our spreadsheet says he was the best D1 hitter among 2014 fourth-year players. Not the best D1 hitter among undrafted fourth-year players; the best D1 hitter, period. (In fairness, most true prospects get drafted after their junior year.) He hit .358/.472/.653 with 12 home runs in 166 at-bats, and Long’s adjustments hardly hurt him. And unlike a lot of our targets, he’s 6-foot-3 and 220 pounds, blessed with a prototypical baseball body.

  Granted, Gayday’s senior season was the exception: In his first three years, he didn’t hit for power, never slugging above .327. But it still doesn’t make sense that a strapping player with his senior stats and a modicum of defensive ability didn’t get drafted. Before talking to him, I email his college coach, Billy Pierce. I ask him the questions that the spreadsheet can’t answer. Why the huge improvement in his senior year? Is he a good guy? Can he play defense? (A big blind spot for us: College fielding locations aren’t tracked, so Long’s method evaluates only offense.) They’re all ways of reframing the indelicate question at the root of all our inquiries: “What’s the catch?”

  Coach Pierce sets my mind at ease. More than that, he makes me excited, as if we’re party to a secret no one else knows. He tells me that Gayday’s newfound fourth-year “spray approach allowed him to really handle the breaking ball/off-speed really well,” and that he hit at least half of his homers—more than he’d hit anywhere in his first three seasons combined—to the opposite field. That change in approach gives us a plausible explanation for the extreme uptick in production.

  Even more encouragingly, Pierce says that Gayday was drawing interest from scouts and advisers until he suffered “severe lower back issues” for six weeks at midseason, playing one day at 50 percent, resting the next day, and pinch-hitting the day after that. “This middle part of the season was when all our local guys came to see him play, and they either saw him play at 50% with below avg draftable tools/skill/performance/etc, or they didn’t even get to see him play,” Pierce writes. But by the end of the season—after his back had blown his chances—he’d recovered and gone deep in each of his last three weekend series.

  Despite Gayday’s breakout, the Mastodons went 19-34, and for them that was a good year. “We’re a small Div I that gets little respect and scouts never come to see us play,” Coach Pierce writes. “We haven’t been very good and I do understand that scouts are very busy and they can’t afford to waste a weekend afternoon on us, but Kristian was plenty good enough to be a 20–30 round guy. If he stayed healthy, he would definitely be in organized baseball.” Pierce also reports that Gayday would fit in fine in the clubhouse.

  On the phone, Kristian tells me that his back feels fine. I ask about his plans for the summer. “I was just gonna go to a couple tryouts,” he says. “And if nothing happened, I was just gonna call it quits.” In my eagerness to sign him, I tell him we’ll pay for a one-way plane trip, which I’m supposed to use as a bargaining chip in exchange for a lower salary. My unauthorized largesse works: Kristian consults with his family and commits to sign the contract as soon as Theo sends him a copy. I can’t believe our luck: We’ve signed one of our top targets, and he doesn’t even look like a runt. It seems as if we’ve stolen a march on the majors, using stats to take the long view on a player whom others might have missed because of an ill-timed injury.

  Sam seems content once we get Kristian to commit—at least we have something to show for our spreadsheet—but the taste of one transaction makes me hungry for more. I turn my attention to pitchers, tag-teaming with Theo on a series of deal-sealing conference calls. Jeff Conley is a skinny, 6-foot-2 lefty out of Alderson Broaddus University, a Division II school in West Virginia so obscure that most scouts haven’t heard of it. In eleven starts and six appearances out of the pen, the southpaw recorded a 1.96 ERA with 89 strikeouts and only 15 walks in 78 innings. Moreover, he recorded those stats while also playing outfield for 49 games, batting .345 with 21 walks and 11 hit by pitches against only 22 strikeouts, which helped him post a .446 OBP. His left arm was also an asset in the outfield, where he racked up 17 assists. Conley hit only 3 homers, so his adjusted offense isn’t good enough for him to appear on our batter spreadsheet, but even if he’s only an emergency outfield option, we’re happy to have the flexibility, given our restrictive roster size. Mr. Conley, come on down.

