The Extra 2% (28 page)

Still, anyone who says they could have predicted what happened on the ninth of September would be lying.

Back in April, the Rays had claimed a fringe first baseman named Dan Johnson off waivers from Oakland. Johnson had enjoyed a decent 2007 season with the A’s before quickly falling out of favor in ’08. The Rays didn’t have any big plans for him; they were just looking for a little minor league depth. There was a decent chance he might not see a single at-bat for the Rays—until the entire fairy-tale season threatened to unravel.

The Rays dropped six of their first seven games in September,
sending shock waves through the clubhouse and roiling giddy fans who’d been bracing for a celebration. The losing streak was especially shocking given the timing: the Rays had closed out August with five straight wins, capped by a three-game sweep of the Orioles that saw Tampa Bay score 34 runs, pack Tropicana Field for the final two games of the series, and stretch their lead in the AL East to five and a half games. But in a span of eight games, the Red Sox sliced that lead to just a half-game. The most heartbreaking loss came in Toronto: on September 7, the Rays trailed the Jays 3–0 for most of the game, dramatically rallied for three runs in the ninth to send the game to extra innings, scored a single run in the 13th to set up a possible win, only to watch Troy Percival serve up a game-winning, walk-off grand slam to veteran catcher Gregg Zaun. It got worse from there as first Toronto, then Boston, shut out the Rays. Tampa Bay was now missing Upton and Longoria, owing to injuries, and heading into the second game of a three-game set at Fenway Park. One more loss and the Rays would relinquish first place in the division. Skeptics started to wonder if the team could even hang on to win the wild card.

Battered and bruised, the Rays called up Johnson to start September 9 against the Sox. Even Mother Nature seemed to conspire against Tampa Bay, though. Trying to fly from Scranton, Pennsylvania—where his Durham Bulls were playing in the International League championship series—Johnson watched as stormy weather grounded nearly every plane scheduled to leave the airport. Granted some free time during the delay, Johnson bought shoes at the airport, since he’d packed just a couple of T-shirts for Durham’s short trip. He finally boarded an afternoon flight due to arrive in Boston at 4:30, only to have it get in around 6:30, just thirty minutes before game time. From Logan Airport, Johnson negotiated his way to Fenway, arriving in the locker room just before the game’s opening pitch.

The Rays clung to a 3–2 lead until the bottom of the eighth. After setting down the first two Red Sox hitters, Wheeler walked
Kevin Youkilis. One walk wouldn’t convince Maddon to pull Wheeler from the game. The Rays had already used Balfour, and no other right-hander could approach Wheeler’s strong track record against righty hitters. He was staying in the game to face Jason Bay. On the third pitch of the at-bat, Bay launched the ball high and deep over the Green Monster for a two-run homer—4–3 Red Sox. With one swing of the bat, the Rays had gone from being on the verge of opening up a one-and-a-half-game lead on Boston to giving up first place for the first time since before the All-Star break. Bad teams aren’t used to heartbreakers; their hearts are usually broken slowly and steadily over the course of the season, until avoiding 100 losses becomes the only reasonable goal. As Bay’s homer sailed into the night, Wheeler and his teammates experienced the kind of pain that few of them had known in their major league careers.

The Rays had one more chance. By season’s end, Tampa Bay would rack up 45 come-from-behind wins, third-most in the majors. The odds seemed long this time, though. Trotting in from the bullpen was Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon, so unhittable that Boston fans were already comparing him to Yankees legend Mariano Rivera. Papelbon was also the only player in baseball who required two different songs to mark his appearance: “Wild Thing,” the 1965 classic by the Troggs that was also the anthem for Charlie Sheen’s Rick Vaughn character in the movie
Major League
, and “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” a 2005 anthem by Celtic punk band the Dropkick Murphys. If you were an opponent and had to sit through 39,928 Bostonians singing “Sweet Caroline” miserably off-key in the eighth inning, followed by Papelbon’s two-song coronation in the ninth, that usually meant two things: (1) you were going to lose the game; (2) you would concoct ways to burn down Fenway Park and get away with it.

Leading off the ninth for the Rays was the one player who seemed least likely to do anything against Papelbon: the all-day-traveling, late-arriving, ice-cold nobody, Dan Johnson. On the plus side, Johnson had been a star at Triple A Durham, hitting a robust
.307/.424/.556 with 25 homers in just 394 at-bats. Still, Johnson’s harrowing travel itinerary didn’t seem to bode well for a pressure-packed matchup against one of the best closers in baseball. His passive approach seemed to confirm it. Through the first five pitches of the at-bat, Johnson never once took the bat off his shoulder.

In retrospect, this was precisely the point. The Rays liked Johnson largely for his batting eye—a trademark of Oakland’s early
Moneyball
teams, as well as every successful Yankees club since their 1990s dynasty and every successful Red Sox squad since Boston started its own run in 2003. Johnson needed a few looks at Papelbon’s offerings before he could pick a pitch he liked. The hope was for that pitch to come on what was now a 3-2 count. Papelbon threw a fastball. Johnson connected. High, deep, and gone, into the stands behind the bullpens in right-center field. Tie ball game.

Every team talks about the virtues of depth. But as Johnson jubilantly rounded the bases and a stunned Fenway crowd looked on, it became clear that the Rays weren’t just any team. The Rays would go on to win that night against the Red Sox, then surge to an AL East title. They carried those winning ways into the playoffs, knocking off the White Sox in the League Division Series, then taking out the Red Sox in the League Championship Series. Well before their historic pennant run, they’d done more due diligence than any other Rays team had. They scoured every organization looking for relievers to layer on top of relievers, knowing you could never have enough choices in the bullpen—insurance policies they were happy to have when Percival didn’t pan out. They agonized over utilitymen, choreographed minor leaguers’ paths to the big leagues, checked and double-checked every contingency they could possibly imagine.

