Winners

Dayn Perry

Description

"We’re all winners, as Dayn Perry serves as our trusted guide on this idiosyncratic but profoundly informative walking tour of the great teams and players of the last few decades."
—Rob Neyer, ESPN.com

"Dayn Perry's really got something here. Part history, part handbook, Winners is an essential read for anyone trying to understand how great teams get that way."
—Joe Sheehan, BaseballProspetus.com

"We look at baseball from so many angles today that we too often forget the point is not to look at the game from an interesting view for its own sake, but to learn how it works, in the service of learning why teams win. Any fan who wants to know will find their answers in this book."
—Tim Marchman, baseball columnist, The New York Sun

"Dayn Perry crafts a lively narrative that blends astute analysis with clever storytelling. He gets to the bottom of what makes a great team tick."
—Kevin Towers, General Manager and Executive Vice President, San Diego Padres
Introduction.

1. The Slugger.

2. The Ace.

3. The Glove Man.

4. The Closer.

5. The Middle Reliever.

6. The Base Stealer.

7. The Deadline Game.

8. The Veteran and the Youngster.

9. The Money Player.

10. A Matter of Luck?

Epilogue.

Acknowledgments.

Bibliography.

Index.

Sujets

• Sport
• Baseball
• Sports collectifs
• Béisbol
• Ligue majeure de baseball
• Recreation
• Major League Baseball
• Dayn Perry
• Grandes Ligas de Béisbol
• Sports

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 17 août 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780470252536
• Langue: English

