Davey Johnson, the Mets, and Sabermetrics

In August 1985, Lesley Visser of the Boston Globe wrote this about the Mets and manager Davey Johnson:

Six hours before a game with Montreal in July, bullpen coach Vern Hoscheit called for the computer to run. Three hours before the first pitch was thrown, manager Davey Johnson looked over the printout. And at precisely 8 o’clock on national TV, Danny Heep (.288, 6, 30) started in left field for the New York Mets in place of veteran George Foster (.260, 16, 64).

Why go with a role player over an all-star?

The computer knows: Heep was 8 for 15 against Montreal starting pitcher Bryn Smith while Foster was 1 for 12.

Such printouts have become as much a part of baseball strategy as stealing signals and riding the pitcher. And its foremost advocate and practitioner today is the Mets’ Davey Johnson.

The former second baseman who made four All-Star teams, and majored in mathematics at Trinity University in Texas calls himself, “the perfect mix for baseball and computers.”

It was Johnson who once went to Earl Weaver with a computer printout making a case for himself batting cleanup – on a team that included Boog Powell and Frank Robinson. Weaver junked the data and continued to bat Johnson near the bottom of the order – but Johnson didn’t give up his love of statistics, his firm belief in the symbiotic relationship between probability and baseball.

In fact, after he retired as a player in the 1960s, Johnson went to work selling computers for Litton Industries. He introduced the computer to minor league baseball when he managed the Tidewater Tides in 1983. By then, Johnson had read “The Hidden Game of Baseball” (about exotic statistics), “Computer Baseball” and Ernshaw Cook’s highly regarded “Percentage Baseball.” Johnson has added such phrases as “favorable chance derivation” and “upslope of the sine curve” to baseball’s lexi-con and perhaps its lore.

“Players aren’t machines,” Johnson said recently, “but the chances of something happening in a particular situation are illustrated by the computer. I don’t run my club by computer, but I use it as another tool.”

As a tool for baseball managers, a computer does the things it would for any business manager. It doesn’t make the decisions, but it can make sure any conceivable bit of information, or any combination of information, is instantly available.

In the back offices of Shea Stadium, Russ Richardson spends 20 percent of his day preparing the daily reports for Johnson and his staff. (When the team is on the road, Richardson prints out the reports ahead of time, and the statistics are not updated until they return home.) In a warren of small rooms, he has an IBM System 36 for the Mets’ accounting demands and scouting reports and an IBM PC- XT for the baseball reports.

“We designed a system to give Davey a kind of computerized scouting report,” said Richardson, 29, the data processing manager. “If Davey wants a printout of every catcher in our minor league who hits with power, we can give it to him in 10 minutes.

“If we wanted to get all the left-handed pitchers who have a grade 7 fastball – that’s one that may reach 90 miles an hour – we can get all those players spit out of the computer, including all major and minor league players,” he said. “You could do the same thing by hand, but it would be very time consuming.”

When Johnson was hired in October 1983, his first moves were to hire Richardson and to call the Elias Sports Bureau on Fifth Avenue. Richardson spent six months entering the lifetime batting averages of every Met player vs. every National League pitcher and information on every Met pitcher vs. every National League batter – all supplied by Elias. He used a standard, off- the-shelf database program called Dbase II, which includes a programming language that can be customized so he could get out the kind of data needed.

“I tried one of those things,” Montreal manager Buck Rodgers joked. “I put in all the information, pushed all the buttons and it came up saying, ‘Fire the manager.’ I’m never looking at a computer again.”

“It keeps track electronically of what we used to do manually,” said Johnson, “plus it graphically displays certain things I’m looking for in a game. Other things are useless, though, like programs that enter the weather report or the playing surface – those things don’t determine games.”

The Chicago White Sox use the Edge 1000 (entering everything from where the ball crossed the plate to where it went in the field) and the Los Angeles Dodgers use a Compaq. The Red Sox computerize only their scouting reports.

The Milwaukee Brewers, the Minnesota Twins and the Cleveland Indians use computers for little more than to store statistical information that had been compiled by hand.

“We don’t have data processing seminars for baseball yet,” Richardson said. “Hopefully we can get to that point, where we can get together and share information so we don’t all have to re- invent the wheel – without sharing secrets, of course. A lot of people feel, if we’re using this to get a competitive edge, we don’t want to lose that edge by sharing secrets.”

