The New Bleacher Bums

Derek Milhous Zumsteg is a 30-year-old program manager for Expedia.com, an affable Eastside resident with a cheerful affection for all things beer. He's also one of the smartest baseball thinkers in America—a longtime author and analyst for Baseball Prospectus (www.baseballprospectus.com), the nation's pre-eminent national-pastime think tank. And he's also, through a daily Web log named U.S.S. Mariner (ussmariner.blogspot.com), the most prominent face of a growing Puget Sound blogosphere of suffer-no-fools Seattle Mariners analyst-fans, who are trying to reconcile their longtime love for the home team with a reluctant but rationally considered belief that their love won't be returned in the form of a fluttering pennant. In their view, the 2004 edition of the Mariners, which opens the season against the Anaheim Angels next Tuesday, April 6, will win fewer games than last year—around 85—and will likely stand by a third straight year as their American League West archrivals, the Oakland Athletics, win a playoff spot. Yes, the A's, with a budget of $43 million, will do better than the Mariners, who have a payroll of more than twice that. "They are always going to be able to find advantages that will beat the Mariners," says Zumsteg, "because they'll find them where the Mariners are not looking. Because they have to." Zumsteg and the others say they can prove it. And they say there's ample evidence that the Mariners don't really care to hear about it.

"It is a wonderful thing to know you are right and the rest of the world is wrong." Bill James wrote those words nearly 20 years ago in one of his groundbreaking series of annual Baseball Abstract books. The founding father of the objective performance analysis movement came to realize that baseball is the one game in which virtually every aspect of performance can be measured and value-weighted through the compilation and analysis of statistics, in much the same way a business can use data about sales and revenue, weigh them against market-force indicators, and make quarterly projections about expected future performance. He found that the statistics can be used to predict, with reasonable accuracy, what teams will win and which players will be effective. James also found, to his surprise, that the people who ran Major League Baseball organizations didn't much give a shit.

Professional baseball is also unique in having and perpetuating a sepia-toned mystique that serves as a wall between those who have managed, played, and scouted the game and those who couldn't hit a Pony League curveball. The insiders of this brandy-and-cigars social club, as Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game author Michael Lewis recently painted it in Sports Illustrated, are deemed to have special seat-of-the-pants wisdom about what makes good teams, good ballplayers, and good game strategy—a belief often enthusiastically reinforced by their gatekeeper friends in the mainstream media—that the rest of us simply can't understand. As many a poet and pundit, from Walt Whitman to George Will, has rhapsodized over more than a century, greatness in baseball is measured not in spreadsheets but in the shape of a player's body; not in statistics but in the sweetness of his swing; not in his platoon-split and park-effects assessments but in his proven character, experience, and leadership. Thus it was; thus it always shall be.

James drifted from contemporary windmill-tilting to writing about baseball's past. But thousands have eagerly scrambled to fill his void, to take his theories and theorems forward and refine them until there were no questions about any aspect of a baseball play or a player's performance that could not be objectively asked and answered. Sabermetrics, as the new-school study of baseball is called, is the namesake of the Society of American Baseball Research, which has nearly 8,000 dues-paying, proud-to-be-outsider members. And, quietly, James' ideas did take root inside some baseball organizations, as the sport's polarizing economy of scale forced smaller-market teams and others that are not the New York Yankees to adopt more aggressive business models, not only to survive but to stay competitive. The evolution of one such successful program, those hated Oakland A's, was skillfully chronicled in Lewis' controversial 2003 best seller, Moneyball. And James received the ultimate testament to his work when another adherent of his beliefs, the Boston Red Sox, hired him in 2002 as a senior adviser.

Sabermetric regimes are now in place in four major-league cities—Toronto and Los Angeles are the others—and even as other organization leaders sniff at A's General Manager Billy Beane, the hero in Moneyball, and his perceived bragging about how he fleeced teams with bigger budgets in trade after trade (no less than semiretired Mariners General Manager Pat Gillick dismissed the book in a Seattle Times interview as being "in poor taste"), they are hiring statheads and showing other signs of quietly implementing distinctly Jamesian techniques.

But not in Seattle. And from the perspective of the Mariners, why should they? The "old-school" way, it can be argued, has done quite well for Seattle. The M's won 93 games last year, and 93 the year before that, and more games—116—than any team in American League history the year before that. They have overflowing streams of revenue from everything from overpriced tickets to television and radio broadcast contracts. They have fanatically loyal fans, from Anchorage to Ashland, superior regional and Pacific Rim marketing, a well-stocked farm system, and the best international scouting organization in the solar system. And a gorgeous cathedral of a home in Safeco Field. Nobody is going to tell the Mariner front office what it has to do to win. Tell 66-year-old general-manager-turned- consultant Pat Gillick, who won a World Series title with the Toronto Blue Jays in 1993, that there's a new way to build on his success? No way. Or tell new General Manager Bill Bavasi, old-school-baseball-family scion credited by some as the architect of the 2002 World Champion Angels, that computer geeks have come up with an approach that might make his beloved old-school scouts and development people less influential? Not bloody likely.