Looking Forward to 2007 - Oakland A’s

Or, Mendacious Meditations on Moneyball

Don Malcolm
Special to BTF

CARDS ON THE TABLE

By all means, let’s go ahead and call it mendacious.

For this how it will be viewed—if for no other reason than the fact that the language employed will be, er, strong.

And because, as is so often the case when yours truly is involved, a team preview is being hijacked for another purpose.

THE SEVEN-YEAR ITCH

And here you thought all I had was film noir on the brain. (Actually, I’m still red-blooded enough of a male to recognize—and semi-cerebral enough to admit—that Marilyn Monroe is not something that I contemplate with my brain. And, yes, that’s “something,” not “someone.” Icons are icons.)

And for many of you, the Oakland A’s and Billy Beane are icons—in a way that is strangely similar to the phenomenon afflicting young men when they are shown images of exceptionally attractive, scantily-clad (or, in these Renaissance days of internet porn, totally unclad and “in the thrall of it all”) young women.

The A’s became the “porn stars” of baseball, neo-sabermetric division, largely through the efforts of Michael Lewis. His send-up of the A’s in Moneyball created as many myths as it purported to destroy, and created a folk anti-hero out of GM Beane, all wrapped up in a cheeky narrative that glossed over as many facts as it revealed in its relentless drive to codify a series of transient insights into timeless precepts.

What mostly emerged from Moneyball, however, was a second wave of vitriol between two highly entrenched camps within the world of baseball, which (as is usually the case) produced far more heat than light. Lewis did a fine job of articulating the precepts behind each camp (though he failed to see that their belief systems possess similar problems despite their seemingly diametric opposition).

It’s now going on five years since the 2002 season, which proved to be the high-water mark for the A’s and for the neo-sabermetric movement. It’s been seven years since the A’s marched into the playoff picture, in apparent defiance of a dire trend in the baseball history: the monolith of money. (That this trend was exaggerated and distorted by both its proponents and its critics is something that Lewis glossed over in his zeal to tell his tale with maximum panache,)

In 2002, of course, there was still much ado about the money monolith (personified by the New York Yankees, rechristened by Red Sox team president Larry Lucchino as “the evil empire” even as that team lusted to emulate them). Even though the Bronx Bombers had finally lost another World Series (an event with more symbolic power than a more reasoned evaluation of performance, and one fixated upon by all sides of the debate), they were clearly getting to the Fall Classic too often for “the good of the game.”

This monolith also cast a shadow over the secretive, intense, and spine-tingling labor negotiations that would affect how the economics of the game would operate over the next decade. Adjustments were being made to reign in the monolith and recreate a more fluid environment that mimicked the results in the 80s (the mythical “golden age of free agency,” where the monolith did not prevail so often).

The monolith has not really faded in the intervening years (a .614 WPCT in 2002-06 as opposed to .596 from 1994-2001), but they’ve been stopped at the Pyrenees (so to speak) enough times to make the rest of the continent breathe a bit more easily. The A’s were supposed to be the Great Exception That Proved The Rule, an anti-monolith that could still be a steamroller. In 2002, riding the crest of a talent acquisition as fecund as any in baseball history, they became rock’n’roll icons for the dispossessed, populist purveyors of mystical science and MBA soothsaying (Lewis’ genuflection to Wall Street and renegade economists is transparent throughout the book, hushed tones akin to an addled Sufi master who has mixed metaphors in order to flamboyantly conflate cause and effect).

Lewis is already on to the A’s Achilles’ heel (the “randomness” of the post-season) and shows us that Beane has already rationalized his failure to be monolithic. (Never mind that the post-season isn’t random at all; what it really does is raise the level of competition to a point where the A’s real talent—annihilating lesser competition---is no longer a factor.)

Lewis leaves off after 2002, with a series of rhapsodic sketches that are intended to seal the myth of Beane’s unconventional superiority. In his afterword added the following year, however, Lewis tries to cover for the fact that the A’s “sabermetric” credentials are not nearly so pure as he had described. In ’03, the A’s performance dichotomy in terms of GvB reaches its extreme (52-23, .692 vs. .499- teams; 44-43, .506 vs. .500+ teams) and they squander a two-games-to-none lead in the ALDS to the Red Sox.

