Management by Baseball

Baseball off the field sometimes pulls a business-quality boehner.

One of the nastiest and most pointless Business boehners is when people who have decision authority come to something it's their job to understand, but either don't have sufficient background (and don't want others to know it) or are just plain lazy, choosing to conserve their ergs to invest in office politics, schmoozing or organizing office pools for the NCAA tourney. 

The most common behavior that results is that people do one of two things or combine them into a big mutant mess:

A) The Decider goes along with the most assertive pundit in the crowd, and this bandwagon effect tends to pull along others of their ilk or

B) The Decider declares facts are irrelevant because perfect knowledge is not attainable, and therefore she openly chooses to base the decision on her feelings.

If the "B)" is the most assertive or apparently-powerful, some "A)" Deciders will follow the "B)". It's the kind of overt Groupstink I see predominantly in large organizations, military & government, but most often in corporate and non-profit settings. I had a client who was taking a bath on employee health insurance every year, but when a group I was consulting with ran the numbers, it turned out the amount of health billings the employees were creating were far lower than what the firm was paying. Their insurer was making a massive profit off of them, so self-insurance was the obvious alternative to explore. On the surface, it looked like the experienced health costs plus the cost of administering a program were enough below the insurers' rates to be a slam-dunk worth at least exploring.. 

But the Business office had no idea how to go through setting up the self-insurance, and no one there had peers who had done it, so instead of learning what what needed, they used (probably) twice the energy researching failed self-insurance schemes, and by digging in and making a major fuss, launched a successful campaign to hack back employee health care benefits. (NOTE: This not unusual approach backfired, as it usually does, because their insurer jacked up their rates, and the firm amplified their previous boehner by further hacking their benefits, which inspired the insurer to raise them again the third year).

IN HALL OF FAME VOTING
We can see a beautiful example of this boehner in the most recent round of Hall of Fame voting, where it's actually quite common. The Poster Boy for "B)" is the intelligent but feeling-based Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated. I had a discussion with this opinion leader a few years back at a Winter G.M.s meeting about Bert Blyleven (when that now-enshrined candidate was still struggling for votes). The core of Verducci's argument wasn't that the numbers didn't support Blyleven, nor that the numbers didn't matter; he wasn't being a Sophist. The core of his honest argument was that Blyleven didn't feel like a Hall of Famer to him. And I respected his intelligence and his honesty, and while I'm comfortable with someone with a Verducci attitude having a vote, I'm not comfortable with someone who's an opinion leader who can drag people along having that attitude.

The challenge is that a Verducci attitude produces unashamedly unfair outcomes in Baseball, which is spitting into the eye of about the fairest arena we get to experience in life. The most recent Hall atrocity was perpetrated on Larry Walker, a perfectly deserving candidate who managed to get only on one in five Hall voters' ballots. It wasn't that they voted against him that is such a boehner, it's the really shallow excuse they used. (Jim Caple left him off his ballot because he didn't have room to include him, but made a beautifully-reasoned argument why Walker career was Hall of Fame).

They didn't like the fact that he accumulated 31% of his offensive cachet playing games in Coors Field, a massive booster of extra-base hits. What they chose to ignore was merely the 69% of his plate appearances away from Coors and his defensive play in Coors Field. The former is ridiculous because for every at bat he had at Coors, he had more than two away from there; the latter is ridiculous and inconsistent because in the perfect double-entry balance that is Baseball, if Coors is an offense-booster, it's a defense-stressor, and Walker earned Gold Gloves playing there. These two things are classic Verducci-feeling kind of decisions. (NOTE: That they ignored the fact that Walker was one of, if not the, savviest baserunners and corner outfielders of his generation is just a massive irritation to me personally, since I care a lot about those skills).

In case you doubt how much of a howler this was, lets look at the hard facts of the 69% of the plate appearances Larry Walker delivered playing away from Coors Field:

Walker had the equivalent of 9 full seasons of games not playing at Coors Field. The argument that he was on the injured reserve a lot evaporates some when you consider that number of games.

Furthermore, other National League players who toiled in the 1995-2005 zone where we are excluding Walker's Coors games got to play some in the Denver park.

So let's ask the question, even punishing Walker by letting him have zero plate appearances in Coors Field:

¿Are Larry Walker's Not-Coors numbers alone comparable to Hall of Fame numbers?

To answer that, let's look at the equivalent playing-on-the-road numbers for the most recent Hall of Fame corner outfielders and corner infielders, (by definition, these are Hall of Fame numbers).

