A Quiet Revolution in Baseball

Before the season began, I predicted that the Toronto Blue Jays and the Oakland Athletics would make the playoffs. In the Blue Jays’ case, I thought that they would build on their fine 2003 season while either the Yankees or Red Sox stumbled, and in the Athletics’ case I saw no reason to think that their string of playoff appearances would come to a stop.In the latter case, I wasn’t far off. The A’s missed the playoffs by a single game despite the collapse of their vaunted rotation in the second half. In the former case, though, I was humiliatingly off the mark – the Blue Jays had a season so bad the Tampa Bay Devil Rays finished out of last place for the first time.I picked these teams largely because of their management. Both Oakland and Toronto are vocal about using statistical and, more broadly, objective analysis to supplement and in some cases supplant traditional practice in scouting and player acquisition. I think this approach gives them an advantage over many other teams, but it turns out I was overenthusiastic about the Blue Jays, a flawed team that played to its peak in 2003.In thinking about this since the end of the regular season, I’ve asked myself several questions: What does the failure of the Blue Jays and the relative failure of the Athletics say about bringing modern analytical and management techniques to baseball? Has baseball adapted itself quickly enough that the edge these teams had two years ago is gone? And, finally, did I buy into a philosophy that was more hype than substance?The answer to the last question, I would say, is a qualified “Yes.” As teams like Oakland have begun to apply their research, it seems they’re merely confirming conventional wisdom, much of it having to do with defense. The Athletics’ signing of Mark Redman last winter was premised on their belief that mediocre pitchers can be made into good ones with solid fielding. They also traded for catcher Damian Miller and outfielder Mark Kotsay partly because of studies showing the enormous importance of fielding at up-the-middle positions. This commitment to defense didn’t much help their collapsing starters down the stretch, but it did show that Oakland thinks it can win with strength up the middle.One hardly needs a radical approach to baseball to discover such truths, and it’s interesting that the more sophisticated the research gets, the more the teams commissioning that research come to look like the Atlanta Braves. As the general managers of the Braves and Twins would be happy to tell you, there’s nothing new about rotating cheap, interchangeable players around a core of durable, homegrown pitchers who throw strikes and offensive players who excel on both sides of the ball.In truth, though, to use the failures of the Blue Jays and Athletics to entirely dismiss what many, including me, were hailing a year ago as a nascent revolution is to miss the enormous impact their philosophy is having on the game right now. Just look at the playoff teams: Los Angeles and Boston are both run, to varying degrees, along lines suggested by Oakland. Both teams have improved significantly under the new regimes. They’ve identified and rid themselves of overpaid and underproductive players, replacing them with useful to excellent ones, like Jeff Weaver and David Ortiz, who were hardly in high demand.St. Louis went further than any other team this year and actually hired a fantasy baseball expert, Ron Shandler, as a consultant. As some have suggested, the team’s “stars and scrubs” approach is very close to a popular fantasy strategy. Finally, Houston and New York were implementing Bill James’s ideas when Oakland general manager Billy Beane was still a ballplayer.More importantly, look at the game on the field. Closers Brad Lidge, Mariano Rivera, John Smoltz, and Joe Nathan were all used unconventionally in the first round, whether by staying on the mound for several innings or to protect leads well before the ninth inning. This is something on which analysts have been harping for many years, and it seems as if it’s starting to have some effect. (Ironically, this usage of ace relievers prevailed in baseball for decades before computer armed manager Tony LaRussa upended it.)Other ideas that seemed novel just a few years ago are impacting games. When you see Mark Bellhorn hitting in the no. 2 slot for the Red Sox, it shows the acceptance of the importance of on-base average relative to batting average, and of power relative to bat control. When the Angels go to a fourman rotation for the stretch run, and the Twins quietly use one for most of the season, it shows that the questioning of the five-man rotation is making an impact. These changes are going to take hold quickly, and in five years the legendary Book to which all managers defer is going to read very differently than it does right now.Teams are taking the best of the new approach and combining it with the best of their traditional approach, and it’s leading to better teams and better baseball. As in politics, the success of the revolution has marked its failure, as apparently radical ideas quickly become received wisdom. Baseball, presented with the ideas of Branch Rickey, Earl Weaver, and Bill James in action, has quietly and somewhat unexpectedly given “Yes” for an answer.This is a wonderful development. On a spectrum, you have the Dodgers and Red Sox on one side, the Twins and Braves on the other, and the rest of the playoff teams somewhere in the middle. Success breeds imitation, and so we’re not only seeing real diversity in the way teams are built, but will see more in the future.The same holds for diversity in the way baseball is played. As their methods have been quickly picked up by others, the Blue Jays and A’s have lost much of their edge, but that loss is a tremendous victory for the health of the game. It’s a different outcome than I expected a year ago, and a better one.

A Quiet Revolution in Baseball

A Quiet Revolution in Baseball

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