While sabermetrics have made great inroads in the game, some still view statistical analysis with skepticism

By Mike Berardino
March 21, 2003

The debate continues ... • Marlins vice president of player personnel Dan Jennings and Athletics assistant general manager Paul DePodesta explain their teams' approaches to scouting, player acquisition and player development. • How does the argument shape up in the minor leagues? • Where does your team stand?

PHOENIX–Billy Beane can be as genial as any major sports executive you’ll find working today.

Despite three straight trips to the American League playoffs, he still wears those much-hyped shorts to spring training and projects an air of laid-back California breeziness. Until, that is, you ask him about the statistical analysis his Athletics use.

Then, the wunderkind general manager’s brow furrows and his eyes harden. Sitting behind an uncluttered desk in his modest office, his answers turn oddly vague as he begins the sort of verbal dance usually seen on a Mike Wallace segment of "60 Minutes."

What, for instance, do the A’s think of the increasingly popular measure known as on-base plus slugging (OPS)?

"We have stats that we think are more important than the others," Beane says, choosing his words carefully. "OPS is just sort of a quick equation. It’s an easy one you can do in a few seconds . . . It’s just a simplistic sort of stat."

What sort of stats do the A’s add into their formula beyond OBP and slugging percentage?

"We’ve got some other things," Beane says coyly.

What went into the Total Offensive Production (TOP) figure Beane inherited from A’s predecessor Sandy Alderson?

"That wasn’t even ours," Beane says. "That came from someone we used to employ a number of years ago."

OK, so what went into TOP, a statistical tool that Alderson began using in the mid-1980s? This tool once led Alderson to dump Dave Kingman and his .255 OBP for an aging Reggie Jackson and snare the likes of Doug Jennings (Rule 5 draft) and Geronimo Berroa (six-year free agency) when others wrote them off.

"It was a more involved formula that included outs," Beane says. "It was basically how many outs a player would make versus total bases. A larger equation."

Then, smiling awkwardly, he adds: "It had division in it."

Are there any fancy acronyms for the preferred stats the A’s use today?

"Not as fancy as you would think," he says.

More probing. More parrying. More awkward silence.

"It’s just a refinement of the process and stuff," he says, clearly eager to talk about something else, anything else. "Basically, for us, it ultimately gets back to scoring runs. We’ll just call it a runs formula."

Yes, but how is that different from TOP and OPS?

Laughing, he shakes his head and says finally, "I’m not going to tell you."

It probably shouldn’t be all that surprising that Beane would guard his statistical formulas the way a Coca-Cola executive would protect the secret recipe for sugar water.

However the A’s analyze stats, that process has been awfully good to the franchise over the years. It has enabled them not only to stay afloat despite one of the game’s lowest payrolls but also to thrive beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.

Matt Stairs, Scott Hatteberg, Mark Ellis, Frank Menechino, the Giambi brothers, Ben Grieve. All are examples of players the A’s either drafted or acquired in large part because of their statistical profiles.

The Red Sox were so impressed with Beane and his formulas, they tried to hire him as their GM this winter. They were even willing to give him a record salary for the position.

When Beane turned down the Red Sox, citing family considerations, they wound up hiring Yale graduate Theo Epstein, the youngest GM in baseball history, in part because of his willingness to embrace and ability to decipher sabermetrics.

Epstein promptly went out and acquired patient hitters such as Jeremy Giambi, David Ortiz, Bill Mueller and Kevin Millar.

More significantly, perhaps, the Red Sox hired author Bill James, the father of modern sabermetrics, as one of Epstein’s most valued advisers. James will butt algorithms in the AL East with former "Baseball Prospectus" contributor Keith Law, now in his second year on the Blue Jays’ payroll working under Blue Jays GM J.P. Ricciardi, another product of the Athletics.

Even the Yankees, with their legion of leather-skinned scouts, have remade their lineup in recent years largely on the basis of OBP.

And yet, for all the institutional momentum sabermetrics have mustered, there is still widespread skepticism, if not outright resentment, toward statistical-based decisions. A number of organizations–among them the Angels, Braves, Expos and Marlins–turn a wary eye toward this new baseball math.

"You can talk all you want about this newfangled OPS bull----, but I just sit there and laugh," one old-school personnel man says. "Look at Miguel Tejada and (Alfonso) Soriano and what their OPS is. If that’s the answer, don’t talk to me about the exception."

What about all those hidden gems the A’s seem to turn up year after year?

"They don’t have any rings, do they?" the personnel man shoots back. "They’ve got three horses in that rotation and they’re riding the hell out of them, but they still get their butts beat every year in the first round."

The man’s name was Eric Walker, and in 1982 he wrote a collection of essays called, "The Sinister First Baseman and Other Observations."

Alderson, then new to baseball as the A’s general counsel, read Walker’s book and was intrigued. Soon after he rose to GM in 1984, Alderson contacted Walker and eventually hired him as a statistical consultant.

It was Walker who devised TOP, which Alderson says was similar to OPS but also factored in categories such as stolen bases and caught stealing as well as park effect. There was a weighting system by position in which an acceptable figure for a shortstop, for instance, was wholly unacceptable for a right fielder.