  We also recruit Sean Conroy, a 6-foot-1 right-handed pitcher from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an engineering school in upstate New York. In 259 career innings at RPI, Conroy struck out 223, walked 49, and allowed only 4 homers, posting sub-2.00 ERAs in his last three seasons and going the distance in more than a third of his starts. He’s also interested in evaluating clubhouse chemistry, an obsession of ours. A psychology major, he’s working on a thesis entitled “How Perception of Teammates’ Ability Affects Personal Ability,” and we envision him as a like-minded mole on the inside who can be our eyes and ears while advising us on avoiding missteps. We also envision him as an effective arm.

  “I’m a sidearm pitcher,” he says. “Just recently I’ve added an over-the-top curveball for an out pitch, which is working pretty well for me.” He tells me how he dropped down in his senior year of high school, and how he’s alternated his arm angle ever since to maximize his deception. “The slider would be the pitch I throw most often, like more than 50 percent of the time,” he adds. No wonder the guy didn’t get drafted: He uses an atypical repertoire from an unorthodox angle, and according to his coach he tops out at about 85. All of the oddities that make him undraftable endear him to us.

  And then, of course, there’s Paul Hvozdovic, our on-paper ace and shining spreadsheet star. (The first “v” is silent.) When he signs with us shortly before spring training, I pump my fist, just like Jonah Hill in the Moneyball movie when he gets the approval to trade for Ricardo Rincon. I haven’t met Hvozdovic—haven’t watched him, haven’t even talked to him. There’s no way I should be this excited about someone I know so little about. But any hidden doubts that might be buried within me will have to talk to the hand, because the limbic system ain’t listening.

  People who write about prospects often speak disparagingly about “Google scouts,” wannabe evaluators who “scout the stat line” instead of seeing players in person or talking to experts who have. Sam and I are guilty of these sins—not because we wouldn’t welcome the input of a seasoned on-site observer, but because we have no time, no travel budget, no scouting staff, and next to no video. Stats are our specialty, but they’re also our only resort.

  Gayday, Conley, Conroy, Hvozdovic. At this point, they’re names and numbers, not fully fledged personalities. But they’re our names and numbers. Thanks to us, they’ve got golden tickets to spring training. And thanks to them, we won’t feel ashamed to show up.

  * * *

  With Opening Day less than a month away, we’re trying to cross off the remaining items on our Stompers wish list. Our most acute need is at catcher, where we’re looking for someone who hits left-handed and can platoon with righty-batting Andrew Parker. On May 9, a catcher/first baseman named Nick Oddo emails the Stompers, giving us the usual sob story about another indy league folding, leaving him looking for work. Sam puts him through our usual thirty-second screening process—stalk his college stats, see if he’s ever played pro ball—and notices that he hit .411/.492/.714 in 65 plate appearances in the Pecos League last summer. (You’d think Oddo might have mentioned that.) Neither of us knows what to make of this: Oddo played for Las Vegas, an offense-first setting in a low-quality, offense-first league, and his hot hitting took place in a sixteen-game span. I’m skeptical—Oddo hit only .273/.315/.365 in his 2014 senior season at Cal State–San Bernardino,
a Division II school—but I’m not having a lot of luck wooing my catcher crush, Nico Delerme, a 2014 grad from D2 East Stroudsburg who hit .437/.557/.635.

  Sam emails Oddo to ask how he went from a middling hitter in college to a .411-batting beast. Oddo responds that he’s always been a good hitter who was held back by his bats. “I believe I’m a better hitter with a wood bat because I stay grounded,” he writes. “With a metal bat I tend to get big in my swing.” In most cases, the transition from metal bats in college to wood bats in pro ball hurts hitters, since they can’t get jammed and still expect to hit the ball hard. Oddo is claiming that wood bats made him better. We give him points for creativity, but even Sam says he doesn’t find the origin story convincing.