Johnson said he thinks clubs “could optimize their lineups and retrieve important data by using the computer correctly.”

“I could write a book detailing what is extraneous and what isn’t,” he said, spitting tobacco juice on the dugout floor.

Is he likely to do that, Johnson was asked?

“Not until I retire,” he answered with a smile.

That March, Bruce Weber of the New York Times did a long profile of Johnson that quoted him saying, “Knowledge always makes things easier.” Weber went on to write:

There is a famous story about Johnson and Earl Weaver that took place in the late 1960’s, when Johnson was studying mathematics and his interest in bringing computer technology to bear on baseball was burgeoning. He created a program called “The Optimization of the Oriole Lineup,” in which he fed to the computer the batting statistics for the Orioles’ starting team, and had the computer manipulate the various lineup permutations to determine which one would theoretically produce the most runs. Then he presented his findings to Weaver as proof that he was managing ineffectively. Weaver took one look at the printout and threw it in the trash.

“He was feeding information to the machine that was irrelevant,” Weaver recalls testily.

Johnson admits now that the original program was inadequate. But through it, he discovered the usefulness of a statistic called on-base average, which represents the relationship between the number of times a player reaches base on a hit or a walk or by being hit with a pitch and the number of times he comes to the plate. The batting order devised by the “Optimization” program corresponded precisely to a ranking of the players according to their on-base average. “It makes sense,” Johnson says. “If the guys hitting at the top of the lineup get on base more often, then more guys over all are going to come to bat.”

Johnson tempers his past assessment of on-base average as the definitive word on lineup construction, but he still feels it is, as he puts it, “underrated.” “You use it,” he says, “and you adjust your lineup according to that and the other things you need: power, speed, giving guys enough playing time to keep them sharp and happy.” Last year [1984], Johnson used the on-base average as a basis for replacing [Mookie] Wilson in the leadoff spot in the batting order with [Wally] Backman, a change from 1983 that produced demonstrably profitable results.

Johnson has a number of statistical studies under way, and he keeps with him a fat, bound wad of printouts of pertinent data. He’s keeping track of trends, he says, somewhat mysteriously. “things that will make it easier for the players to be aware of what might happen.” Asked to be specific, he terms the information “classified.”

This post is part of a small series of posts on sabermetrics in the early ’80s that I’ve done sporadically for the last few months. If you’re interested, the other posts are here, here, here, and here.

Walter Johnson in Idaho

A book called “Boise Baseball: the First 125 Years,” by Arthur A. Hart, talks about Walter Johnson’s time spent playing in the semi-pro Idaho State League in 1907. Johnson was on the Weiser Kids. As you might expect, he was too much for the Idaho ballplayers. The Big Train threw either 77 or 85 straight scoreless innings over May and June and struck out an average of 16 hitters per game. He signed with the Washington Senators at the end of June, then threw his last two scoreless games in the streak back-to-back, 19 innings worth, in two straight days. The streak ended on an 11th inning error that got Johnson beat, 1-0, on June 30. The season’s end was highlighted by a 5000-person crowd in Boise on July 4th to see Johnson duel against a Boise Seantor pitcher named Campbell, triple off Campbell, and win 2-1.

Then, on July 7, Johnson was a “picked” player for Payette, which signed him on to pitch a single game against Caldwell that had heavy betting on it. In his book, Hart explains that Payette “loaded up” for the game by signing several other Weiser stars as well. It worked: Payette beat Caldwell 4-2.

Weiser wound up winning the Idaho State League crown, but the Mountain Home team challenged it to a three-game postseason series. Weiser and Mountain Home put up $2500 each of winner take all stakes, and Johnson won the last two games of a Weiser sweep to win the $5000 for Weiser. Walter then went straight to the Senators. At the end of the 1907 season, with its greatest player gone, the Idaho State League reorganized by halving its eight teams to four and banning the  borrowing of players and teams “loading up” for individual games. The next famous player to call Boise his baseball home, however briefly, was Rickey Henderson in 1976.

When Johnson was pitching for the Weiser Kids, one local wrote this letter to Pongo Joe Cantillon, Washington Senators manager: “You better come out here and get this pitcher. He throws a ball so fast nobody can see it and he strikes out everybody. His control is so good that the catcher just holds up his glove and shuts his eyes, then picks the ball, which comes to him looking like a little white bullet, out of the pocket. He’s a big, 19-year-old fellow like I told you before, and if you don’t hurry up someone will sign him and he will be the best pitcher that ever lived. He throws faster than Addie Jones [Joss] or Amos Rusie ever did, and his control is better than Christy Mathewson’s. He knows where he’s throwing because if he didn’t there would be dead bodies strewn all over Idaho.”