The Rays had even picked up a discarded left-handed hitter to stash in the minor leagues for five months, a journeyman with just enough pop in his bat to give him a fighting chance, in the unlikely event he’d ever make it to the plate in a big spot during the 2008 season. In 100 more tries against Papelbon in that spot, Johnson
might never hit another home run—a testament to the good fortune that helped the Rays during their unlikely run from worst to first. The late, great baseball architect Branch Rickey had a ready-made response whenever someone noted the way his teams always seemed to catch a break. Luck, he said, is the residue of design. Or in the Rays’ case: trust the process.

Two days before the start of the 2008 World Series, a curious email arrived in Josh Kalk’s in-box. The sender was James Click, manager of baseball research and development for the Tampa Bay Rays. Kalk had read Click’s writing for analysis site
Baseball Prospectus
years earlier, but the two men had never met. Why, he wondered, was Click emailing him now, two days before the Rays would play in their first World Series in franchise history?

“What can you tell me about Moyer’s release point?” Click wanted to know. “It looks like his curve is being released from a higher spot than his fastball.”

That Click wanted more information on Phillies starting pitcher Jamie Moyer was no surprise, given that the Rays were about to face the veteran lefty on baseball’s biggest stage. What was surprising was that Click would seek outside counsel to build a scouting report. The Rays employed the usual cadre of advance scouts, who’d seen Moyer pitch and could relay vital information on his arsenal of soft tosses. They also held a dizzying array of statistics on
their upcoming opponent, courtesy of the proprietary database Click had built and now managed. That database contained reams of information on thousands of players at the professional and amateur levels and was unmatched by all but a few other major league clubs. If any team was going to be well prepared, it was the Rays.

A telltale marker of any successful company, though, is recognizing its own weaknesses and seeking to resolve them. For the Rays, one chink in their armor was PITCHf/x analysis. Developed by Sportvision, a company founded by former News Corporation and Fox Sports executives, PITCHf/x debuted in 2006 as a system that pegs the location and velocity of a pitched baseball, as well as arm angle and pitch type. Though a few baseball analysts had dabbled in PITCHf/x–based analysis, Click knew that no one could do it better than Kalk. A physicist and math professor at remote Bluefield State College in West Virginia, Kalk quickly gained a reputation as someone who truly understood how PITCHf/x works and how to leverage it for real-life situations through his personal blog posts and work for
The Hardball Times
. If Jamie Moyer was tipping his pitches, even in the most subtle way, Kalk would be able to spot it.

He told Click that his hunch was correct, that Moyer’s release point on his curveball was indeed slightly higher than the spot from which he delivered his fastball—but not enough for hitters to notice. That was the entire extent of the conversation. Armed with their usual scouting information, as well as Kalk’s analysis, the Rays faced Moyer and the Phillies in Game 3 of the World Series … and didn’t do a heck of a lot against the forty-four-year-old warhorse, scoring just one run through six innings before touching Moyer for two more in the seventh. The Phillies went on to win the World Series in five games. Kalk wasn’t paid a cent for his feedback, nor did he know if he’d ever hear back from the Rays. But a few months later, again out of nowhere, another email arrived from Click. “Can you come down next week for an interview?”

Kalk had seen this play before. He’d interviewed with both the Cleveland Indians and St. Louis Cardinals in 2008, and been approached
by a Chicago Cubs scout in early 2009. Kalk had ample experience in academia, but none in dealing with interest from professional baseball teams. It showed. “When I showed up to the Cleveland interview, I was wearing a full suit, tie, everything—it seemed like the safe thing to do. [Indians baseball operations director] Mike Chernoff shows up in a T-shirt and jeans. I was totally out of place.” He was also charmingly naive about protecting his ideas, handing over seminal analyses to the Indians and Cubs. “Every little bit of information I had I gave to them, because
obviously
they were going to hire me.”

He would try to be shrewder this time. After battling to get someone to cover his Wednesday class, he flew down to the Rays’ spring training site in Port Charlotte and met with Click. After a few minutes, Kalk realized that the Rays had trained their eye on him for a while. A PITCHf/x expert could help them spot early signs of ineffectiveness, fatigue, or even possibly injury in a pitcher. Kalk next met with Andrew Friedman. Money was discussed. Would Kalk work for the Rays if they matched his professor’s salary? He would. Five days later, on his birthday, Kalk got the official offer. He quickly accepted. Given how common Tommy John surgeries and rotator cuff tears remain in baseball, and how much money teams lavish on pitchers, Kalk’s ability to break down the intricacies of a pitcher’s delivery stood to save the Rays millions of dollars—maybe even tens of millions. All for the price of a Bluefield State professor.

Kalk didn’t much care that his new bosses had just pulled off one of their most impressive feats of arbitrage. He’d landed his dream job in a major league front office. An unassuming guy from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, he wasn’t one to gloat. But telling the baseball world he was on the inside would still be a lot of fun. The Rays were having none of it. Tell no one, they told the new guy. Send a cryptic good-bye to the blogosphere if you want. That’s it. Not only was Kalk barred from revealing the identity of his new employer, but the Rays took the added step of leaving his name off their front-office directory. Tasked with the weighty responsibilities of improving the health and performance of the pitching staff and the pitch
recognition skills of Rays hitters, Kalk was The Man Who Wasn’t There.

“When they hired me, they wanted to portray a neutral image to other teams that they weren’t studying this area hard or that area hard.” He was learning just how zealous the Rays were about safeguarding their intellectual property, so much so that “they may have someone like me studying just fielding, and I wouldn’t be aware of it.”