  Two days later, Chris Long sends us a spreadsheet with framing ratings for college catchers. We don’t have to scroll very far from the top before we run into Oddo, who has a comfortably above-average score. Chris quickly follows up to say he’s discovered a bug—“We are baby chicks under your stiletto right now,” Sam says. “Don’t crush us!”—but when he sends an update, Oddo still rates well. By this time, Delerme has decided that playing for the Stompers would endanger his real dream, dentistry, so that option is out. But as soon as I see the spreadsheet, my eye is drawn to two other left-handed-hitting catchers—Victor Romero and Russell Vaughan—who rate even higher than Oddo and who put his college hitting stats to shame. Romero is from Fairfield, only forty minutes from Sonoma, so I track him down first via the “call his mother” method. Sadly, he considers himself retired.

  Vaughan, who lives in Arizona, is more tempted, but he’s already started a career as a business consultant. Although he’s only a year out of college, he’s making real money. I hunt him down on Twitter, and Theo and I call to deliver one of our patented two-person pitches. At this point, we’re like longtime police partners entering the interrogation room: Each of us has a script that sets up the other, with angles of attack designed to erode the player’s resistance. But unlike most of the players we’ve talked to, Vaughan sounds like he’s interviewing us. “Sell this to me,” he says. “Why should I play independent ball? Because I know you’re not getting paid a lot. Do I have a good chance of getting seen? Do a lot of players get picked up? What’s the current catching situation?”

  Theo goes silent for a few seconds, weighing possible approaches. “Those are all good questions,” he says. “Any of us who are in the game or work around it, you play it because you love it. You play it because it’s not golf. It’s not something that you can do until you’re seventy-five years old. You’ve got a finite number of at-bats in you—we all do. And you want to get as much out of every pitch that you can see or catch, because that is something that is fleeting and finite. And not to add more emotion to it, but as a guy who’s thirty-four, thirty-five years old, it feels like a hundred years ago that I was playing competitive baseball. It’s something that I personally miss and wish I could’ve held on to a little bit longer.”

  Now he’s really rounding into form. He mentions the “approximately eight” players the Stompers have sent to higher levels. He says Sonoma in the summer is “seven hundred degrees cooler” than Phoenix. He talks about building an organization that’s worthy of the sport’s respect. “This is a real piece of the baseball quilt,” he says. “We’re a real component of this. It is a small league. It is way on the West Coast. But we do have real baseball people who have real baseball futures.”

  I mute my mic so I won’t be tempted to step on his flow. “I understand where you’re at in your life,” Theo says. “How old are you, Russell, twenty-four?” Vaughan answers: twenty-three. “Twenty-three. So while it’s a big change from your day-to-day life, this very well could be a hundred-day blip on your radar.… If there’s any bone in your body that says ‘I need to give this a shot,’ it is gonna fly by like nothing else you’ve experienced. And I would bet—What’s the saying, dollars to doughnuts? I don’t even know how that works—but I would bet if you come out here and you play this season for us, that you’re going to look back on it, and the idea of not taking this opportunity is going to be something that you’re going to regret. Now, if you don’t take it, you won’t know what you’ve missed. But it’s a very short, brief, quick, amazing summer.”

  The pitch is a tour de force. I want to give Theo a standing slow clap. When we hang up, I send him a text to tell him he was rolling. “I meant all that,” he says. “As a sage thirty-four-year-old, ninety days in my twenties feels like a traffic light.”

  “You left it all on the field,” I say, working my baseball clichés. “If he says no, we’ll just have to tip our cap to the business consulting industry.”

  “Per Malcolm Gladwell, we have the upper hand in this battle,” Theo says, alluding to Gladwell’s book David and Goliath.

  “Yeah, not sure he’s right about that,” I respond.

  “I didn’t say he’s right,” Theo says.

  Two days later, Vaughan texts to tell us that the suits won. Theo delivered a speech worthy of being set to swelling strings, but we couldn’t quite persuade a twenty-three-year-old to structure his summer around the Stompers. Between Vaughan and Romero, I have enough material for a Craigslist missed connection. “You were a left-handed-hitting catcher with sexy receiving stats,” it might say. “I was an indy-league executive searching for the perfect platoon partner.”