You can read much more about the Big Train in Idaho here.

Some Edgar Martinez Lore, Anecdotes, and Trivia

From what I’ve seen, the case that Edgar Martinez’s fans have cumulatively assembled to argue for him as Hall of Famer almost exclusively mentions only his statistical accomplishments as a hitter, gauged by both the traditional metrics and the advanced, sabermetric kind. But of course it is people, not assemblages of statistics, who stand as candidates for the Hall of Fame, and that seems to be part of Edgar’s problem.

As an unassuming, unquotable Latino who never reached the World Series and played far from any media hothouse, in the most remote big league city in the sport, Edgar’s a deep underdog in the charisma category of Hall of Fame qualifications. (I think it’s obvious that personality and a résumé of myth-making material help any player make it to Cooperstown: see Dizzy Dean, Enos Slaughter, Bobby Grich, and Bob Johnson for four examples on both sides.) Even in the Seattle area, he didn’t attain the heights of fame (or notoriety) that Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, Alex Rodriguez, Jay Buhner, and Ichiro did. Mario Lanza, a friend who’s written a long story about being a Mariners fan in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, said:

Even in Seattle people didn’t really know who he was. I saw him in Crossroads Mall [in Bellevue] with his family, just sitting there eating dinner outside of the food court. Here he was, one of the greatest players in Mariners history, and people just walked by him like he was nobody special.

He used to go there with his family, and I’d see him reading newspapers right outside the Daily Planet newsstand. I must have seen him five times there and nobody ever recognized him. Even in Seattle he was anonymous. How are the writers in Boston or New York supposed to feel any differently about him?

To remedy the mistaken impression that Edgar was a routinely, even boringly efficient player, I’ve gathered together some anecdotes, lore, and oddball trivia about his career, presented in chronological order. Most of them are taken from the Mariners’ 2002 media guide. You’ll be surprised by some of the pure heroism this compilation reveals:

Edgar began his pro career in Bellingham in 1983, hitting .173 in 32 games, which gave him some early adversity to overcome.

In 1985 he led Southern League third basemen in putouts, 94, assists, 247, double plays, 34, and chances.

In 1986 he led Southern League third basemen in fielding percentage, .960. (I don’t know what he was doing in Chattanooga for the second year in a row.)

He was the Calgary Cannons MVP in ‘87. At the time, the Seattle Times said “he is regarded a brilliant fielder.” And, Edgar said: “I think I can play utility, third, second, wherever they want to play me I try to do it.”

Edgar’s first major league hit was a triple. It was hit off Reggie Ritter of the Indians on Sept. 14, 1987. The Times reported that in the second inning of that game, “on consecutive plays, he dived to his left to take base hits away from Jay Bell and Andy Allanson.” The triple came in the bottom of the second.

Despite the fine glove and hitting .372 in 43 Mariner at-bats in ’87, in 1988 he was back with the Cannons, was named their player of the year, and led the Pacific Coast League with a .363 average.

He spent the offseason after ’89 by hitting .424, or 56-132, in Puerto Rican League winter ball: it was good enough to outpace the second leading hitter by 82 points.

In 1990, Edgar stole home on August 25 as part of a double steal with Ken Griffey Jr. It was his only steal of the season: his first, at age 27, spent entirely with the big league team.

Despite playing with a sore right shoulder throughout 1992, Edgar was the A.L. player of month for July and August. He was the third player to record that feat in back to back months: Mattingly in August and September of ‘85 and Puckett in May and June of ’92 preceded him.

Edgar hit .343 to lead the A.L. in ’92: he was the first Mariner to do it, the second A.L. player to do it for a last-place team, and the first right-handed hitter to do it since Harvey Kuenn in 1959.

After missing most of 1993 with three different left hamstring pulls and strains (it helps explain his lack of mobility in later seasons), Edgar started ’94 by getting hit on the right wrist by the Indians’ Dennis Martinez in his first at bat. It was the first game at Jacobs Field, so Edgar was the first hit by pitch in the park’s history.

In ‘95 he became the first A.L. right-hander since Luke Appling to get two batting titles, and his .356 was the highest average for an A.L. righty since Joe DiMaggio in 1939.

