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Really interesting interview that must really bother Rubin since he gave it to the Star Ledger. The stuff about Muffy is pretty interesting, as is the whole idea that the team is looking to unload players who don't do it their way. Is there any evidence of that or is it just a threat? Also is sorta whetting the appetite for the arrival of Sandy Era position players -- a year or so away still.
The art and zen of the Mets' version of 'Moneyball'
By Craig Wolff/The Star-Ledger
The baseball ethos of Sandy Alderson and the rest of the men who run the Mets is held in a three-ring binder, standard issue for the coaches and managers, scouts and instructors — baseball apostles all — who roam the organization spreading its wisdoms and commandments.
Take more pitches. Be selective. Compress your hitting zone. The primer comes, too, with fair warning — we are watching you and keeping tabs. We are counting the mindless hacks at pitches in the dirt, the swings that take you nearly out of your shoes as if you haven’t heard a word we’ve said. Fail to obey at the peril of your jobs.
On the eve of Opening Day, consider this the reinvention of the Mets, the embracing of a different way to run a ballclub.
More than a decade after Moneyball — the tabulation of statistics that goes far beyond batting averages and strikeouts — became a national catchword, the men who were its brain trust are still at it with the Mets, only this time promising to raise it to a futuristic level.
Monday at Citi Field, when David Wright, Curtis Granderson, Dillon Gee and their teammates begin the long season, they know that along the way, their every move will be measured. How many rotations does Gee’s curveball make after he lets it fly? At what angle is his arm at that moment? How patient is the first baseman on a count of three balls and one strike?
The Mets will be keeping book on all of it, pouring the data into algorithms used to assess and guide each player’s performance.
Nothing less than the game’s sweet mystery may be at stake here. Baseball, requiring no clock to keep things in order, with its hidden games tucked inside the game, and with its unlikely geometry, resists the straight-line sameness of other sports. It eludes full discovery.
The Mets are trying to unlock the mystery with math, and, perhaps, in the not-too-distant future, with super-aged science. Cameras are already perched around Citi Field to capture a pitcher’s tics and a hitter’s quirks. Satellite images to measure the foot speed of a base runner and the range of an infielder may not be far off.
Others in the game are trying to devise new ways to predict and control performance. Like the Mets, most clubs have a full-time “analytics” team — the baseball equivalent of mad scientists obsessed with extracting new formulas from the status quo.
But it is doubtful that anyone in the game is going about it with the Mets’ single-minded fever.
“Every team in baseball is trying to do this,” said Alderson, the general manager and boss. “We are just approaching it more systematically, more unrelenting.”
Sharpening the point, Alderson said that players who defy the program — he calls it the “curriculum” — face an ultimatum. Alderson is not a batting coach, has never worn a major-league uniform, and is not given to fiery demonstrations, but he has personally delivered his unvarnished message in group sessions, specifically with the hitters.
“I told them, ‘This is what we’re looking for,’?” he said. “?‘If you don’t play that way, then realize we’re looking for somebody else. Right now.’?”
At the same time, in agreeing to sit down with The Star-Ledger for rare interviews about their methods, Alderson and his top lieutenants say they bristled after the publication of “Moneyball” in 2003, and then three years ago after the book spawned a movie.
They say they became caricatured as out-of-touch technocrats, enraptured more by metrics and graphs than by the heart and soul of the game. The newfangled data, they insist, has not replaced but rather added nuance and dimension to traditional scouting (what the sport calls “eyeballs”).
“Moneyball” focused on the Oakland A’s and their innovative general manager, Billy Beane. But Alderson, who preceded Beane in that position, had already begun pushing the A’s toward a more empirical approach. Paul DePodesta, who later worked behind the scenes with the A’s, scheming new ideas and concocting theorems, now oversees the Mets’ scouting and player development.
“The biggest disappointment,” DePodesta says, “was when someone took a narrow reading of the book and movie, that the story was about on-base percentage. Moneyball had little to do with that, little to do with stats in general. What it was really about was being open-minded and being a constant learner.”
The upcoming season is the Mets’ fourth since Alderson and his top-down management style were enlisted to rescue the club from years of broken expectations and undermanned rosters. The corner the club has talked about turning for several years running is tantalizingly close.
A farm system, barren not long ago, brims with genuine prospects, partly because of smart, forward-looking trades of older stars. Pitching prodigies like Matt Harvey and Zack Wheeler have already emerged (though Harvey is out after elbow surgery). Wright, the reliable star third baseman, and Granderson, a free-agent transfer from the Yankees, provide some sock to the batting order.
