Authors: Jonah Keri
That the Rays wanted Kalk’s work—and even his identity—kept a secret was no surprise, given the background of Stuart Sternberg. The Rays’ owner learned the importance of secrecy while working his way up to partner at specialist firm Spear, Leeds & Kellogg, then had those values reinforced while at Goldman Sachs. On Wall Street, Sternberg discovered, letting even the most innocuous details slip out risked compromising a company’s competitive edge or scuttling a big deal. Let success speak for itself, and keep others guessing how you did it.
When Sternberg bought the team and put his friends Matt Silverman and Andrew Friedman in charge, the trio sought to carry on that tradition. Problem was, they quickly discovered, baseball is very different, in some ways at least, from Wall Street. The first obstacle to secrecy was the media. Investment banks similarly have to learn to keep the financial media at bay—but not for the better part of each day from February through October and through the off-season, the way baseball writers have to be handled. Baseball is also easier for outsiders to quantify: an astute baseball analyst can deduce if, say, a team is loading up on strong defensive players, then write an article or blog post describing the team’s efforts to win that way. Not so for big banks, where a lack of transparency contributed to the collapse of the U.S. housing market and a nasty recession, with only a few voices in the wilderness spotting the signs of danger before it was too late.
The bigger roadblock to protecting intellectual capital in baseball comes from other teams. In dealing with other firms in his old job, Sternberg could feel secure in knowing that other parties had as much incentive to be discreet as he did. In baseball, he found,
that wasn’t the case. Government officials could run to the media after even the most preliminary of stadium discussions. In trade negotiations, other teams could leak information, whether to curry favor with go-to reporters, tilt a future deal in their favor, or just crow about an exciting potential deal.
Sternberg, Silverman, and Friedman set to work protecting their secrets. The first step was easy. Key personnel were told in no uncertain terms to keep their mouths shut. Once everyone else in the organization toed the line, the Wall Street trio devised their own media plan. They would be friendly and accommodating, but in a precise manner. No sharing of secret sauce on any key projects, whether on the baseball side or the business side. No on-the-record, impolitic words for anyone in the game. And certainly no sidling up to even the most venerable of reporters; no supposed inside information would be worth ruining their own deals. The approach was born primarily out of pragmatism. Rarely would details of a Rays trade be leaked before the deal actually went down, thus preventing last-minute bidding wars. But there was an additional incentive. The publication of
Moneyball
had triggered a wave of both reverence and disdain for Billy Beane: boardrooms and aspiring baseball execs lauded the A’s GM, while Joe Morgan and his ilk ripped him for … something or other. The Rays honchos simply wanted to do their job in peace, while maintaining that coveted 2% edge.
“They’re guarded with the proprietary way they do business,” said
St. Petersburg Times
columnist Marc Topkin. “[Fellow
Times
columnist] John Romano tried to do an [investigative] piece. And I know, just anecdotally, how hard it was for him to get Andrew to the table. They literally had a lunch, and if you read that column, there’s like two little tiny quotes in it.”
Few resources prompt Rays management into secrecy more than the team’s number crunchers. The advent of the
Moneyball
era accelerated a trend already under way in baseball: the seduction of overqualified young men into entry-level positions in front offices (they’re almost never women). Most major league teams now employ
at least some kind of full-time statistician as a counterweight to traditional scouting and player evaluation personnel. Many of those aspiring Billy Beanes, Theo Epsteins, and Andrew Friedmans carry impressive credentials: advanced degrees in mathematics or statistics, law degrees, or, in Kalk’s case, a background in physics. They’d probably make a lot more money, advance further with their careers, effect more real-life change, or all of the above, elsewhere. But they chose baseball instead, many of them hoping to defy astronomical odds and claim one of the thirty MLB general manager positions on the planet. For all the sacrifices these gunners were willing to make, the Rays knew that such talent represents a huge bargain given the work they do. Moreover, Tampa Bay’s brain trust knew that other teams with more resources could easily woo their star analysts away with a few more bucks or the promise of promotion. That’s why they went to KGB-esque lengths to hide the identity and responsibilities of people like Josh Kalk.