He was the first Latino with 100 walks, hit .433 vs. lefties, and reached base in 137 of the Mariners’ 145 games.

Edgar’s ALDS performance against the Yankees included a playoff-record seven RBIs in game 4, hitting .571 for the five games, with an OBP of .667, and hitting “The Double” to win game 5 and the series.

After doing all this in ‘95, he still had time to play Puerto Rican League winter ball for the team in San Juan.

Before suffering four fractured ribs when catcher John Marzano ran into him chasing a pop-up on July 20, 1996, Edgar had been on pace to hit 75 doubles, which would have been the MLB record by 8. The injury stopped his streak of 293 straight games, a Mariner record.

Despite playing only 139 games, Edgar still hit 52 doubles for the second straight year (he’d only played 145 games in ’95): he was the fifth hitter to get 50+ doubles in back-to-back seasons.

In ‘97, he had to get stitches twice within five days in September. The first time was on Sept. 8 in Kansas City, when Royals DH Chili Davis swung his bat in the sixth and it landed on Edgar’s head in the dugout for a five stitch cut. Edgar stayed in the game and went 2-4 with two singles, getting his 100th RBI along the way. A quote from Edgar: “I lost sight of it in the lights. I knew it was coming, and I ducked to the left. I must have ducked right into it. It was scary, lots worse than having a pitch come at your head.”

Then, on Sept. 12, came the coup de grace: playing Toronto at the Kingdome, Edgar slid into home, and into catcher Charlie O’Brien’s mask, trying to score in the sixth inning. He got eight more stitches on his chin. Of course he stayed in the game, and of course he hit the game-winning three-run homer in the eighth, breaking up a 3-3 tie. Edgar hit it off Roger Clemens, who was 21-5 at the time, and on his way to the ’97 Cy Young and a 2.05 ERA while giving up nine homers in all of 1997. Here’s the kicker: Edgar also had two infield(!) singles, for a 3-4 night, with two runs scored to go with his three RBI.

Edgar’s quote: “I never have been to a hockey game. But I’ve watched and seen the fights and the cuts. I guess you could say my week has been like a hockey game.” Lou Piniella called Martinez “a tough kid, a professional. It was his night.” Over the seven games that began with getting five stitches on the 8th, Edgar hit .400, 10-25, with four walks and a .483 OBP.

After having right knee surgery after the ‘98 season, Edgar managed to hit .394, 56 for 142, in 41 games at Safeco Field in 1999. His five homers in two games, on May 17 and 18 of ‘99, tied the MLB record and set a Mariners record. The homers were capped by three in a row on the 18th vs. the Twins. Edgar’s 1,500th hit came on August 14 at Fenway, off Pedro Martinez.

On July 29, 2000, Edgar was scheduled to be grand marshal of Seattle’s Seafair Torchlight Parade in the evening, but first there was a game to play. It ran late: 13 innings, and 5 hours, 4 minutes. But Edgar had a parade to catch. So he hit a walk-off single for a 6-5 win over the Blue Jays, showered, dressed, didn’t say a word to the press—too busy–and went off to the day’s second job. The Torchlight Parade’s theme: “Heroes of Our Hearts.”

His 145 RBI in 2000 was the best ever in the majors for a player 37 or older.

In 2001, Edgar reached base in 43 straight games in May and the first half of June. He was ejected on October 1 in Anaheim when he charged Lou Pote after the pitcher hit him. The Seattle Times reported:

Angels reliever Lou Pote was struggling in the sixth, with two on and one out when a fastball rode in on Martinez, hitting him in the right arm before ricocheting up and hitting him on the bill of the helmet. The DH fell hard, as if hurt or stunned.

Then suddenly Martinez got up, seemingly much faster than he usually moves, and headed for Pote, who seemed stunned in turn. The young pitcher backed away from the angry veteran as players converged en masse.

Anaheim catcher Bengie Molina and third baseman Glaus grabbed Martinez. Jay Buhner came out of the dugout and grabbed Pote, who had been entirely non-threatening.

Benches and bullpens emptied, but the only one showing emotion was Martinez, who had to be held by teammates, including Javier and Piniella. . . . Martinez declined to comment after the game.

On October 4, after he got suspended for two games for charging Pote, the Times added:

“It hit him in the chin, then the eye, then the forehead,” trainer Rick Griffin said. “He was pretty upset.”