After that, the A’s suddenly lose their trademark second-half surge, blowing a four-game lead in the final month of the 2004 season to finish out of the playoffs entirely. In ’05, the A’s survive a 7-20 May and some time in the AL West cellar, and fight all the way back to first place in late August before having another sub-par September, again winding up out of the money. By this time Beane has cashed in two of his three starting aces (Mark Mulder to the Cardinals, Tim Hudson to the Braves) and he is running his shell game in the starting rotation (a much riskier tactic than any of the unconventional maneuvers Lewis so effusively chronicles).

The key question that Lewis fails to address in Moneyball (preferring to tell a series of colorful tales that tie the book to a more familiar folkloric strain of baseball writing) is the issue of sustainability. Coming as it does at the crest of the A’s success, with only one major player from their talent boom (Jason Giambi) no longer part of the team, the book is ultimately an exercise in premature ejaculation.

Which is pretty much the history of neo-sabermetrics, when you get right down to it. Lewis buys into the neo-sabe myth that Bill James’ original precepts were roundly ignored until the “young blood” from the Internet generation pushed their way into front offices, but a look at the league stats indicate that baseball grasped more of James’ concepts than what the neo-sabes are willing to admit. The Jamesian concept of “isolated power” resonated throughout the nineties, with far-reahcing effects. One-run strategies such as the sacrifice bunt (subjected to exaggerated vilification by the Internet inquisitors, whose primary contribution to sabermetrics consists of taking an old Jamesian notion, repackaging it, and delivering it with the cocksure arrogance of youthful bravado) continued to diminish, indicating that the “other wing” of sabermetrics, represented by probabilistic wizard Pete Palmer, was not ignored either.

The rush to hire number-crunchers has not exactly produced a revolution in how the game is being played, though it has created an increasingly heated exchange between the young guns and the old guard that Lewis so gleefully skewers. There is little evidence of connections being made between statistical analysis and game-level decisions; in short, the barrier that existed in the application of sabermetric concepts to the game is still mostly intact a quarter-century after they first burst into the mainstream with the first mass-published Baseball Abstract.

Let’s turn back to one of the key claims in Moneyball, however. The A’s 2002 draft was a good one, producing solid position players in Nick Swisher and Mark Teahan, and a serviceable back-end rotation starter in Joe Blanton. (Unfortunately for Beane and the A’s, they let Teahan get away to the Kansas City Royals.) As has been noted by Aaron Gleeman and others, however, the A’s successful draft picks in ’02 were not the ones who were championed by Lewis as the great unorthodox selections: they were the ones that traditional scouting had identified as the likeliest to succeed. As of 2007, there is really no evidence that Beane or Paul DePodesta (now under wraps in San Diego by way of a high-profile nuclear experience in Los Angeles) have mastered a new talent evaluation paradigm. This is the biggest puff of smoke in Lewis’ pipedream, and it’s the reason why the A’s are just hanging on as contenders despite a consistent rise in payroll over the past four years.

Ultimately, Lewis’ book will be seen as the product of heady times, where an exuberant hubris was celebrated in the fever of short-term success. It will remain an historical curiosity and little more, as more comprehensive, less self-serving analyses of the “neo-sabe” moment will supplant it (and no, Alan Schwarz, your book is not that, either). As with his purported “fellow travelers” such as Toronto GM J.P. Ricciardi (on a three-year spending spree in direct contradiction of Lewis’ characterization in Moneyball), Billy Beane will shortly evolve into a more mainstream GM as the A’s cash in on a new park and additional revenue. One wonders whether access to a greater budget, the mere idea of which caused Beane to back out of an agreement to be the Red Sox GM, will somehow untether him in an analogous way. If that should happen, it would create a poignant and ironic echo of Beane’s difficulties as a “can’t miss” prospect during his playing days (this is easily the best segment in Lewis’ book, and the only part that will be of any real interest in years to come).