  Sam and I are still so split on Oddo that we can’t even agree on how his surname should sound: Sam pronounces it “ah-doh,” while I opt for “oh-doh,” like the changeling from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Sam says the Star Trek association is why I’m still not sold. On May 16, our catcher dragnet hits an unexpected snag: Theo emails to tell us that Isaac Wenrich—a twenty-five-year-old, left-handed-hitting catcher who hit .274/.381/.495 for Vallejo in fifty-two games in 2014, and was popular even among opposing players—was just cut from his team’s spring-training roster in the American Association, a higher-level league. Our fancy stats say Wenrich was sixteenth-best out of sixty-three Pacific Association hitters with at least fifty plate appearances, and Theo says his glove is serviceable. I want one of “our” guys, but I can’t come up with a nonselfish rationale for passing on someone who’s already succeeded in the Pacific Association. Fishing for a reason not to sign him, Sam asks John Choiniere for every player’s stats against Pittsburg in 2014, figuring that some players with good numbers might be mirages who beat up on the league punching bag, which might be better equipped to retaliate in 2015. Sure enough, Wenrich hit .288/.409/.525 against Pittsburg, but he also held his own against Sonoma and San Rafael, batting .271/.373/.492 against those two teams. When he sees the numbers, Sam concedes. After Theo assures our new consensus backup that he won’t be buried behind Parker, Isaac signs with the Stompers.

  It’s exhausting to consider how much work preceded this single signing. Several spreadsheets produced by two number-crunching consultants. A series of online exchanges and conference calls, not to mention multiple calls to poor, put-upon Mrs. Romero. The worry that we wouldn’t end up with anyone we wanted, plus the emotional suffering inflicted by each rejection. And after all that effort, we’ve ended up with the most obvious solution—a guy who hit well in the league last year—because he happened to hit the market at the right moment. It’s our first lesson in how easily our careful planning can be swept aside, and a reminder of how much legwork major league clubs must do for deals that never get made, let alone the ones we know about.

  6

  NO FEEL

  We have a friend, Russell Carleton, a clinical psychologist by day and a sabermetric writer on the side. He consulted for the Cleveland Indians for a while, and has since written about clubhouse chemistry for us at Baseball Prospectus. Ben writes to him in mid-May: “Our players report to spring training this weekend, and then we have about 10 days before Opening Day. Do you have any recommendations or suggestions? Surveys or personality tests we should administer? Spring training group activities? You name it,
we’re probably willing to try it.”

  Russell immediately writes back with some suggestions. “As hokey as they seem, there’s evidence that those corporate icebreaker things actually work,” he says. “My personal favorite is ‘two truths and a lie.’ You write two truths and one lie about yourself on an index card and walk around to meet everyone else and vote for which one you think is the lie. Then everyone reveals which things are which. In a group of 25–30 guys, it will get kinda bawdy, but whatever. Everyone gets a turn. Everyone reveals a little bit about themselves, but has control over how much. It’s a good, safe, get-to-know-you game.

  “I’d recommend water balloons one day. It will be summer. Cheap and so much fun. Guys love them because you can throw them at each other, but it’s not an actual thing that will hurt you. If there’s a theme to any of this, it’s ‘12-year-old birthday party.’ The baseball stuff kinda takes care of itself.

  “Start a star sticker chart. 10 stars and you get a burrito. Use food to your advantage. Stars can be given for anything you want to reinforce. Yes, I’m treating them like 4-year-olds. The first rule of child psychology is that it applies throughout all of life. They will scoff at it and three days later be checking out how many stars they have.

  “Have an absolute non-sequitur item that is given out to someone each day, by team vote. Funny hats always work. Smith gets the funny hat because he went 3-for-4. A ritual will develop around the presentation of this hat. Go with it. When I worked day care, we had ‘The Golden Dustpan’ for the cleanest room. The kids went crazy over the Golden Dustpan. You might also try a crazy toilet plunger (spray paint works wonders…). The guy who gets it gets to keep it in his locker as a sign that he had the best day, but with the caveat that if the toilet gets clogged up, he’s gotta go in there and plunge it out. A little scatological humor. You are both being honored and humiliated.