The Rays were slightly less paranoid about James Click, though they still didn’t shout his name from the rooftops. After graduating from Yale in 2000 with a degree in history, Click sought a career in a major league front office. His job search eventually took him to
Baseball Prospectus
, a place he felt could serve as a stepping-stone to the big leagues. There, Click absorbed the work of Keith Woolner, a skilled analyst noted for a number of key studies, including his ability to peg replacement-level talent in baseball; Clay Davenport, a meteorologist by day who’d developed new metrics for batting, defense, and other skills; Michael Wolverton, whose work with pitching gave baseball some of its first support- and luck-neutral stats that helped debunk the game’s reliance on won-lost records; and Nate Silver, the inventor of the PECOTA projection system who went on to become a noted political writer and analyst. To keep pace with these and other leading lights at
BP
, Click knew he’d need to make significant contributions of his own to the world of sabermetrics.
One of his most notable efforts was park-adjusted defensive efficiency
(PADE). Years earlier, Bill James had devised a simple but useful stat that tracked the frequency with which fielders caught balls hit into play that didn’t go for home runs. Click realized that tracking down fly balls at Fenway Park was very different from patrolling the vast expanse of Coors Field’s outfield, and that adjusting for those differences would help better evaluate fielders’ ability.
In the book
Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong
(a book I edited and co-authored), Click contributed several studies, asking offbeat questions such as “What if Pete Incaviglia had Rickey Henderson’s legs?” It was a creative way to learn more about the value of base running and base stealing, subjects that many crusty old baseball men didn’t fully understand properly and few analysts had studied with much depth. The chapter showed that even a base stealer as prolific as Henderson was scarcely more valuable on the base paths than a plodder like Incaviglia if he kept getting thrown out trying to steal or take an extra base. Dan Fox, another
Baseball Prospectus
author who went on to an MLB front-office job (with the Pirates), would later invent a stat called equivalent base-running runs, which quantifies exactly how many runs a player is adding or subtracting from a team’s ledger based on his performance on the base paths.
The sabermetric community knew Click’s work, and his name, very well. But many major league front offices did not. When Tampa Bay hired Click full-time in February 2006 (he’d consulted the year before), management tasked him with building a database that could track all major league and minor league players, blending scouting reports, statistical analyses, injury information, and multiple other components. If successful, the project could be used in any number of ways, whether to unearth hidden free-agent gems, make quick, but still informed decisions in the heat of trade talks, or help Joe Maddon and his coaching staff make informed on-field decisions based on tangible information rather than blind guesses. Working alongside Erik Neander, an intern who would later become the Rays’ co-manager of baseball R&D, Click built a database
that rivaled the Indians’ oft-praised DiamondVision, as well as similar databases constructed by the Red Sox, Mariners, and other clubs.
“We want to take as many steps out of the decision-making chain as possible, minimize phone calls and mouse clicks,” said Tony Blengino, special assistant to Mariners GM Jack Zduriencik. “When scouts are informed of stats, and vice versa, it makes the whole process go much more smoothly.” Having a robust database, he said, “is huge.” How huge? Blengino pegs the value of a robust, central database in the millions. But one MLB executive estimates the total cost of setting one up, between the human capital and technology, at just $500,000. Demand has grown so rapidly for all-in-one data depositories that financial giant Bloomberg entered the market with its own product in 2010, offering its Bloomberg Sports Pro tool to major league clubs that would prefer to buy rather than build. (Last note of this kind, promise: I write, edit, and consult for Bloomberg Sports.)
Click belongs to a cadre of Rays baseball personnel that’s much smaller than the group that works for the Yankees or many other clubs. Depending on the time of year, Click can be found helping with draft preparation, Neander gathering information for a (rare) arbitration case, Kalk compiling pitching data for an upcoming series, baseball operations director Dan Feinstein researching minor league free agents, and Friedman negotiating a trade—with many of those roles liable to switch. It’s a close-knit group that also often includes assistant director of minor league operations Chaim Bloom, another bright young mind and Yale graduate who cut his teeth at
Baseball Prospectus
. On any given night (except Friday), you might find Friedman, Feinstein, Bloom, Silverman, and Click holding spirited conversations at the Trop or over beers. The running joke is that peer pressure will eventually force Click to change his name to Clickstein.