So what about the seven-year itch, anyway? Well, sans a subway grate to lift up the skirts of a pornographic blonde, it’s a simple framing device. The rise of the A’s came with the advent of three pitchers (Hudson, Mulder, and Zito) who are now ghosts. There is no staircase hidden in Tom Ewell’s (Billy Beane’s) apartment that will bring the unseasonable object of desire right into his grasp. There is no other moment like that first indelible rush of ecstasy, when you know that you have destiny in your hands and you roll nothing but sevens. You think it will last forever, but it doesn’t.

And the blonde moves on.

THE A’s ON THE FIELD IN ’07

What the heck—you struggled through all that, so you deserve something akin to an actual season preview.

The A’s off-season moves were rather wan; perhaps Billy is saving himself for something more flamboyant when the situation calls for it during the season. Mike Piazza is plugged into the Frank Thomas slot (Billy rolled a seven with the Big Hurt and wants to do it again with Mike); Shannon Stewart has slugged under .400 for the past two years, and seems to have lost his earlier ability to excel against LHP (this looks like a very marginal move).

Manager Bob Geren will plug in the instructions from Beane and feature only a few everyday regulars (Jason Kendall at catcher, Mark Ellis at second, Bobby Crosby at short, Eric Chavez at third, Nick Swisher in either right field or at first base, and Piazza at DH). Outfielders Milton Bradley, Bobby Kielty and Mark Kotsay (when he returns from a back injury) will get rotated according to Beane’s ministrations: Bradley is historically prone to injury, so Stewart and rookie Travis Buck will likely see significant playing time.

The A’s haven’t scored 800 runs in a season since 2002 (though they’ve been eerily consistent at just under that figure for four years), but this could be the year where they take a more pronounced dive. Piazza will not have the galvanizing effect on the lineup that Thomas had, and it will take major rebounds from Chavez, Crosby, Dan Johnson, and an actual full season from Bradley to keep the team from dropping toward 700 runs.

And that’s worrisome, because the pitching is not going to take up much slack. While much of the neo-sabe contingent spent the off-season alternately bashing and painfully micro-analyzing Barry Zito (is it his fault that teams flush with money want to pay him more than he’s worth?), his 200+ IP will be very hard to replace for this year’s A’s. In our “mendacious” section above, there was a chart showing how the team’s starting pitcher ERA has been declining over the past three seasons. Last year, the A’s starting pitcher ERA hit 4.50, and it’ll be a stretch for it to be that good in ’07. The main hope for avoiding this scenario: Rich Harden.

The problem is that Rich hasn’t been able to stay healthy, and he has a tendency to get wild. He could still become an ace, but there are lingering concerns that he has too much stuff for his body size. If Rich doesn’t blossom, the A’s have little chance to avoid a serious decline: while Danny Haren is a solid mid-rotation type, he’s thrown a lot of pitches over the past two years and is a bit homer-prone. In other words, an ace he is not. Joe Blanton and Esteban Loaiza, on the other hand, aren’t even face cards (to be exact: six of diamonds, seven of clubs). Joe Kennedy is an interesting reclamation project, but can he successfully transition into the #2 starter? Er, how many times do you fill an inside straight?

The A’s bullpen features a fine closer in Huston Street, and a pair of useful setup men in Kiko Calero and Justin Duchscherer, but the rest of the crew is downright spotty. The A’s begin ’07 rather top-heavy in lefties, as they are carrying Rule V acquisition Jay Marshall, retread Alan Embree, and are taking a flier on Red Sox reject Lenny DiNardo. This aggregration (assuming that they all manage to stay employed) will struggle to match the A’s solid relief performances in the past two seasons.

Of course, the A’s still have their secret weapon stashed ninety miles away in Sacramento just in case. That’s right: the original “soft body” stud, the one, the only, the key to the lost universe, the mysterious extra joker in the deck, Moneyball’s Pillsbury doughboy: Jeremy Brown. Sometime in early June, with the A’s in a state of anemia, Billy Beane will reach out to his AAA farm club and bring up Brown---and, improbably, miraculously, a number-crunching annunciation will transpire, a surreal transubstantiation in the netherworld of deep, hidden correspondences. At long last, after years of derision, Jeremy will achieve sainthood, and while his reign will be brief, it will keep the A’s myth intact—and the circle will, against all odds, remain unbroken.

***

And after all that, the A’s will go 83-79.