Moneyball, Epstein, and the Cubs

Chicago

After a memorable October Classic – intriguing for the opposing managing styles of the two clubs, bizarre for the number of little league blunders committed by both sides, and exciting for its unlikely lead changes throughout – we’re finally past November and settling in for the arrival of The Hawk, as winter is known around these parts.

Baseball’s return to the North and South sides is quite a few page-flips ahead in the calendar, and city sport fans seem content pondering the improved fortunes of their beloved Bears (it’s the offensive line, if you ask me). And yet, perhaps for the unseasonable warmth and sunshine we've had, or maybe with the NBA away settling its absurd labor dispute, baseball doesn’t feel that far away. At least not for Cub fans.

The hiring of President Theo Epstein and, to a much lesser extent, manager Dale Sveum has created a stir, and local papers continue to provide a steady stream of news about the Northsiders, even if the tidbits are relegated to the final pages of the sports section.

Who the hell is Theo Epstein, and what does he have to offer the Cubs?

At first glance Epstein is just another upper-tier, baseball executive: white bread, Ivy League, highly paid, essentially bland and inoffensive to eye or ear. He does stand out for being relatively young – in fact, he became the youngest GM in MLB history in 2002 when the Red Sox hired him at the ripe age of 28. But why?

Epstein’s brand of baseball, as popularized in the book-come-movie Moneyball, seems to represent a paradigm shift in managerial thinking. In many ways, it's a story that illustrates the differences between theory and practice, with the former represented by sabermetrics pioneer Bill James, and the latter personified by the likes of Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane and Epstein. (Full disclosure: When it comes to mathematics, I have trouble grasping anything beyond long division, and I am thus incapable of comprehending, let alone explaining, the more technical aspects of James’ statistical… innoventions. I will, however, drop James’ name and ideas shamelessly throughout the present and future posts.)

We can imagine James the theoretician, on duty as a night watchman at a pork and beans factory in the late ‘70s, hunched over a desk, pouring over piles of box scores and baseball stats, dreaming up new ways to answer a very simple question: what is it that makes one team score more runs than another? (Hearing about night watchman James immediately conjures up Einstein in his younger years, which he spent working at a Swiss patent office while moonlighting with his theory of relativity). Unconvinced by traditional baseball stats, James looked to previously unquantifiable aspects of the game to come up with categories like runs created (runs a player helps create, as well as a team’s projected number of runs), range factor (defensive ability, quantified), and even something cool called a “Pythagorean Winning Percentage.” It goes without saying that fame and fortune did not come overnight to the statistician, but as players' salaries continued to climb to astronomical heights in the decades that followed, his quantitative approach to the game would soon be not only theoretically intriguing, but a financial necessity for front office staffs.

Perhaps James, much like your average fantasy league nerd, simply relished in assembling imaginary squads of speedy hitters with sky-high on-base percentages who would consistently outscore their opponents. Was it merely intellectual curiosity and a passion for the game which drove him to compile his lengthy Baseball Abstracts?

Whatever his original motivations may have been, the practical applications of sabermetrics would not materialize until the early 2000s, when Billy Beane’s small market A’s lost key players to wealthier clubs. Unable to compete with the salaries offered up by the East Coast oligarchs, Beane brought in a young Yale grad and sabermetrician to help rebuild his team by assembling a collection of overlooked veterans, rookies, and would-be wash-ups – who were willing to play for peanuts compared to, say, a newly pinstriped (and bloated) Jason Giambi.

In short: sabermetrics, when put into practice by baseball management, ceases to be a theoretical exercise in assessing players and projecting winners, and becomes yet another example of capitalism's streamlining, wage-repressing logic. Which is not to say that professional baseball players have anything in common with South Asian textile laborers. The fact that the Cubbies are about to dole out $20 million next season to the likes of Carlos Zambrano is enough to make anyone's stomach turn – especially mine.

Which brings us back to Chicago. It will indeed be interesting to see what Epstein has in store for Wrigleyville in 2012. As far as intangibles go, he's proven himself a winner for bad luck clubs by breaking the so-called Curse of the Bambino and bringing two World Series trophies to Beantown. To be sure, Boston classifies as a big market team and has the payroll to match, but Epstein's initial approach was indeed inspired by Beane's success in Oakland (Incidentally, Beane turned down the job in Boston in 2002 before it was offered to young Epstein).

Interestingly, though, a number of other clubs have since gone Moneyball, which means that, thanks to simple supply and demand, previously overlooked players with high on-base and slugging percentages are now worth more than they were a decade ago. As a result, Moneyball has expanded to take a number of defensive categories into account, and each team's front office has its own means of rating a player's defensive performance. As Peter Gammons reported while Epstein was still in Boston: "The Red Sox have their own service that charts games, including how hard balls are hit. 'It goes beyond zone ratings,' says. 'We try to measure players by what the average defensive player at that position would get to.'" (http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/gammons/story?id=1880247)

Exactly how Epstein tackles the Cub dilemma is anybody's guess at this point. Will he go young, fast and unpredictable? Proven, solid and dull? Flashy and overpaid? If anything, the hiring of a somewhat bland and docile Dale Sveum is a sure sign that things on the field will be run from the front office, and not the dugout. And even with the bloated contracts of Zambrano and an aged Alfonso Soriano, the Cubs have room on the roster and payroll to make some huge off-season acquisitions. If Epstein wanted control, he's got it - now it's just a matter of what he will do with it. I, for one, will be watching.