Extrait

W INNERS
W INNERS
How Good Baseball Teams Become Great Ones (and It s Not the Way You Think)
D AYN P ERRY
Copyright 2006 by Dayn Perry. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
Design and composition by Navta Associates, Inc.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone], or on the web at www.copyright.com . Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions .
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
For general information about our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at [phone], outside the United States at [phone] or fax [phone].
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Perry, Dayn, date.
Winners : how good baseball teams become great ones (and it s not the way you think) / Dayn Perry.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-471-72174-1 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-471-72174-3 (cloth)
1. Baseball-United States-Miscellanea. I. Title.
GV873.P415 2006
796.357 06-dc22
2005015111
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my Mother and Father
Contents
Introduction
1 The Slugger
2 The Ace
3 The Glove Man
4 The Closer
5 The Middle Reliever
6 The Base Stealer
7 The Deadline Game
8 The Veteran and the Youngster
9 The Money Player
10 A Matter of Luck?
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
Your team is a loser.
They re not irredeemably awful-they have a handful of elite performers, and there are worse clubs. But your team isn t within hailing distance of the truly great teams of the day. They re graced with the odd All-Star and what seems to be a spare menagerie of haphazardly identified prospects, but your team s high command does a poor job of filling out the roster and navigating the club through the treacherous shoals of the late season. They either mindlessly adhere to the tactical approaches of the past or, on occasion, fecklessly ape the strategy du jour. They misread the markets, judge hitters with flawed metrics, and fail to covet repeatable skills in pitchers. So they lose. And they lose.
You may have picked up this book because you d like to be a better fan, a better unpaid organizational watchdog. You d like to know what your team can learn from the winners of the recent past. You d like to know what they ve got that your team doesn t.
The book in your hands attempts to answer the following queries: How do baseball teams win? More specifically, what things are important? What do they tend to excel at? What do they tend to ignore? In essence: How d they do that?
To cobble together answers to these questions, I ve examined each team to make the postseason between 1980 and 2003, with the 1981 and 1994 seasons excluded. I m excluding those years because they culminated like no two other seasons in baseball. In 1981, a players strike forced the season to be truncated to a total of just more than 100 games per team. Because MLB decided to determine the playoff pool based on first-half and second-half division winners-a patently silly decision-teams such as the Cardinals and the Reds, who had the two best records in the NL that season, were left out despite meriting inclusion. So to include playoff teams from the 81 season in my research would be to pollute the sample with teams that weren t really playoff teams. As for the 1994 season, labor troubles once again fouled up the process, except this time no playoffs at all occurred. However, even with those two seasons left out of the calculus, 124 playoff teams remain, and it s those teams and what they did to be successful, to reach the wilder shores of October, that drive this book.
As for the 1980 cutoff date, I think it s more instructive to keep the focus on recent history. Even so, since 1980 the vicissitudes of the game have allowed us to see an array of organizational styles and tactical approaches employed by great teams. That affords us a look at the strains of greatness that have persisted over the past quarter century or so, despite broad and frequent changes to the playing environment.
To divine what s important and what s not important to winning teams, I ve used statistics of all sorts. First, know this: I m a former humanities major who for many years had math skills that could be charitably characterized as tutor-worthy. So I m not going to sail over anyone s head with all things quantitative. From time to time I ll wield some scary-sounding metrics, but they ll be explained, and along the way I ll also explain why they re superior to the baseball stats you re used to seeing. If you like, think of these statistics as an ideological counterweight to the stuff that s on the backs of baseball cards. But moreover think of them as tools that help tell the stories of these great teams.
Speaking of statistics and those who like to monkey around with them, there s been a recent percolating controversy over whether it s better to run a baseball team with reliance on traditional scouting methods or with a statistics-driven approach. This debate is as big a waste of time as your average Yanni album. Developing a prevailing organizational strategy isn t some Boolean either-or dilemma; it s using all the resources at your disposal, be they scouting reports or Excel files. There s no reason why your favorite team can t use both to its distinct advantage. No, the debate exists mostly because of the scant few haughty bomb-throwers on each side.
The vast majority of the analytical community has long since disabused itself of the Panglossian notion that anything that matters in baseball can be quantified. Most of us don t believe that for a second (although our missionary hardiness in advocating what we do believe carries with it a certain reputation). In fact, although it s beyond my ken to measure such intangibles, I do believe that things such as team chemistry and leadership not only exist but also are brought to bear in the standings.
All that said, the arguments and positions staked out in the pages ahead are framed by the numbers. Almost all of these numbers will be adjusted to correct for the effects of a player s home park and league. This is necessary because, unlike football fields or basketball courts, there s only a glancing uniformity to baseball parks. Fence distances and heights, altitudes, hitting visuals, foul territories, weather patterns, etc., all vary greatly from park to park. The upshot is that because of these meaningful differences among playing environments, some parks help the hitter, some parks help the pitcher, and some parks play essentially neutral. If we re to gain useful knowledge from the numbers, we must correct for what s called park effects -or how a park influences statistics. Additionally, I ll adjust for the league in almost all the numbers you ll find. This is done because eras, like parks, exert substantial influence over the game on the field. Mostly this phenomenon is owing to rule changes, particularly with regard to how umpires call the strike zone. To cite one example that draws on both elements, a run scored in Dodger Stadium in 1968 means much more than one scored in Coors Field in 1998. Numbers must be adjusted to reflect that fundamental tenet of serious analysis.
At its core, however, this book is about great teams and the players who make them great. The numbers will be here, but so will the stories of the flesh-and-blood folks who generate those numbers. I ll examine in great depth the roles and guises that come to mind when you ruminate on this game-the slugger, the ace, the closer, the glove man, the speed merchant, the setup man, the doe-eyed youngster, the salt-cured veteran, the money player-all toward learning what s really the stuff of winning baseball. This is the story of how great baseball teams got that way.
C H A P T E R 1
The Slugger
(or, Why Power Rules)
In 1985 you couldn t hit in Dodger Stadium. Just couldn t be done. Singles? Sure. Doubles, triples, homers? Forget it. The foul territory was vast, which meant tepid pop-outs by the bushel. The hitting visuals-the shadows, the hue of the outfield walls in the Los Angeles sun-were brutal, and rumors had persisted since the days of Sandy Koufax that the groundskeepers at Chavez Ravine would illegally heighten the mound when an especially potent offense paid a visit. It just wasn t the place for a hitter. Unless you were Pedro Guerrero.
That season, Guerrero spent time at first base, third base