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November 29, 2005

Smartball and Moneyball

Sabermetric Innovation Helps Power White Sox' Championship

by Jeff Angus

The 2005 World Championship Chicago White Sox got the rap of being a "hustle-ball" or "anti-Moneyball" team.

False. One of the pillars of their success was the ability to deliver on an innovation that's best known as the failed child of Bill James and Theo Epstein: The "Closer by Committee." How Chisox General Manager Ken Williams and Manager Ozzie Guillen delivered value from the discredited concept is enlightening, and, because of the team's championship, it's something that's likely (though not certain) to be imitated. As with most competitive tools, it wasn't invented from scratch, but diffused--in this case, from the other side of Chicago.

CLOSER BY SAVE MEETS CLOSER BY COMMITTEE

The save rule (1969, with modifications in '73 and '75), created a gravitational field where, to achieve comfort, managers, pitchers and fans hydroplaned from merely following the stat to Birkenstocking their behavior, perceptions and desires to conform to the stat. A line of work built up around the stat. In the eyes of many sabermetric analysts the reason for inventing the stat (measuring the value of key relief performances) disappeared. Players pitched for saves, agents negotiated to optimize save opportunities, managers managed to deliver saves, fans rooted for savers, and what seemed to get silted over in an alluvial flow of events was the underlying purpose and design of stopping runs, winning games, effective relief. The "save" moved from being a representation of accomplishment to a goal that drove in-game tactics, roster construction, career development. Closers didn't so much earn saves; they became defined by them...the rules weren't reflecting best practices, they were shaping standard...a classic path for underperformance in any field.

In 2003, the Boston Red Sox and their fresh, determined-to-overcome-comfort front office team started the season with the idea of implementing a bullpen scheme built on the underlying scheme of stopping runs. I can't find who first labeled it "Closer by Committee." But it was named to echo Whitey Herzog's 1985 St. Louis Cardinal bullpen scheme, "Bullpen by Committee" where, having lost Bruce Sutter to free agency, Whitey managed a team to a pennant applying four different pitchers who earned four or more saves while none harvested more than 19.

The Bosox' scheme was doomed to underperform because the front office violated not merely everyone's comfort and the status quo, they violated everything known and tested in the field of change management--how to prepare people for organizational change that will inevitably make the steakholders uncomfortable. There's a solid ethnologic reason there's a laugh-track on TV sitcoms, and it's the same reason movie trailers insist on exposing the plot twists of thrillers; many American people want to know when to laugh so they can fit in and not be ridiculed, and most people don't like surprises.