This team is lost at sea. Aside from a few prospects in the minors, it has no strengths. There’s not a bad management philosophy in this organization there is no management philosophy. This team is not rebuilding, not tooling up for a run at the pennant, not looking at any time horizon, and seems as if it’s run by Rachel Phelps. There is absolutely no reasonable explanation for the choices this team has made as of late.
This is Baseball Prospectus’s introductory paragraph on their pre-season writeup for the Pirates. From the winter of 1995/1996 (Ed. Read all of that. You’ll thank me later.). It could be from 1998, though. Or 2001. Or 2003. Or 2006. As I wrote for Pittsburgh Magazine’s blog, it’s incredible how long the Pirates have been bad and it’s best not to think about it, lest you make yourself question why you’ve stayed a Pirate fan for this long.
You can’t objectively say all of these things about the 2011 Pirates, though. You could say the team is still lost at sea, but it’s not true that the team has no strength save a few prospects. There isn’t much strength, maybe, but the team has quite a bit of outfield talent in Pittsburgh and in the upper minors, and the team has put together a heck of an interesting bullpen on almost no budget this year. The minor league system is also getting stronger, to the point that it seems likely they’ll be considered a Top 10 system this winter. You can’t say there’s no management philosophy, you can’t say they’re not rebuilding, you can’t say there’s no timeline, and given the draft and amateur player expenditures you can’t say they’re being run by Rachel Phelps anymore. You can question the philosophy, question the timeline, question the right way to rebuild, but if you doubt the team is doing these things you’re being a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian.
That’s not meant as a blanket statement of praise for the Pirates’ front office; it’s just a statement that there is a plan in place that is being worked towards. For the whole last half of the Dave Littlefield era, what I wanted was a plan. There was no plan in the flurry of trades at the 2006 deadline, there was no plan in drafting college relievers fourth overall, there was no plan in the Matt Morris deal. That’s what was so disheartening about 2006 and 2007; the Pirates were just a car stuck in the mud with the driver leaning on the gas, not realizing he wasn’t moving.
The first time I really, truly recognized the Pirates didn’t have a plan was the first time I read Moneyball. Moneyball is a lot of things to a lot of people and it’s not a lot of things that a lot of people say it is, but what it really, truly is is a story about a General Manager with a plan. This is how baseball thinks and this is why they’re wrong and this is how we’re going to exploit it. That’s Moneyball once you get past the sabermetric ideas themselves. I thought a million things when I read it for the first time in 2004, ranging from “bullshit!” to “brilliant!” but the more I thought about it, the more everything in it made sense and the more I thought to myself, “This is how the Pirates have to think if they ever want to change their fortunes.”
Regardless of the success the A’s have had since the book came out in 2004, Billy Beane will always deserve the iconoclast label the book gives him for challenging the way that baseball people (fans, executives, etc.) think about the game and the way that his results changed the way that teams are run. This is absolutely true. Where I think that the plot has been lost in the eight years since the book came out is that the message has been essentially distilled down to “Think different” and while it’s true that Beane did that, all he really had to do was think because no one anywhere in baseball had really been thinking much for the better part of 100 years.
Consider this: Henry Chadwick invented batting average some time around 1865. Baseball was still a lot like cricket back then and walks weren’t common outcomes at the plate. In 1879, it took nine balls to walk. That season, the league batting average was .259 and the league OBP was .279. Not a huge difference and because it was so hard to walk and because of the cricket mindset that still surrounded the game (in cricket the only way to advance between the wickets is to put a ball in play), batting average made a lot of sense. By 1889, walks had been standardized at four balls and the gap between batting average and OBP was rising. The National League batting average in ’89 was .266, but the OBP had jumped way up to .335.
Batting average was what they used first, though, and hell, in 1889 baseball was mostly played by stuck-up, half-wit, scruffy-looking nerf-herders. No one cared or probably even noticed that the way they were measuring the way hitters were reaching base wasn’t terribly accurate anymore. Why would or should anyone care? No one did, and by the time baseball had settled into it’s role as the National Pastime, it had settled into the pal-ocracy that Moneyball takes apart. Managers were ex-players, GMs were ex-players for a while and then the new GMs were the understudies of the old GMs and for literally 100 years they did things they way they’d always done things because that was the way they were taught to do it. As long as the reserve clause existed and teams could scout players and create a core and keep it together and have it not be prohibitively expensive, no one really had to think about how poorly they were evaluating the things that were actually happening on the field.