"We were looking for a guy we could use to answer more specific questions about players rather than just subscribing to the general notion of the Bill James philosophy," says Alderson, now Major League Baseball’s executive vice president for baseball operations.

All those A’s did was win four AL West titles in five years, make the World Series three years running and win it all in 1989.

When Beane joined the A’s front office in the early ’90s, one of the first things he did was meet with Walker at Alderson’s insistence.

"I said, ‘You’ve got to go meet with him so you understand what we’re trying to do here,’ " Alderson recalls. "Almost immediately, it was hook, line and sinker."

While Walker left the A’s sometime in the last decade and is now believed to be living in Canada, Beane now ranks as the patron saint of sabermetrics, a lightning rod for those in the game who fear the scout could one day be replaced by the slide rule.

Here, Alderson can’t resist a dig at two of his former protégés.

"If you look at Billy’s numbers as a player, you’d never select him," Alderson says. "The only reason he was on our team was because Walt Jocketty signed him. I’m only kidding.

"I don’t understand what it was. In his own (playing) career, he didn’t subscribe to any of this stuff."

Finding doubters around the game today isn’t hard at all. While most executives will tell you they look at stats such as OPS, the majority still lean far more heavily on traditional evaluation techniques.

"We look at OPS, but it isn’t the sole deciding factor to whether we want a guy or not," Angels GM Bill Stoneman says. "What it is, it’s a measure of offense. Shoot, if we only looked at OPS, a year ago we wouldn’t have gone with Scott Spiezio as our first baseman. And it goes on.

"What we rely on very heavily are our own judgments and the judgments of our scouting people. We’re a scouting organization, and we really lean on our pro scouts as to what they see in a player. It’s really not what the guy did last year; it’s what you think he’s going to do this year or in the future."

Traditional scouting methods have the upper hand on the South Side of Chicago as well.

"I lean on my scouts, first and foremost," White Sox GM Kenny Williams says. "After my scouts tell me this is a player we should have interest in, I’ve got a few different methods in how we come to decisions."

Shortly after he was elevated from farm director, Williams installed Dan Fabian as director of baseball operations systems. While Williams values the statistical studies Fabian works up, he also favors alternative measures such as film study.

"I’m an old football guy, so I believe in film," Williams says. "I’ve spent a lot of hours watching film and breaking down some of the things numbers don’t tell you that scouts can’t see with the naked eye."

Orioles executive vice president Jim Beattie says his club relies at least as much on scouting and psychological profiling as it does statistics.

"I think nowadays you go a little bit further into those types of stats, on-base percentage in particular," Beattie says. "You open doors, then once you’re in the room you start taking a look around. That’s probably what you do somewhat. If anybody relies on a statistic to make their evaluation, they’re probably going to end up failing more often than not."

Diamondbacks GM Joe Garagiola Jr., architect of the 2001 World Series champs, cautions against opening too many of those statistical doors. He’ll buy something like OPS, but his eyes glaze over at something like PECOTA or runs created.

"Maybe I’m hopelessly old school in this regard, but to me statistics that you can derive from sort of the basic building blocks I think have real value," Garagiola says. "I look at ‘Baseball Prospectus’ from time to time, and some of those stats are so arcane, dense, impenetrable–whatever the word you want to use is.

"I guess this is meaningful to somebody, but not me. It drills down so deeply, it’s like, ‘OK, when you hit the bottom, there are three people in the world that this matters to.’ "

Garagiola says those seeking that one perfect stat, or "magic bullet," as he calls it, are just wasting their time.

"There’s a tendency to view these newly developed or derived statistics as the magic bullet: ‘This is the one,’ " he says. "What was it, Total Average? Remember Total Average? That was supposed to be the one. When was the last time anybody talked about Total Average?"

An interesting case study is the Rangers front office, where the traditional scouting values of GM John Hart work hand in hand with the influence of assistant GM Grady Fuson, the former A’s scouting director.

"Here, we’re kind of in the middle," Fuson says. "We’re not locked into some ‘pi times nine equals’ or something like that, but at the minor league level, the players we’re trying to develop and the players that are attractive to us are players built off strength and on-base.

"We don’t really lock into OPS. It’s not like we have to have that number on every one of our players. I look more at power numbers and on-base, then use my eyes to decipher the hitter a little bit. We’re not crazed on OPS."

Considering the widespread reluctance that still greets those who worship at the altar of numbers, the new breed of baseball executives must tread carefully. While sabermetrics may yet receive a full-fledged seat at the decision-making table, one need only remember the example of former Red Sox GM Dan Duquette to recall how easy it is to get (Mike) Gimbel-ized by the media and one’s peers.

"One of the tricks with these sabermetricians is you have to be able to blend it into sort of the traditional baseball context," Alderson says. "You can’t just traipse a guy out or come out yourself and say this is what we’re going to do. It’s such a tradition-bound, almost hidebound sport, that you’ve got to work it in.

"You’ve got to keep the guy in the closet, let him spit out the numbers, just because people get excited if they think you’re doing it on the basis of some formula."

And God help those who try to peek behind the curtain, especially the one in Oakland.