Charles Steinberg remembers exactly when Earl Weaver began recording statistics to help him win games as manager of the Baltimore Orioles. “July 11, 1968, the day he became the manager,” said Steinberg, then a summer assistant with the Orioles, now an executive vice president with the Boston Red Sox.
“There were patterns he had observed in the minor leagues where if you recorded the numbers, those patterns might be recorded in a mathematical way. He asked Bob Brown” – the club’s public relations director – “to record every at-bat hitter vs. pitcher.”
Nearly half a century later, Weaver’s method of compiling and using statistics may seem primitive, but he was a pioneer; he was unique, years ahead of his time in the use of statistics to help him win games. But Steinberg was quick to emphasize an important element of Weaver’s use of statistics.
“He used the numbers to support what he believed,” Steinberg said in a telephone interview last week. “He was a master of the statistics, not a slave to the statistics.”
Tony La Russa, whose managerial career overlapped Weaver’s, offered a similar caveat about his use of statistics.
“We drew the line that when the competition starts the impact of the metrics stops,” said La Russa, who managed for 33 years and is now in his first year as the Arizona Diamondbacks’ chief baseball officer. “We used the term observation analytics. We watched the game that day, players on both sides, and you made adjustments based on what you’re observing.”
Like Weaver, La Russa was an early proponent of the use of statistics.
“We really got into gathering as much information about the team we were playing, how teams did against us,” he said. “Earl had index cards. I talked to him about it. He said ‘If Eddie Murray is 10 for 29 against this guy and 1 for 29 against this guy, that tells me something.’”
La Russa said Dave Duncan, his long-time pitching coach, was in the forefront of using statistics and pitching charts. “Having information to be able to compete became more important,” he said.
When La Russa became the St. Louis manager in 1996, he recalled, the Cardinals were not an analytics-leaning team.
“Bill DeWitt began this in St. Louis in 2004, 2005,” La Russa said, referring to the chairman of the team he would manage for 16 years.
DeWitt made the decision to adopt an analytics strategy despite the Cardinals’ success under the old-fashioned system of operation. A regular post-season participant, the Cardinals won the World Series in 2006.
Nevertheless, after a 78-84 record in the 2007 season, DeWitt fired Walt Jocketty as general manager because Jocketty did not sign on to the planned reliance on analytics.
In seven years under Jocketty’s successor, John Mozeliak, the Cardinals have played in the league championship series four times and won the World Series once.
In his new job, La Russa has made sure analytics would be part of the Diamondbacks’ arsenal, creating a new division.
The club got my attention with a recent news release, announcing:
“… the hiring of Dr. Ed Lewis as the team’s Director of Baseball Analytics and Research. Lewis will oversee the organization’s increased efforts in those areas and work closely with Assistant GM Bryan Minniti, Baseball Operations Data Analyst John Krazit and Baseball Operations Coordinator Sam Eaton, with additional staff likely to be added.”
“Arizona hasn’t been into that,” La Russa said, “so we decided to catch up, and we hired Dr. Lewis.”
The release noted that Lewis and La Russa have known each other for more than 30 years and quoted general manager Dave Stewart as saying, “We believe that he will be able to help us find the balance between traditional evaluation and analytic evaluation that will help us make sound decisions throughout baseball operations.”
The Diamondbacks’ development is the highlight of what seems to be an industry with in industry. A member of the Major League Baseball public relations staff compiled, at my request, a list of 51 club employees whose titles indicate they are analytics personnel. What would Gabe Paul, Jim Campbell and Spec Richardson say?
Five clubs have no such personnel listed but obviously have employees manning positions related to analytics. No club wants to be left out of developments that capture the attention of the majority.
The best known name on the list of baseball analytics people is Bill James, a senior adviser with the Red Sox baseball operations. A former baseball writer, James has been with the Red Sox since November 2002, and his fans say it is no coincidence that the Red Sox have won three World Series since then after having won none since 1918.