     Source: Baseball.Reference.Com

I've bolded the leader in each category, and italicized the next two best in each.

Walker's numbers away from Coors Field are very competitive with recent Hall of Fame electees. He's the slugging-est of this tribe, even considering zero of his Coors Field work, and even though we've credited some of these players with Coors appearances. His OPS is the highest, his Extra Base Hit percentage and his Homer percentage lead this set of Hall of Famers. He has a gaggle of diverse italicized categories, from speed numbers such as good steal percentage and good grounding into double play avoidance, to on-base numbers. His weakness in this comparison is pure volume...he only played nine full seasons worth of road games, good enough to surpass at least five-dozen Hall of Fame players who got there for their on-field accomplishments.

To be fair, a few of the current voters cited Walker's time on the injured reserve as a reason to exclude him, and while I personally consider his number of games played (more than 98.6% of all major leaguers all time) to be adequate, like a Verducci argument, at least this appears to be an honest objection.

Answer: Larry Walker's Not-Coors numbers alone ARE comparable to Hall of Fame numbers.

Are the voters right or wrong in not voting for Walker? I think they're wrong, but that's just my opinion -- the breathtaking foolishness, though, is not about right/wrong, but the extreme inconsistency of their choices. Since most of the voters who shorted Larry Walker were voting for the most-recent crop that I used for the comparison, it's obvious the played-in-Coors argument, that is, the most-cited one, is irrelevant, either a mere canard or gross, willful ignorance.

¿So what's the real reason? I don't know, but I have one suspicion. While I never interviewed him, I do know people who have, and the feedback I got was he was not a cooperative interview or a quotable-quote guy. Since the voting population is (significantly) writers, I suspect this could be one of his perceived deficits. In an endeavor such as Hall of Fame voting where Verducci-like feelings can take precedence over hard facts, it's possible that a Walker would get downgraded for his off-field demeanor.

In Baseball or business, it rarely pays to ignore facts. My ex-client's generally competent executive management choosing to pour $$ into decreasingly useful health insurance payments by following a noisy objection is one sad example. And while Baseball doesn't come close to competing with non-profits' and corporate silliness this way, perhaps that makes it seem more ugly when a boehner like pimping Larry Walker's Hall of Fame vote springs up.

• Baseball management is not significantly wiser than management in any other field, or
• Baseball management, regardless of its standing overall, is inferior to that of other sports.

In 2008 Texas Rangers manager Ron Washington led all of baseball with 20 intentional walks that bombed. Bill James has been keeping this intentional walk stat for a while now. He breaks down all intentional walks into three categories:

1. Good — these are the intentional walks that “work.”

2. Not Good — these are the intentional walks that don’t quite “work” — a run scores — but doesn’t lead to a big inning.

3. Bomb — these are the intentional walks that lead to big innings.

There is a more detailed explanation in The Bill James Handbook, but for our purposes that’s enough. Washington led the league with 20 intentional walk bombs in 2008, which was more or less in line with his philosophy on the subject. He intentionally walked his team into 11 bombs in 2007, which was also a very high number. I would not try to explain how Ron Washington manages baseball teams — it seems to me some combination of feel, improvisational jazz, likability and Wile E. Coyote — but it seemed pretty clear that he did not want other teams’ best players to beat him. This seemed to be a core philosophy. And this led to baseball disaster quite often.

Then in 2009, all of a sudden, without warning, Ron Washington basically stopped intentionally walking people. His total intentional walks dropped from 44 to 14. And his bombs dropped all the way to three. This actually led the American League in FEWEST bombs. Last season, though Washington intentionally walked a few more guys (from 14 up to 24) he became the first manager since Bill has been tracking this stuff to not have a single intentional walk blow up in his face. Not even one.

That’s a pretty remarkable turnaround. So … what happened? Bill and I both figured that Wash probably had a heart-to-heart with the Rangers front office folks, who are savvy people, and they probably came to the conclusion that the intentional walk was hurting the team more than it was helping them.

But more … we both figured that it spoke well of Washington that after getting burned a few times he stopped sticking his hand in the fire. One of the striking things we both have sensed after years of writing about sports is that it is absurdly rare that people actually CHANGE in sports.

But in core ways … well, here’s the funny thing: It sometimes feels like some people would rather be wrong than admit that they are wrong. There are a million examples. A manager or general manager will pay someone a lot of money, realize quickly that it was a mistake, and keep playing that person even if it hurts the team.

