Bill Felber

Bill Felber’s new book The Book on the Book: A Landmark Inquiry into Which Strategies in the Modern Game Actually Work nearly didn’t get in the game itself. Felber, a true sabermetrician in the Society for American Baseball Research vein, spent years researching the book — but not for the reasons most authors do. In a cruel twist, Felber’s manuscript – accepted for publication by a financially shaky publisher – was claimed by the publisher’s creditors when the publisher went out of business. It wasn’t until another three years had passed that Felber was able to reclaim his work.

Worse, Felber’s book, a sabermetric exploration of how team finances and other issues affect the game on the field, had to be updated each time a new season passed – the book that ended up on bookstore shelves this summer is the fifth edition – the other editions unpublished and having died in legal limbo.

“If you write it in 1999, you have to keep redoing it in 2000, 2001, 2002,” Felber said. “And if you redo it, the conclusions change.”

Ironically for a book bound up by a financial snafu, many of the conclusions his book makes turn on the financial aspect of the game. Sabermetrics has looked carefully at how on-field action affects team performance, he says, but not many have examined how strategies of the general managers affect their team’s play.

“An awful lot of success in baseball is determined in November and December,” Felber said, referring to player acquisitions. “From a general managerial standpoint, I think that’s one of the ways this book advances things.”

On the other hand, Felber says that money isn’t the overarching force that ownership has claimed it to be during labor disputes, with one major exception – the AL East. Financial circumstances there, he said, are “oppressive.”

According to Felber, the Yankees’ tremendous money advantage is an “insurance policy” that allows them to burn through players and still contend. “The Yankees waste far more money than anybody else. It’s true but irrelevant because it pays off in wins,” at least for the years Felber studied.

On the other hand, baseball’s other divisions typically enjoy a more competitive atmosphere because the financial inequities are not too much for a savvy general manager to overcome. Even so, Felber says, if a team wants to contend they’re going to end up overpaying for talent – the millions that go to star players is almost never repaid in performance. But, Felber said, alternative is losing.

“The salary system screws everybody in turn,” Felber said. The players outperform their salaries until arbitration, but they then fail to live up to the millions given them. On the other hand, young, low-paid players usually can’t produce in raw terms as much as the overpaid veterans. Competitiveness, then, requires an increasingly greater investment.

“A G.M. who wants to contend at some point will have to overpay for players,” Felber said, “because that’s the way the system is set up.”

Consider a pitcher who is paid $9 million and contributes 6 more wins than a rookie, who contributes 2 wins. Each of the rookie’s wins cost less than $200,000 – a more efficient rate than the veteran’s $1.125 million per win. Since wins cost teams an average of $851,000 last year, the veteran’s winning presence cost his team a premium whereas the rookie’s relatively poor performance was still cost effective. Since the sad sack Devil Rays were among the most profitable teams in 2004, and the pathetic Brewers most profitable in years previous, such a finding makes intuitive sense.

Not all of Felber’s interests, however, lie in the financial realm. At one point in his research, Felber said, he was nearly convinced that the popular statistic to measure park effects was bogus. It was St. Louis’s Sportsman Park that flummoxed him. The park was shared by both the St. Louis Browns and the St. Louis Cardinals. In 1933, the park effect for the Browns was 140, a tremendous hitter’s park, but was 104, a neutral park, when the Cardinals played. The next year, the effects reversed – 107 for the Browns, 127 for the Cardinals. None of these differences could be explained by field conditions, lighting (night baseball hadn’t begun) or other possible explanations. The park’s personality was less stable than Sybil’s.

“I wrestled and wrestled,” Felber said. “My instinctive reaction was, “That can’t occur.’”

Stumped, Felber turned to his sister, Joy Hayes, a mathematician and a collaborator on the book’s analyses. The answer, she said, was in the park effects formula. Sportsman Park’s performance was in the equation’s numerator; all other league parks were in the equation’s denominator. Since the Browns and the Cardinals played in different leagues, the park effects were based on different criteria. Felber was assuaged, partly.

“Frankly,” Felber said. “I can’t think of what happened in the leagues between 1932 and 1933 to explain it.”

No word on whether Felber’s next effort will be on the twisted finances of book publishing.