No one could remember Martinez being so angry in public.

“I’ve seen him as angry before,” said Jay Buhner, who has been Martinez’s teammate for 12 years, “but never in front of fans, never in the open.”

As Bret Boone observed, “Everyone’s got a breaking point. Edgar’s is pretty deep, but those guys reached it.”

Martinez reportedly was upset after being hit several times this year by Angels pitchers and having several other pitches just miss him.

Asked if he wanted to talk yesterday, he smiled and shook his head and said, “No comment.”

Edgar ended 2001 with a .425 OBP, second among active players with at least 2,000 at-bats, behind only Frank Thomas’ .438.

He was named A.L. player of the month, for the fifth and final time, for May 2003, and made the All-Star team that year for the seventh and final time. 2003 was the last year in his nine-year streak of on-base percentages above .400.

Finally, here are a few items from his overall career:

Edgar hit .625, 10-16, off Mariano Rivera, with three doubles, two homers, six RBI and three walks. He hit .444, 8-18, off Roy Halladay, .571, 8-14, off Rick Sutcliffe, .480, 12-25, off Dave Stewart, .372, 16-43, off Andy Pettitte, .429, 6-14, off Dennis Eckersley. . . He hit four homers each off Clemens and David Wells, and three homers and two(!) triples off Mike Mussina. He hit at least .500 off 242 different pitchers, and 1.000 off 75 different pitchers. He had the third most doubles in the majors in the ’90s, with 358, six behind Mark Grace, MLB leader for the decade.

More on Sabermetrics in 1983

A few months ago I used a 1983 Newsweek feature on sabermetrics to put together a post on “Sabermetrics in 1983.” Here’s a follow-up, taken from a few different sources. In late April 1983, Jim Henneman of the Baltimore Evening Sun reported:

These days in the Oakland Coliseum, where the Athletics do their thing, the phrase is “Computer Ball” [not "BillyBall,"] as programmed by Martin’s successor, Steve Boros.
It probably isn’t very comforting to Baltimore pitching coach Ray Miller, one of the finalists for Martin’s position, but there is some evidence to suggest Boros’ infatuation with video statistics was a factor in his getting the job.
“Will I have access to a computer?” was the first question Boros reportedly asked Oakland co-owner Roy Eisenhardt during his job interview.
Eisenhardt not only had a computer, he was trying to find a way for the Athletics to use it.
Boros, along with Chicago manager Tony LaRussa and Seattle’s Rene Lachemann, has taken Earl Weaver’s statistical cards to the “nth” degree, creating a baseball version of “Pac-Man.”
The A’s, who were 9-8 going into last night’s game, have had a respectable start under their new manager, but just how much is attributed to the computer is unknown. There is a suspicion that sounder arms on the pitching staff are primarily responsible.

Not quite a month later, Gerald Eskenazi of the New York Times, picking up from the Sun’s story, reported that “Boros Manages A’s With Aid of Science.” He wrote:

Steve Boros keeps a computer upstairs, good books on the shelf and a mitt on his desk. He has been able to keep the three in motion – although sometimes they collide – while he serves as rookie manager of the Oakland A’s, the team he inherited from Billy Martin.
The contrast between managing styles and personalities has never been more startling than when Martin returned and took over center stage for the Yankees’ weekend series here. . . .
But Boros, who is 46 years old and quietly content with his job, sits in his office before a game and unfolds a computer printout. Many people in sports and business are following his career. He was selected after a search in which the A’s president, Roy Eisenhardt – a former law professor and rowing coach at Berkeley – devised a list of standards for the job. They included patience and the ability to work within the community.

”See here, this is interesting,” Boros says, looking at the line on a 25-year-old right-handed rookie pitcher. ”Chris Codiroli. Six games against lefties, they’re hitting .340. Against righties he’s .127. It tells you that pitchers are not working against certain hitters, and maybe they better get another pitch in those situations.”
Boros, whose team took the field today at three games over .500, has made the computer a part of the locker room, although he never takes his printouts into the dugout. He can tell you what every one of his pitchers is likely to throw as his first pitch, with the count 0-2 or when he is behind.
He is trying to get his computer to show him graphically where the ball is pitched, what kind of pitch it was, and where his hitters hit it.
”With the modern ballplayer,” he says, ”it helps to show them.” . . .
Martin, a Civil War buff, reacted as if wounded when asked if he would consider using a computer. ”I have advance-scouting reports. That’s my computer,” snapped Martin.