Critically, Alderson says, the Mets are in the middle of assembling a core group of players — through trades, free agency and the draft — who already embody the team’s philosophy or show signs they can adapt.
Saddled by debt — much of it created by losses in the Bernie Madoff scandal — the team’s owners also turned to Alderson for his skill in nursing money-strapped franchises back to life. The Mets’ payroll, even after the club gave Granderson a four-year contract for $60 million, and $20 million over two years to the veteran pitcher Bartolo Colon, is just under $90 million, 22nd among the sport’s 30 teams.
Moneyball gets its name because it is rooted in the bottom line. But since it became a craze, just one team has won a World Series without having a payroll ranked in the top half of the sport. These numbers send a message to pragmatic men like Alderson, highlighting that while operating on a limited budget can work to create a contender, as it has sporadically in Oakland, it probably won’t produce a champion.
Operating on the margins, Alderson acknowledges, sometimes puts the organization in a vise. After losing millions at the gate for several years running, the team has been hamstrung from spending big, like the Yankees or Boston Red Sox, the defending champions.
Moneyball doesn’t eliminate what might be called Moneylust, meaning the Mets have to show real signs this year that the equations and logarithms are producing a winning product. Some in the organization, disciples of Moneyball, say that without putting up the dollars, the Mets cannot rise to become a consistent baseball power.
“We have to outperform expectations to get fans coming back to the ballpark,” Alderson said in glaring understatement.
The decision makers
The Mets have always been a wish, something of the imagination in a way the pressed-suit Yankees never have been and never could be. Even the Mets’ colors — purposefully blending Brooklyn Dodgers blue and New York Giants candy orange — are a vision of something gone, not attainable. The Yankees compile dynasties, the Mets wait and wait and every now and then deliver a miracle.
In Port St. Lucie, Fla., this spring, the Mets’ decision makers floated between the chain-link fences that separate four practice fields, the major-leaguers from the minor-leaguers, and in between, the ones on the lip of success. It’s a place of comings and goings, ambitions fulfilled, and also great disappointment.
Alderson, who is 66 and Clint Eastwood lean, often preferred a spot behind the batting cages, sometimes alongside Terry Collins, the Mets manager. DePodesta, 41, is a roamer, though at times he could be found taking in a panoramic view of camp from a raised concrete platform, sort of a miniature air-traffic control tower from where all parts of the operation seem within reach. Both Alderson and DePodesta are Harvard men.
By design, the Mets are the rare organization with four men qualified to run a baseball club, so what Alderson or DePodesta may have missed was probably caught by John Ricco, the assistant general manager, or J.P. Ricciardi, once the Toronto Blue Jays general manager and now a special assistant to Alderson. Also an Oakland A’s alum, and a former minor-league player, Ricciardi, 54, welcomes the new age, but is otherwise the closest thing to an old-time baseball man in the Mets front office. He doesn’t hesitate calling Alderson with a hunch (he was the strongest advocate for the Mets signing Colon).
“I do look at the numbers, but I’m not as attached to them as maybe other people are,” Ricciardi said. “It’s not as easy as black and white.”
Daily at camp in Florida, the executives shared their evaluations over teriyaki chicken or a rack of ribs at the West End Grill, or over pasta at Tutto Fresco (Alderson likes their spaghetti and meatballs in a San Marzano tomato sauce.). They want no part of miracles or serendipity. Success, they say, has to be planned.
“You have to have a widget factory,” Alderson said. “Like a hedge fund, or mutual fund, it’s actively managed. How do they make decisions? They have a system. Either they beat the market or they don’t, but you have a system.”
Aggressive … but patient
What’s old is new. The great Ted Williams could recite his batting average for every part of the strike zone. He learned to abstain from pitches off the meatiest part of the plate. And before him, there was probably a moment when Babe Ruth turned to a discouraged rookie named Lou Gehrig and said, “Just wait for your pitch, kid.”
The hitting approach espoused by the Mets, and in fashion throughout the sport, runs the risk of straitjacketing players who have thrived by attacking the baseball no matter where it is thrown. That may work in high school but not in the game’s higher echelons. Now they are instructed to harness their reflexes, to become extra fine with the pitches they elect to hit, as if they could TiVo the action and press Pause.
Here’s what they’re told: In the face of 95-mile-per-hour pitches, be patient. Be aggressive. All at once. Be discerning, but also know when to pounce on a pitch. We like home runs, too.