I'm going to guess that with the exception of a gaggle of newsrooms, Mr. P. hasn't spent much time either in the military or in the corporate world, because compared to sports, it's so absurdly rarer that people in the corporate and military worlds change the way they manage in response to measurable feedback that I doubt he'd jump on sports, and most especially baseball. During a two- to four hour baseball game, the manager will change tactics almost certainly every inning, and both/either the baseball manager and the catcher on the field adapt to the current situation every pitch (otherwise the game plan would get laid out before the game and generally followed, which never happens even at the AA level of play).

In the corporate and military world, of course, this would make sense as an optimization strategy, but how many CEOs or even line managers are prepared to tweak their tactics and strategy multiple times per day (unlike the the multiple times per inning or sometimes even multiple times per minute Rangers' manager Ron Washington or any of his peers execute daily during the season)? Not very many.

The least-capable D- major league manager (that omits Maury Wills and not a whole bunch of others in the last 110 seasons) is significantly more attuned to rapid change in the face of mutating circumstances than 85% of corporate CEOs and than 75% of successful line managers. If feels a little disrespectful of Washington's acumen that Posnanski and James seem convinced the reason he changed was because the front office told him to. I believe it's very possible the data-savvy Rangers' front office sent him a report and asked him to look at it, knowing that he would respond to his outlier (and net-negative) behavior and change accordingly.

But don't underestimate any major league manager's ability to remember getting bombed by a bad decision. If Washington got bombed 11 times in a single season, I'd stake Kid Rock's life on the fact that Washington remembers either every single one as an individual failure that cost his team or, alternatively, all of them together as a big ugly pile. If he didn't, he wouldn't be able to get his team to .500, or win a single playoff game.

Accountability is inescapable in baseball. Unlike the corporate or military worlds, the baseball manager can't blame underlings or have his lobbyists arrange a bail-out. To get to be a D- or better major league manager, you have to embrace accountability, that means to last, you have to adapt your decisions to deal with reality. Some baseball managers overshoot by oscillating between binary opposites (do the intentional walk, get burned; eschew the IBB, get burned; repeat), but it's rarer than you would think, and most certainly rarer than it is in the corporate or military worlds.

I worked as staff at a place once where free-cash flow was so vast that every manager got out of the habit of ever saying "no" to any reasonable sounding expense -- if it sounded reasonable, it got funded. When the rest of the economy decided to invest in empire-building adventures and financial speculation, their market for products shrank -- an unprecedented turn of events for the firm. And at that point, managers were instructed to always say "no", no matter how useful or needed the investment was.

You been there? Of course you have. You ever seen a baseball team do this in mid-season, crack up and then keep pursuing it (or doing the exact opposite back to the original again). With the exception of the 2002-2010 Seattle Mariners, I can't think of any.

Try to think of a line of work that's more adaptive to minute-by-minute, inning-by-inning, series-by-series, month-by-month and season-to-season change than baseball is.

The pitchers especially improved in their ability to stay in the game longer which benefits the individual and the team since you aren’t exposing your bullpen every night to four or five innings. The Rangers with Ryan at the helm are set for long-term success and don’t be surprised if many other teams follow suit with their pitching philosophy because of the 2010 Rangers’ success. - Buck Martinez

With the very well-run Texas Rangers team getting into its first-ever World Series, you are not going to escape a guh-zillion repeats of the assertion that the Rangers' pitching has been remade because Nolan Ryan has convinced the organization to have starters pitch longer.

A lot has been made all season of this. Nolan Ryan, starting pitcher extraordinaire, advisor and now part-owner of the Texas Rangers, has been driving the organization to remake itself, apparently, in his image. Well, the part of his image that could pitch 300 innings in a season and (I'm not making this up) in a 33-day period for a losing team throw consecutive starts with pitch counts of 148, 135, 147, 146, and 164. The 42-year old got 11 days rest after that final one.

Ryan's Protocol, described one main way and with several subtly-different variants, simplified is: "Get starting pitchers to go deeper into games, and not let pitch count automatically trigger bull-pen use".

Ryan's Protocol appears to have been deployed by the Rangers, but it's not what its being presented as. Before we're done with this entry, I'm going to show you which of the following, in reality, the Protocol is: a Myth, or a Hoax, or a Lie or an Exaggeration.