Also, in 1985, the Boston Globe talked about the A’s use of computers in the early ’80s. Newsweek had described the subject in its article, and looking backwards, the Globe added:

More than four years ago [that is, sometime in 1981], Don Leopold of Lexington [Mass.] helped bring what he claims was the first use of a computer in baseball to the Oakland A’s. Working for the Pacific Select Corp., he and Dick Cramer were hired to help the A’s upgrade their television broadcasts. “They wanted their broadcasters – Bill King and Lon Simmons – to have better information, to have deeper statistics about performance,” Leopold said.

Leopold, who now runs Game Plan Inc., a marketing firm, was the interface between the technical side and the client side. He encouraged the A’s to buy a computer and hire someone to chart every pitch thrown in every game – what direction it went when hit, what kind of pitch it was, what happened to the defensive alignment when the batter swung.

“Billy Martin (who was then the manager) didn’t give a rat’s rear end about it,” Leopold said, “but Steve Boros (a later manager) was quite interested and used the information constantly.”

In line with the notion that good statistics don’t always make good management, Boros was fired as soon as Oakland went into a slump [early in 1984]. And Frank Robinson, who labored over information from his IBM 34, was similarly released as manager of the San Francisco Giants [later in 1984].

1876: The Cubs’ First Game Ever

Here’s the Chicago Tribune headline for the Cubs’ first game ever, played on Tuesday, April 25, 1876:

And the box score:

The box score’s hard to read, but the Cubs won 4-0, scoring in the second, third, fourth, and seventh innings. They got eight hits, all singles, with three of them by pitcher Al Spalding. Louisville pitcher Jim Devlin threw the first pitch, in Louisville, at 3:30. Attendance was “about 2,000 or a little less,” compared to the prediction that “10,000 would be a small figure” for estimating the number of fans at the game.

But, a hill adjoining the grounds gave people “a clear view of the game over a short fence, and it was crowded and peopled with masses of citizens, who chose to husband their cash and steal half-a-dollar each from the clubs. The audience which did not pay was fully as large as that which did.” The game took one hour and fifty minutes, and “the ground was not in good shape, and was fully as moist as the Chicago park, being sticky and soft in the outfield, and very dead all over. The character of the game depended largely on this fact.” The Cubs made three errors, and Louisville made six. The Tribune added: “Very little money was wagered, the Chicagoans generally refusing to give the odds of five to one which were demanded before the game.”

At the time, the Chicago team was called the White Stockings (but it’s easier to keep straight if we just call them the Cubs); the Tribune didn’t call the Louisville team by any particular name, but it wound up being known as the Grays. The Cubs wound up winning the N.L. pennant easily, going 52-14 over the 66-game season. Check out the season stats.

Rickey Henderson in Boise in 1976

Despite playing an outstanding center field and hitting about .336, Rickey Henderson didn’t make the 1976 Northwest League All-Star Team. It was his first year in professional baseball, playing for the Boise A’s at age 17. Apparently it was the summer following graduation from high school in Oakland.

The people in Boise didn’t know what they were missing: in his book “Boise Baseball: the First 125 Years” (available here used and here from the publisher), Arthur A. Hart explained that the team drew over a thousand fans just three times all year. For one late August game, the A’s drew only 47. It was their second and last year in Boise.

Mike Manning, operator of the team, said: “In my worst dreams I never imagined we’d draw 200 people. I though 400 would be rock bottom in a town this size.”

Hart wrote: “Because Borah Field was under control of the school board, the sale of beer at games was not allowed. This, in Manning’s mind, made a critical difference between losing money or breaking even.”

Hart’s saying that the A’s were playing on Borah High School’s baseball field, and the school didn’t let them sell alcohol. Here’s a picture of the field from the book:

The A’s finished 1976 below .500, and the Boise A’s became the Medford A’s in 1978 (I don’t know about ‘77).

Tom Trebelhorn, Rickey’s manager in Boise, and again in Modesto in 1977, talked with the official minor league baseball site about him: “I was very fortunate in my career to have guys like Paul Molitor, Cecil Cooper, and Ryne Sandberg. But at 17 years of age in Boise. . . Rickey Henderson had a better idea of the strike zone than all those guys did. He was outstanding as far as pitch discrimination was concerned. He was Rickey. He was fearless running, and at the plate.”