The Houston Astros have probably the most creative titles for their analytics experts. They have a director of decision sciences, a mathematical modeler and a senior technical architect. Tampa Bay, Pittsburgh and San Diego also have architects, and they aren’t the kind of architect that Janet-Marie Smith has been, working on the design of new parks in Baltimore and San Diego and the renovation of Fenway Park in Boston.
The New York Yankees, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and San Francisco have quantitative analysts.
Practicing analytics does not mean living by WAR and UZR and the whole alphabet of new statistical formulae. Each club decides for itself the extent to which it will use analytics and how much it will continue to base personnel decisions on the old-fashioned method of scouting and evaluation. Those decisions involve selection of amateur players, interest in free agents and players on other clubs for trading purposes and the way managers prepare for games.
“The metrics guys think they can devise a lineup and tell you how to run your bullpen,” La Russa said. “We stand totally against that intrusion. You have managers saying ‘I should do this because metrics say this.’ We don’t do that.
“There are different measures being developed all the time. We pick and choose, determine which might help us. We take them and apply them.
When you observe you develop a body of information about what you’re seeing, what our guys can do, what other teams’ guys can do.
“We take some of those metrics, challenge the ones we don’t think are as important. We include a heavy dose of what we see – whether an infielder gets a good jump, whether a baserunner does.”
And he reiterated his caveat about the use of analytics.
“Once the game starts,” he said, “the managers and coaches throughout our organization go into observational mode.
“We’re observing if our players are playing the scoreboard. We file reports on how well a guy is playing the scoreboard.”
What does he mean? It seems that La Russa is using another term for situational hitting.
“Let’s say you’re the No. 2 hitter,” he explained. “If the No. 7 or 8 hitter leads off an inning, you’re fifth that inning. As you approach your at-bat, you look at the scoreboard, which gives you what the score is. The situation tells you what’s important to do. Leading off, you have to get on base. Third or fourth, drive in a run. The scoreboard tells you what you need to do. You learn to use that at-bat in the most productive way possible.”
Translation: all the analytics in the computer won’t substitute for a player’s knowledge of the game.
As for Weaver, Steinberg said, “Earl used his own judgment on how to use and when to use his information. He used it as an asset 49.999999 percent of his own judgment.” In other words, Weaver reserved a slight majority for his own judgment.
Steinberg clarified one misconception about Weaver’s index cards. The popular recollection is that the manager used the cards to record the Orioles’ hitters’ at-bats and hits against opposing pitchers. Those numbers, Steinberg said, were noted on 8 ½ by 11 sheets of paper.
“The index cards,” Steinberg related, “had Earl’s detailed tendencies, where a hitter will hit the ball each at-bat.” Some statistics, he added, were recorded on extra-long index cards.
“Everything was done by hand,” he said. “And he wouldn’t let anyone know about it because other clubs weren’t doing it. It wasn’t shared until other clubs started doing it.”
STAN THE (ANGRY) MAN
The man on the other end of the telephone was angry, screaming angry, nearly losing-it angry, calling me a liar over and over, among other things. So now, in the view of Stan Kasten, president and CEO of the Los Angeles Dodgers, I was rude to office people, professionally unethical and a liar.
What apparently enraged and unglued Kasten was an item in my last column about his not calling me, as he had said he would, to discuss his e-mail accusations.
He had written last Tuesday, “Traveling today and Thursday. Should have time tomorrow afternoon Pacific time, or any time Friday.”
I replied, “Tomorrow afternoon Pacific time or any time is ok. I’ll be home all day.” And I gave him my phone number to call me, thinking it would be more convenient for him if he called me.
I’m not sure what I lied about; I’m not sure anyone cares about Kasten and me. I wrote about Kasten and his accusations only because his e-mail coincided with one from Jim Crane, owner of the Houston Astros. I have at times written columns with e-mail from readers so I figured this time I would write about e-mail from an owner and an executive.
I have no interest in placating Kasten, but I am writing this because he threatened not to explain his accusations unless I “corrected” what I wrote about our e-mail exchange and I would like to hear his explanation.
You’d think the man has enough to do running a $2 billion ballclub without taking time to scream at a baseball columnist.