Eventually free agency came in and blew things apart and began to separate haves from have nots and even after that happened it took until the early 1990s for Sandy Alderson and Billy Beane to start looking for a competitive edge and they found it and exploited it for close to ten years because quite literally, using on base percentage (and slugging percentage, to an extent) to measure hitters instead of batting average should’ve been as plain as the noses on their faces. Bill James had been talking about it since the 1980s and he wasn’t alone. If we go back to Baseball Prospectus ’96 again, this is how the Cardinals’ entry starts:
The Cardinal organization is one possessed by its past. A decade of success under Whiteyball convinced the Busch administration that speed and defense, sacrifices and hustle and all the little things were the keys to success; the ability to hit, especially for power, and take a walk was neglected.
Seven years before Moneyball came out! The Cardinals made the NLCS in 1996 but wouldn’t get back on track, really, until 2000, after Walt Jocketty (hired away from Oakland before the 1995 season) had time to rebuild the franchise.
As anyone that follows these things, though, knows that it wasn’t long after Moneyball came out that teams all started doing a better job evaluating their players. As Charlie pointed out last week, there’s not really such thing as a “Moneyball player” in 2011 because the number of GMs that are using advanced metrics to scour the league for their diamonds in the rough far outnumbers the GMs that don’t these days.
To bring this on back to the Pirates, this is where things get awfully dicey for them. The more complex point of Moneyball is that small market teams must find market inefficiencies to exploit because they can’t spend money the way that large market teams do. The inefficiency the A’s found was a relative slam dunk: guys that were good at getting on base but bad at hitting for average were undervalued by pretty much everyone, but more or less locks to be good big league hitters. The A’s used them to fill in the holes in their rosters instead of the late 1990s/early 2000s equivalents of Lyle Overbay and good things happened to them until other teams started targeting the same players. At that point, Beane failed to recognize the difference between walking a lot as a big leaguer and walking a lot as a minor leaguer or college player. Now things aren’t going so well in Oakland.
What affects Beane today is what affects the Pirates. When Moneyball came out, the market inefficiencies were players that were valuable but underappreciated by nearly the whole of baseball. In 2011, the market inefficiencies are things that are harder to quantify (like defense) and the draft, where a team like the Pirates can conceivably outspend a team like the Red Sox. What’s not clear at all, though, is how much of an advantage spending $8 million or $10 million or $15 million on a draft really gives you, as compared to a team that spends, say, $6-7 million. You still have to have scouted accurately and picked the right players. You still have to develop them and because in many cases the undervalued players are high schoolers and pitchers, that’s a long, difficult road to cross.
The Royals have stockpiled talent like mad for several years and aren’t significantly better off than the Pirates. The Nationals have spent like crazy in the draft the last few years and seem to be close to something, but they’re not quite there yet, either. The Rays have built from the ground up and found quite a bit of success, but they’ve coupled it with a wider Wall Street organizational philosophy (The Extra 2% is probably the most relevant book you can read about small-market team building in 2011: you should read it if these sorts of things interest you and you haven’t yet). Perhaps the message, then, is that spending a ton of money on the draft isn’t enough, that there has to be something more. Where Alderson and Beane succeeded in Oakland simply by opening their eyes, small market GMs now need to have a full field of vision.
The Pirates are obviously trying other things, too. Since Neal Huntington’s taken over, the team has shown a clear penchant for groundball pitchers and hulking pitchers that either don’t throw hard but might or that have great stuff but terrible control problems. They’ve had pretty good success with quite a few of these guys, though mostly as relievers. The Pirates have also taken plenty of chances on prospects from other systems that struggled early in their big league careers, hoping there’s still something left in these guys that other teams didn’t see. They’ve generally failed miserably with these players. The system is chock-full of speedy outfielders that are strong defensively that are questionable with the bat, though it’s less clear if that’s a Huntington thing or a byproduct of the end of the Littlefield era. The Pirates are trying lots of things, for sure, but for now, at least, the whole of their rebuilding is being put on the draft and the draft is always going to have variable elements, no matter how much money you spend. I don’t know if Huntington’s rebuilding plan is going to work and frankly, I’m not sure anyone can say for sure right now.
Last year, I read Thunderstruck, an account of how Guglielmo Marconi’s singular vision and obsession beat Nicola Tesla to create intercontinental radio, spliced with a murder mystery that his technology managed to help solve. It was interesting and informative and I was entertained and I learned things, but I didn’t come away from it thinking that the best way to communicate in 2011 is to build massive radio towers in England and Newfoundland to toss signals across the Atlantic and hope that a few lines of Morse code will come across the ether. Moneyball is set so recently that whenever it comes back into the public forum, casual fans (or those just not as familiar with the concepts) inevitably start comparing teams like the Pirates to the early 2000s A’s and wondering why the Pirates can’t do what they did when it seems so easy for Beane. The problem is that the difference between small market team building in 2003 and small market team building in 2011 is about the same as the difference between a cell phone tower and one of Marconi’s first radio towers.
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