And: “He’d take a bad pitch at the plate and he’d say to himself, ‘Oh, no, no, Rickey, don’t swing at that.’

“He had great strike-zone knowledge, especially for a 17-year-old kid. He had great discipline and knew the strike zone. And in the Northwest League then, you could face lot of tough pitchers.”

Trebelhorn, who had his Boise A’s office at Borah High School, also recently talked with the Idaho Statesman about Rickey: “A 17-year-old kid, stole 29 bases, hit .340. He went in the Hall of Fame this year, and he started here in Boise, Idaho.”

This page at Baseball Cube shows Rickey’s minor league stats, but it’s extremely hard to believe he stole 95 bases in 1977 with Modesto without getting caught once, or 29 with Boise without getting caught. Or that he played third base both years.

By the way, Rickey was, in a sense, following the footsteps of Walter Johnson, who played in a semi-pro Idaho league in 1907. You can also read here about the Big Train in Idaho.

Criticizing Sabermetrics in the Early ’80s

The following are two excerpts from journalism on sabermetrics in the early 1980s. I reprint them here because they display two of the major themes that have apparently come up in criticisms of sabermetrics from the very beginning on up to today. This letter to the Toronto Globe and Mail, titled “Slippery Swami” and appearing on Thursday, May 24, 1984, said of the paper’s Bryan Johnson:

Your Swami of Sabermetrics, Bryan Johnson, is proving himself to be a very slippery and resilient swami. His method is like that of a salesman who, having forced his way into your home and set up his demonstration before you can protest, finally has to be physically ejected from the premises.

And what is he selling? Q: (to sabermetrician) Were Baltimore Orioles the best team in baseball last year? A: It’s too early to say. They did win the World Series, but that was only because they were able to score more runs more often than their opponents. However, if we look at this in terms of ballpark distortion, and if we take into account other erroneous and misguided perceptions of reality . . . Would you buy a used World Series from a guy in an orange Rabbit? Terry Finn Toronto

And, in Daniel Okrent’s profile of Bill James in Sports Illustrated in 1981, Okrent didn’t really criticize James, but he did describe James’s absentmindness and his disengagement from the physical world sport takes place in:

Driving home one night with a friend from a Royals game in Kansas City, James stopped for a lonesome red light while delivering a brilliant soliloquy on the statistical evidence of Shortstop Freddie Patek’s decay as an effective player. The traffic light changed to green, and then it changed back to red. It changed to green again, back to red and back to green again before James’ disquisition ran its course and he returned to earth. “Oh, the light’s changed,” he said, and proceeded calmly down the road. . . .

His father, George, 74, who still lives in Mayetta, Kans. (pop. 246), where Bill was raised, says of his son’s boyhood, “Mostly, Bill had his nose in books, but he was a baseball nut, too, like a lot of other people. He was just nuttier than most.” And a lot smarter, too. Unfortunately, a statistician’s mythology is not like that of a fastball pitcher; we have no mental picture of young Bill hurling stats at the side of a barn, sharpening his nominal curve.

James also made the point that baseball is a dream for sports-minded statisticians and mathematicians because it so thoroughly tracks the movements of the players during a game: “A baseball field is so covered with statistics that nothing can happen there without leaving its tracks in the records. There may well be no other facet of American life, the activities of laboratory rats excepted, which is so extensively categorized, counted and recorded.”

The 1982 Bill James Baseball Abstract

Bryan Johnson, a Toronto Globe and Mail writer who had, apparently, been the paper’s drama expert in the late ’70s, reviewed this book in this way:

Until this year, there were two distinct classes of baseball fans: the great huddled masses, and the tiny tribe of zealots who followed the gospel according to Bill James. The common herd watched the NBC Game of the Week, swallowed newspaper box scores, and did idiotic things such as making Willie Stargell the 1979 MVP. Shrouded in darkness, they seemed forever doomed to a life of mere batting averages, RBIs and ERAs. The Bill James devotees could only gaze down from a great height and forgive their lesser brothers. What, after all, could be expected from people who didn’t know a Runs Created formula from an Isolated Power stat? . . .

If you could find his pamphlet in Canada, which only a few of us ever did, it cost an outrageous $20. But what an investment! In return, Bill James revealed the game you were watching but had never seen. In an odd way, the Kansas stats fanatic actually hated most baseball statistics, because they so often hid the game’s truth. . . .