Here's the take of Bob Nightengale of USA Today:

Ryan, who won 324 games in his Hall of Fame career, preached along with (pitching coach Mike) Maddux the importance of conditioning for pitchers. They ran more than they ever have before. They exercised harder. They tossed aside the pitch counter. And the staff was conditioned to pitch deeper and longer into games, going until the opposing hitters let you know you were done.

RYAN AS (IMPROBABLE) MODEL Ryan, one must note, was an extraordinary outlier in several ways, but physically at least stands alone in the history of baseball since WWII. No other primarily power pitcher was a regular starter at 45 years old, and no other successful starter I can find consistently yielded less to hitters in their 3rd and subsequent plate appearances in a game against him than he did in their 1st and 2nd appearances against him in a game. Part of his extraordinary success was physical conditioning, part was extending his career by mastering a breaking pitch after a long career as a simple flamethrower, and part of it was mental toughness.

The main way observers and pundits have explained this is that starters have become soft in the years since the every-fourth-game, 300-inning-per-year guys, and that toughness or performance have suffered as a result. There are a lot of announcers and columnists who have turned this into a moral or even religious issue, and even very good ones miss the facts because for them, it's faith based, an issue of character or manhood. It's somewhat a BITGOD (Back In The Good Old Days) meme. It's more a television thing than a print thing, but among the print guys, its most intelligent advocate is Bruce Jenkins, who presents it as a character issue most tartly in an April 2009 blog entry, and in an well-written but naïve two-part feature I dissected with hard evidence here and here.

The BITGODs advocate not only no pitch count, but frequently a four- instead of five starter rotation as well. And sometimes pitching on shorter rest. This would give most every starter Ryan-type work loads. The math is roughly this. At 95 pitches per start average (not always getting to the 105-120 pitches a successful starter gets to because almost all good starters occasionally have a bad game where they throw only 60 or 70 before being pulled) and 32 games started a year, the typical contemporary starter would throw about 3160 pitches in a regular season. With a four-starter rotation that includes a spot starter for ugly rest-free stretches of the schedule, you're going to have about 39 starts, and at 115 average pitches per game (about another 1-1/3rd innings), about 4485 pitches in a regular season. That's a 42% workload increase, without occasional Lefty Grove or Walter Johnson-like occasional relief appearances or getting moved up a day to take on a critical game, which the BITGODs would love to see, too.

Ryan is a fantastic hero, but a lousy model, because almost all who model themselves on a once-in-fifty-years anomaly (in Baseball or Business or any endeavor) are going to fail...like the most successful of the kids getting Baby Mozart training will top out at being Baby Kenny G.

REALITY CZECH: HOW THE RANGERS STARTERS HAVE CHANGED UNDER THE PROTOCOL If Ranger starting pitchers are having longer outings as a rule, it shows up in the statistics. But it needs context. Let's look at the 2010 Rangers compared to the 2008 Rangers, the last season before pitching coach Maddux took over that position, and before Ryan was being officially acknowledged as a guru of the old school approach for the franchise.

In 2008, the average Ranger starter went 5.4 innings and 91 pitches, lowest in the league in both categories, and a half an inning and 4 pitches below the league average (5.9 innings, 95 pitches). Conceptually, it's better to remove Texas from the League composite (so it's Texas compared to A.L. without Texas, but it doesn't move either innings or pitches average off what you can see below.

2008 American League Starting Pitching

Countervailing the general trend, 2008 Ranger starters were used more aggressively than the average AL team, though not by much. They had basically an average number of complete games (6 compared to the AL's average of 5). They delivered 7 starts on short-days-of-rest over the season compared to the AL's 4 start average (the column labeled "sDR") and 72 starts on longer-days-of-rest than the AL's average 77 ("lDR") which can be (and was here) affected by injuries to starters that pull them out of the rotation. But in further support of their shorter-than-league-average stints, they notched 104 starts of under 100 pitches (the "<80" plus the "80-99" columns) and 58 of 100 pitches or more, compared to the league average of 91 of under 100 and 72 of 100 and above.

It's clear the pre-Ryan/Maddux Ranger staff was putting up shorter starts, and if you glance at their R/G column (runs allowed per game), you can see one reason...they were getting their brains bashed out, about a half run a game worse than the next worst-performance staff (Baltimore).

I'll tell you another significant reason, but first I'm going to show you the much-bloviated-about "deep into games" Texas starters of 2010.

