Tuesday, October 17, 2006
A’s Far A’s They Go
The quest for the American League pennant is now complete, leaving fans with a winner to celebrate and a loser to psychoanalyze. Exaltation for the Detroit Tigers is better tabled until next week — they still have four more wins to come. As for the Oakland Athletics, it's time for them to take a seat on the coach and tell us about their childhood.
Admittedly, I never thought the Oakland Athletics would still be playing baseball through the second week of October. The first week maybe, but not the second.
Last year, in my inaugural Sports Central column, I exposed the alleged fraud of the Moneyball religion and its high priest, one Billy Beane. My timing was almost perfect. Oakland had dropped into the AL West cellar at 24-37 earlier that week and devotees received my blasphemies with the same warmth accorded Johnny Damon during his first visit to Fenway Park in pinstripes. Even Baseball Prospectus accused me of being a member of the Flat Earth Society, as if the search for one-dimensional ballplayers was as radical as the search for a New World.
To my detriment, the A's got hot. Unbeknownst to anyone, they were taking the baby steps of a 51-19 run that would carry them into a first-place tie by August 2 and the outright divisional lead by August 11.
Alas, first place was short-lived. Moneyball wilted down the stretch as the A's lost 18 of their final 31 games. Athletics Nation grew silent, their team once again finding itself out of the playoffs.
At the time, out of the playoffs was their safest place. During the first eight years of Billy Beane's reign, the A's were a postseason disaster. Through four playoff appearances, they had yet to get past the best-of-five ALDS, despite reaching the decisive game each time. In all, they played and lost nine games in which they could have clinched any one of those series with a win. Twice — in 2001 to the Yankees and in 2003 to the Red Sox — they blew two-games-to-none leads. It was a futility from which even their GM wished to distance himself, claiming in Michael Lewis's Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game that his "shit doesn't work in the playoffs."
A year later, little seemed to change. The 2006 Athletics opened much like their predecessors. By May 30, they fell to 23-29 after losing for the tenth time in eleven games. But this year, I held my tongue, which proved a wise move. The A's ran the table from there, winning 70 of their last 110 games to take the AL West divisional crown at 93-69. And, despite all the warning signs, Beane's Boys appeared headed for another postseason collapse.
But something happened on the way to winter.
Ironically, that "something" started in Detroit during the final regular season series with Kansas City. On two separate occasions, the Tigers stranded runners on third with one out in extra inning losses. Plating either run would have given Detroit the AL Central and a date with the A's, where Oakland's season would have again ended in ALDS disappointment, as history was to confirm.
Nonetheless, fate — and the Royals' bullpen — proved more compassionate than in recent years. The A's drew the Twins and Frank Thomas opened the postseason by homering off Johan Santana, the most formidable pitcher in baseball. His blast reverberated through the Twins' fragile confidence with the magnitude of a tremor along the San Andreas Fault. A day later, Houston Street set the Twins down in the ninth, and the A's took a two-games-to-none lead back to Oakland, presumably to meet their Waterloo.
Now, it can be debated whether extricating the monkey from Billy's back — as the A's 8-3 win to close out the Twins did — was worth the ensuing embarrassment handed them by the Tigers. That depends. Is it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all? Having chosen the former, the dirty laundry of Moneyball was soon laid bare before a nightly national television audience.
Moneyball preaches two basic tenets: identify those tools correlative with winning, and fill your roster with the cheapest players who possess them. As for the first, it cherishes men who get on base while demonizing those who try to advance, because the risk of doing so outweighs the actuarially determined benefit. This explains why the A's never attempted to sacrifice or steal in seven postseason games; how a catcher could lead a MLB team in steals; and why base runners dressed in green cling with fear to the bases they reach, like an incarnation of the invisible runners of childhood sandlot days who had to be forced to the next outpost. Meanwhile, Placido Polanco and Carlos Guillen dispensed with Tigers feasibility studies and just got motoring whenever Jason Kendall couldn't pluck pitches from the dirt.
In Moneyball, there are no cheap players, only undervalued ones. And much like that undervalued suit from the Salvation Army starts looking threadbare by cocktail hour after a long business day, Frank Thomas looked a little worse for wear against the Tigers. A value-added pickup from the White Sox scrap heap last winter, Thomas had Billy's disciples singing with his 39-homer, 114-RBI regular season. But after hitting two homers in the ALDS opener, The Big Hurt was exactly that to his team, collecting two hits in his next 19 at bats, including an 0-for-13 ALCS in which he left 12 men on base. In Game 2, he stranded three runners in the ninth inning of a three-run loss.
Discipline at the plate is one of Beane's favorite tools, but it is not as popular among his players. Oakland hitters swung at first pitches 40 times in four ALCS games, although they did collect 10 hits in the process. Leading the impatience parade were Thomas (0-for-6 when first-pitch swinging) and sabermetric poster child Eric Chavez (1-for-6, a Game 2 home run).
Perhaps a little reverse engineering is in order over the winter. For instance, if the Moneyball minions can dissect the secrets of getting hitters on base, they can also be applied to keep runners off. During the four-game ALCS, the Tigers managed an OBP of .367 as Oakland pitchers allowed 56 base runners. That was 14 per game, 1.6 per inning. One key was discipline. Each Tigers hitter saw an average of 3.86 pitches per plate appearance, which would have ranked the Oakland staff among the most inefficient in the Majors if projected over the entire season. The A's were beaten by their own game.
Yet, for all the futility of following Billy's Boys, Athletics Nation remains an assemblage of the most loyal and passionate fans in all of sport. They don't complain about the financial tables tipped decidedly against them, nor about frugal ownership, nor disappointing finishes. Rather, they pride themselves in economical wins and bask in the warm sunshine of eternal hope.
At that's a good thing since, in Oakland, the winters are quite long.