Alas, there is a sad ending to the Bill James story. Sports Illustrated discovered him last year, and ran an ecstatic profile. A publishing company offered a nice contract, turning the Abstract into a real book with a glossy cover and typography that doesn’t look like a high school essay. The price is now reasonable, the distribution excellent.

So there’s no longer the slightest cachet in being a Bill James devotee. Now any damn fool can be a ball fan.

The Seattle Mariners’ First Game

It came on Wednesday, April 6, 1977, with venerable Diego Segui, the Ancient Mariner, battling the Angels’ Frank Tanana. And it was not auspicious: Segui allowed six runs, four earned, in three and two-thirds innings as the Mariners lost 7-0 (the same score as the Pilots’ first game at Sicks’ Stadium in 1969).

A close-up shot of Segui’s cap flying off with a first-inning pitch:

Mariners shortstop Craig Reynolds: “Yes, we were jittery, so many people and all that. Once we got untracked, we played decently. We’ll be back.”

Mariners manager Darrell Johnson on John Montague, who relieved for Segui: “Montague pitched like a son-of-a-gun. He was something else. “
And: “Tanana was just too much for us tonight. I don’t have complaints except for Mr. Tanana. But he didn’t embarrass our hitters. We got nine hits.”

Montague: “I felt real strong, real good. I was a starter all last season in the minors. Boy, this was the biggest crowd I ever pitched before.”

The Seattle Times reported Commissioner Bowie Kuhn “drew the loudest boos” before he left game early to get to Toronto for the Blue Jays opening game.

Senator Henry Jackson threw out the first ball, and Rod Belcher, writer of “Go, Go, You Pilots,” operated the Kingdome scoreboard. The West Bremerton High School marching band performed before a crowd of 57, 762 that set the MLB record for a night opener, and Joe Rudi, with the Angels after a nice career with the A’s, hit the Kingdome’s first homer, a two-run job “that soared 21 rows into the left-field seats.”

The Seattle Pilots’ First Game at Sicks Stadium

After a last-minute rush to install as many seats in the new right-field bleachers at Sicks Stadium as the Pilots could, opening day at the stadium happened on Friday, April 11, 1969. Lew Matlin, head of stadium operations for the Pilots: “Work here should have been started a month earlier, that’s all. But things are going well now; we are going to be ready.” The seat installation went on day and night, and so did work on the roof for the grandstand.

When opening day vs. the Chicago White Sox happened, the Seattle Times called it “a Perfect Day, for Weather and Score”: around 60 degrees, sunny, breezy. Attendance was 17, 150, and they saw Don Mincher hit the Pilots’ first Seattle homer, launching it into “concrete footings for nonexistent seats.”  The Times’ Georg N. Meyers continued: “The joy of a 7-0 shutout will make quaint and precious the memories of an Opening Day in a park whose Star-Spangled Banner, for want of a flagpole, fluttered from a light-pole yardarm–at half-staff, of course, in honor of a departed ex-President (Eisenhower had died on March 28.)”

Very Rev. John A. Fitterer gave a prayer blessing the Pilots’ undertaking, Rod Belcher sang the “Go, Go, You Pilots” song he’d written himself, Warren Magnuson threw three bad opening pitches to fellow senator Henry Jackson, Governor Dan Evans caught another opening pitch, and Bob McGrath, a teacher at Franklin High School, across the street from Sicks, sang the National Anthem.

Meyers summarized: “For Opening Day, Seattle had a domed stadium–blue and infinite, so warmly illumined that baseball fans quaffed 1,000 cases of beer, swept through the inadequate concession stands like locusts and loaded the young with blue Pilot caps, pennants and bobble-headed dolls. Traffic jammed but did not clot, and all the nearby parking lots were not filled.”

Pitcher Gary Bell and his teammates leaving the field victorious:

Here’s the Pilots’ theme song, “Go, Go You Pilots” (or listen to the song and watch images of Sicks Stadium here):

The Pilots’ pitchers:

And Jim Bouton:

Finally, the front of the Times sports section for Thursday April 10, with pictures of the right-field bleachers, Mike Hegan’s wife Nancy getting his uniform ready, and a stockpile of Pilots pennants:

(If you’re curious about Seattle MLB debuts, there’s also this post on the Mariners’ first game, in the Kingdome in April 1977 and this one on the Pilots’ first game ever. Or, check out the website celebrating the Pilots. Or, watch a promotional 17-minute video the Pilots produced about their season-including footage of opening day at Sicks.)