“This is not ‘hitting for dummies,’?” said Alderson. “Be aggressive? What the hell does that mean? Being aggressive is just swinging from your ass. But it doesn’t accomplish a lot.”
Even out of Alderson’s mouth, it doesn’t sound exactly simple.
“It’s something in between aggressiveness and passivity,” he said. “It’s aggressiveness with judgment, or patiently aggressive. Or aggressively patient.”
Being more selective carries the benefit of wearing out pitchers, compelling them ultimately to give hitters the juicy pitches they crave, or driving them from the game. It also inverts a basic tenet of baseball — that the encounter between pitcher and batter is controlled from the mound. Pitchers know what they are throwing, and get to decide when the action starts, while hitters can only react.
The Mets’ approach strives to give hitters control of the confrontation, but it also creates a hazard. Drawing more pitches, creating deep counts, invites more strikeouts.
The 2014 version of the Mets show where priorities lie. Granderson has a .340 lifetime on-base percentage. Wright’s is .382. The first baseman, Ike Davis, floundered so badly last year, he was sent back to Triple-A ball for reschooling. On his return, his on-base number soared to .429. A new acquisition, Chris Young, batted only .200 last season, but the Mets are banking on that as a statistical aberration. Besides, he cost them “only” $7 million or so on a one-year deal.
Financial considerations are inevitably part of the equation. The Mets, after parsing the numbers on Stephen Drew, a free-agent shortstop who helped bring the Red Sox a championship last year, decided to pass, even though it means sticking with their young alternative, Ruben Tejada, who played himself off the team last year.
The Mets’ prognostications, said Alderson, have Drew probably regressing a bit and Tejada perhaps rebounding. Calculations show, he said, that Drew would provide the team with one or perhaps two more victories than Tejada.
“But one guy is making a million, and the other guy is asking for $30 million guaranteed,” said Alderson. “Why would you do that?”
Signing Drew would also cost the Mets a third-round draft pick. Be it common sense or stinginess, Tejada remains the shortstop, for now.
Preaching Moneyball is one thing, but getting players to accept its doctrine is another. On the surface, Daniel Murphy, the club’s second baseman, does not present a problem. He batted .286 last season, led the team in hits and stole 23 bases. But he is sometimes viewed as a player resistant to change, who should draw more walks and is content to hit meager singles to left field, which are usually not run producers (though he had 38 doubles last year and 40 the year before that). Efforts to trade him in the offseason apparently found no market.
Murphy has occasionally angered the club by stubbornly flouting the team’s hitting tactics. In the past, from the dugout bench, he has apparently committed near sacrilege in these Moneyball times, openly riding teammates who let a fastball go by. He has been encouraged to close the gap by drawing a mere one more walk each week.
Two days ago Murphy sounded like a convert.
“If you don’t get a pitch you can do damage with, you take it,” he said. “Taking it leads to more walks and swinging at more pitches you can damage, which leads to more doubles and homers. That’s the premise behind it.”
Full acceptance of these methods comes hard. Asked which he enjoyed more, a hit or a walk, Murphy sounded like a man who had been asked to stifle a primal urge. Hitters want to hit. They live for the crunch of ball against bat.
“Me? Getting a hit,” he said. “It’s not even close. It’s getting closer, but I like the way it feels when you center a ball. It’s one of my favorite things.”
Perhaps with Murphy at least partly in mind, in recent days Alderson and his deputies convened another conference room meeting of the hitters, delegating each man to act as agents for change, to help their teammates adjust and see the light.
Language of Moneyball
Moneyball comes with another word that has swept through baseball: proprietary.
Team executives might talk about the attributes they prize in a player. They might share a few of the statistics they trust. But the algorithms used to ultimately assign a value to each player differ from team to team, and are held as tight as a batter’s grip.
They are processed by members of the Mets’ analytics team, which is stationed in office cubbies at Citi Field. They sit in a high-ceilinged, windowless but well-lit hub, along with other team personnel. A baseball field feels far away here.
Down a sleek, silvery hall and around a small corner is Alderson’s office. It overlooks the expanse of the outfield and the theater of thousands of dark green seats. Classified stuff goes on here.
“There might be proprietary measures that are a function of whatever algorithm we have, that we weigh in a particular way,” said Alderson, in the thick language of the times.
With a new baseball season here, he gave one small peek into future algorithms, allowing only that next year and in the years that follow, they are sure to change. |
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