2010 American League Starting Pitching

The 2010 Ryan Protocol starters moved up to 5.9 innings per start, equal to the 2008 AL average, and up to 98 pitches, exceeding the AL's 2008 average. BUT the entire AL was moving up at the same time...to 6.1 innings and 98 pitches per start. The Express' expression of change in Tejas brought them to league average in pitches/start and still two-tenths of an inning below-average. They are not a beacon of innovation in using starters deeper into games, but in a league that's headed that way anyway, advancing somewhat more quickly. The assertions that Ryan has done something exceptional in pitch count or innings-per-game with Texas' Major League starters are just not true.

It's worth noting that while the League average of games with under 100 pitches and 100+ pitches has moved to 75-87 respectively, the Rangers have surpassed the League average in that regard by moving to 73-89.

I promised you an other reasons the 2008 Ranger starters' outings were so short relative to the league and why this year's model is going a little deeper.

First, the 2008 Rangers used an above-average number of 22- to 26 year old rookies to start games. Younger starters tend to not have mastery of a large enough variety of pitches to face batters a third time (batters have already seen the full repertoire and can lock down the variables), and young starters are more likely to get blown out of games early.

None of the seven rookie starters met the team averages for Innings...and as a group they dragged pitches/start down as well. All teams have rookie starters, but the 2008 Rangers' 41 rookie starts was higher than normal

THE FACTS, RANGER PRIDE & WHY THE PROTOCOL IS, BEAUTIFULLY, A MYTH The facts vaporize the announcers' assertions, soon to be an unbearable and, throughout the next few months, inescapable cliche.

The fact is also that the Rangers coaching staff & Ryan never asserted their staff was going deeper into games. BITGODs simply heard what they actually said and translated the words to fit the BITGOD aspirations of A Glorious Time When Men Took The Ball Every Fourth Day And Pitched Until The Gods Alone Ordained They Stop.

ASIDE: The Ryan Protocol, though, may be (and I suspect, is) in play in their minor league system. The Rangers have an unusually astute front office now, and a history of innovative people staffing it (even when they have had exceptionally un-astute ownership). If they are making a big public display of their Protocol, it's likely that's part of getting a minor league system moved away from the status quo and towards accepting a major change (a classic Change Management technique).

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's incomparable Jim Caple, now laboring for ESPN, heard and reported the actual words best:

Ryan twice topped 300 innings in a season and reached 299 in another. Obviously, it was a different game then, but one of Ryan's passions is working to get pitchers at least a little closer to that.

"I don't blame the pitchers for not pitching longer, I blame baseball and management for that because we produced that," Ryan said. "I mean that's the course we set and so that's what we have to deal with. And so we're going to change that course, and we have to start it and it won't be a process that comes overnight.

"What we're trying to do is get our starters to pitch deeper into the games, so we don't have to use as many people in the bullpen and then I would also prefer to not carry as many pitchers to give the manager an option to have another bench player. Will we get there? I don't know, but that's my hope."

Attempting to change a mindset ingrained in baseball over several decades isn't easy, but pitchers are more open to the idea when it's suggested by someone who pitched 332 innings one season without hurting his arm, than say, an owner who made his fortune analyzing stock derivatives.

"He just wants to get the best out of us; he wants us to push ourselves a little bit," Rangers starter Colby Lewis said. "I think that's the biggest thing. He doesn't want us to go out there and be satisfied with 95, 100 pitches, 105 pitches and feel like we've done our job. He wants us to go out there and feel like I can throw another 20 pitches and I can throw 130 pitches. That's his type of background, his motivation for pitchers."

The Ryan Protocol is not yet about the physical act of throwing more pitches per start.

It's about mental toughness that great pitchers have, the relentless focus that deflects self-doubt and mental fatigue when physical fatigue is starting to express itself in the small muscles. It's about engagement and commitment. It's about laboring on while the starter still has stuff and energy, not when the body is no longer able to deliver quality sequences.

Is it going to work? Even Ryan isn't sure...dealing with human emotions is a lot more unknowable than workout/fitness routines and even pitching "mechanics".

The Ryan Protocol is Mythic, in the sense that a myth is a truth presented in a compact clearly fictional story.

The Ryan Protocol is not a Hoax or a Lie or even, at this point, an Exaggeration. It's a Myth. And whether it's Cassandra, The Fates, Hercules Cleaning the Augean Stables & the Royals' Bullpen, or The Express, a myth is a beautiful, if not always happy, way to deliver a point and get it understood and acted on.