What makes the combination work—aside from Manischewitz Night at local watering holes—is the buy-in throughout the organization.
Moneyball
chronicles how everyone from manager Art Howe
to Feinstein, then the A’s video coordinator, adopted the principles espoused by Billy Beane. With the Rays, Feinstein presides over a similar culture, only from a higher position (in essence, assistant GM). On any given night, especially late in a game, Joe Maddon will pull out his trusty three-ring binder. Inside, he can scan the usual scouting reports—as well as pitcher release point tips from Kalk, defensive tendencies from Click, and tidbits from Feinstein, the man who, A’s assistant GM David Forst said, “has probably watched more video in the last fifteen years than anyone in baseball.”
Like the rest of “the Mystery Men,” Feinstein’s contributions often go unnoticed by the masses. He excells in subtle areas such as arbitration. When the Rays defeated B. J. Upton in his 2010 arbitration case, that brought Tampa Bay’s record to 4-0 in arb cases under the new regime. They have a rigid negotiation policy in place: as soon as both sides give their offers to the arbitrator, the Rays cut off communication on that case. Kendall Almerico, the agent for Rays catcher Dioner Navarro’s 2009 case, said he’s rarely heard of a team that refuses to talk once figures have been submitted. He’s also rarely seen cases where a player and team go to arbitration over such a small gap. The Rays offered $2.1 million after Navarro’s breakout 2008 season. Almerico countered with $2.5 million. Most teams would split the difference in a case like that; $200,000 is a rounding error for the Yankees or Red Sox. But the Rays work for every dollar. And they are supremely confident they will win.
Navarro was coming off a season in which he hit .295, threw out 36% of base-stealing attempts, and made the All-Star Game. By contrast, Royals catcher John Buck settled at $2.2 million the year before, despite owning a batting average 73 points lower. Through data compiled by Feinstein, Click, and others and an argument style that is both brutally effective and, as Almerico said, “handled with class,” the Rays won their case anyway. Put an extra $200,000 in the bank.
For his part, Kalk’s addition has enabled the front office’s analytical power to better assist other parts of the team, namely the pitching
coach and trainers. One month before the Rays snapped him up, Kalk published a
Hardball Times
article entitled “The Injury Zone.” In it, he pushed Pitch f/x analysis to the next level, wielding it as a tool to try to predict a pitching injury several pitches before it happens. It wasn’t hard for the Rays to see the implications of this study: by combining Pitch f/x input with an artificial neural network algorithm (a system that looks at everything from a lower arm slot to velocity changes and movement on a pitch), Kalk could spot early warning signs, call the Rays’ decision-makers from anywhere, and warn of a potential injury risk for, say, David Price. Joe Maddon and Jim Hickey could then act on that information and save their star pitcher from harm, just in the nick of time. Conversely, Kalk’s research could also reassure Maddon and Hickey if they wanted to push one of their young starters for an extra inning. Amid a growing trend of overcautiousness that has prompted the Yankees to institute the convoluted “Joba Rules” for right-hander Joba Chamberlain, and other teams to get less out of their young arms, early-career pitchers like Price, Matt Garza, Jeff Niemann, and Wade Davis can go deeper into games when the situation calls for it.
Other innovative on-field tactics have also gained traction, thanks to the influence of the Rays’ Mystery Men. One of the most reliable ingredients in a typical lineup is a prevalence of opposite-handed hitters facing that day’s pitcher—stack the order with lefties when a righty takes the hill, do the opposite when a lefty toes the rubber. It’s such an ingrained, almost immutable baseball concept that
The Simpsons
once lampooned it. With the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth, the Springfield Nuclear Plant team has lefty-swinging Darryl Strawberry due up to bat against a left-handed pitcher. Strawberry is the lone ringer left on a team full of regular Joes, one of the best baseball players on the planet dominating vastly inferior competition. Yet the manager, Mr. Burns, pulls Strawberry for a pinch hitter anyway, sending in the hapless (but right-handed!) Homer Simpson in his stead. When Strawberry protests—“But, Skip, I’ve hit nine home runs today!”—Burns pulls
out the hammer: “It’s called playing the percentages. It’s what smart managers do to win ball games.”