Necessary Facts: Late to the Game: Moneyball (and Ted Williams)

Growing up in Cleveland, of course I was an Indians fan, reading the box scores and Gordon Cobbledick every morning, collecting Topps cards, listening to games on radio and watching on TV. In college, I got away from it all. Working a contract in Cleveland March 96 to May 97, I picked it up again while the Tribe was hot and I actually attended a game but drifted away after Mike Hargrove was fired for winning division and league titles but never the World Series. Here and now, later this month, The Red-Headed League is taking a multigenerational tour of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, and Chicago just to buy peanuts and crackerjack. To keep up with the news while they tour, I have been reading books.

Strike Four: The Evolution of Baseball by Richard Hershberger
Moneyball: The Art of Winning and Unfair Game by Michael Lewis (also watched the movie twice)
The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia (2000 pages of statistics)
The Science of Hitting by Ted Williams

With Strike Four as background, Moneyball was fascinating. Although Billie Beane fought, won, and lost his battle in 2002, the concepts of alternative statistics had deep roots. The book and the movie both nod to Bill James, of course, and of necessity, the book reveals more of the otherwise hidden history.

So, Ted Williams drew from me a wry smile when I read this:

“Now, if a .250 hitter up forty times gets 10 hits, maybe if he had laid off bad pitches he would have gotten five walks. That’s five fewer at-bats or 10 hits for 35, or .286. And he would have scored more—everybody has been crying for more runs—because he would have been on base more.” (Page 26).

It is just a glimpse of the theories that Beane was pursuing in Moneyball but it indicates that some professionals who thought deeply about the game had ideas that most others never considered.

Bill James’s Baseball Abstracts is often cited in Moneyball as having been cited by others. James was not alone and it should have been surprising if he had been. Our common culture has been influenced by scientific thinking at the same time that baseball was evolving. The first rule book was published in 1845 and older (partial) publications are known. Also, unlike other games with simple tallies of points scored, wins and losses baseball is a game of statistics. In Moneyball, Lewis followed James in insisting that followers do not copy but develop new theories and test those with not just new data but new kinds of data.

According to Hershberger, among those other researchers were Ken Mauriello and Jack Armbruster of AVM Systems. Later, Bill James worked with Dick Cramer to establish Stats, Inc., which was eventually sold to Fox News in 1999 for $45 million. (See, also, When Big Data was Small: My Life in Baseball and Drug Design by Richard D. Cramer; University of Nebraska Press, 2019.) Meanwhile Paul DePodesta met AVM and then was hired away from Cleveland by Billie Beane in 1998. However, as early as 1977, Dan Okrent bought his copy of Baseball Abstracts #1, and took the knowledge to his friends who met to talk baseball at La Rotisserie Française and hence, “Rotisserie Baseball” as the start of fantasy leagues. It must be noted, also, that in Moneyball, James is cited as having played “tabletop baseball” as a youngster. That would have been an expected (if not wildly popular) hobby at time when kids built large scale “soapbox racers” and miniature “slot car racers, flew powered model airplanes and model rockets.

That being as it was, it was not until 1981, that Okrent was able get Sports Illustrated to write about Bill James, Okrent’s first submission having been rejected by “proofreaders” two years earlier by for contradicting “known facts.” Even more to the point, also, in Moneyball: Mike Gimbel was a statistician for the Boston Red Sox; Craig Wright did the job for the Texas Rangers; Eddie Epstein worked for the Baltimore Orioles; and none was successful in their roles. Today, things are different. Whether Beane was the prime mover or an agency of something else is for historiography to explore.

Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers is about the astronomers (astrologers) between Galileo and Newton who came close to but never touched the relationships between measuring the area under a curve, the slope of a curve at a point, and the motions of bodies falling on Earth and the orbits of planets around the Sun. (See Copernicus on the Revolution of Heavenly Bodies here https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2017/11/copernicus-on-revolution-of-heavenly.html

In a science fiction novel (perhaps Neuromancer or Count Zero), a European clucks that Americans think that everything was newly invented in their own generation. In baseball, we now (2023) have a 20-second pitch clock on the field. In fact, baseball always had a 20-second rule.

“The 1901 season saw the implementation of a predecessor to the modern-day pitch clock. When no runners were on base, a one-ball penalty would be imposed if the pitcher did not deliver a pitch within 20 seconds of the batter taking his stance at the plate.^[11][12] The rules were tightened before the start of the 1955 season, and the 20-second timer now started once the pitcher received the ball. However, these 20-second limits were hardly ever enforced, and were left to the umpire's judgement.^[13][14]”. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_clock

Major League Baseball does acknowledge the new science of statistics and at the same time grants the importance of the fantasy leagues of fandom.

MLB Standard statistics here: https://www.mlb.com/glossary/standard-stats
MLB Advanced Statistics here: https://www.mlb.com/glossary/advanced-stats

“In the past several decades, the baseball industry has become more enlightened -- thanks to an assist from advanced metrics.

Although standard statistics remain quite valuable, advanced formulas and figures have played a pivotal role in the creation of championship teams -- both in Major League Baseball and fantasy leagues around the world.

Today, each big league franchise relies upon advanced stats to some degree, with a growing number of clubs employing complete staffs devoted to their study, development and deployment in decision-making processes.

Many advanced stats have long been tied to sabermetrics -- a reference to the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) -- a term defined by Bill James as "the search for objective knowledge about baseball." James, widely considered the face and most influential advocate of sabermetric study, has helped shape the lens through which the game of baseball is viewed.” (Ibid)

Does art imitate life or does life imitate art? Along Interstate 35 over downtown Austin is a billboard with a motivational message: William Shatner and “Boldly go.” Everyone knows what that means. So, it would be unusual, perhaps, if over the course of the past 35 years, science had no equal and opposite attraction for baseball.

“As in baseball, the discovery of bacterial diversity has experienced a transition from relying on the subjective judgment of experts to objective and universal statistical methods. Originally, discovery and demarcation of bacterial species required a lot of expertise with a particular group of organisms, involving difficult measures of metabolic and chemical differences. To make the taxonomy more accessible, decades ago the field complemented this arduous approach with a kind of idiot’s guide, where anyone could use widely available molecular techniques to identify species—for example, a certain level of overall DNA sequence similarity.” — “Science Needs More Moneyball” by Frederick M. Cohan, American Scientist, May-June 2012, Vol. 100. No. 3, page 182. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/science-needs-more-moneyball

George Carlin on Baseball vs Football

This was often part of his show and the content changed for different venues and audiences. The easy narrative was that football is bad and baseball is good.

Football is a 20th century game of technology. Baseball is a 19th century pastoral game.
Football is played on a rigidly defined gridiron field. Baseball is played in a park where the foul lines widen out to infinity and every park is different.
In football you wear a helmet. In baseball, you wear a cap.
Baseball is so civilized that the uniforms have pockets.
Football proceeds by downs. In baseball you are “up.”
Football has penalties. In baseball, it is just an error, (oops).
Football is a game of land conquest. In that, we are Europe Junior. We advanced on the Native Americans ten yards at a time: Ohio down; Midwest to go.
The object in football is to drive through your enemy’s defenses with an aerial assault, a ground assault, a blitz or a shotgun. In baseball, the object is to go home, to be safe at home.
In every other game, the offense controls the ball. In baseball the defense controls the ball.